How Xi’s ‘Thought Eradication’ Led to China’s Uyghur ‘Genocide’

An article from Newsweek cites a recent report from VOC’s Dr. Adrian Zenz, Senior Fellow and Director in China Studies at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, on recent additional findings of Uyghur forced labor in Xinjiang.

As the article reads, “Xi Jinping’s crackdown on the ‘disease’ of separatism encouraged local Chinese officials to sweep up as many detainees as possible for internment camps in the Muslim-majority region of Xinjiang, where they faced what the U.S. has described as genocide.

Officials in the region, hoping to satisfy the Chinese president’s drive for draconian ‘reforms,’ were incentivized to intensify the policy of repression, which escalated from ‘thought eradication’ to mass internment, reeducation and sterilization under the guise of combating extremism, according to a new report.

The report, based on files obtained from Xinjiang Police Security Bureau and other local security sources, was released by China-sanctioned German anthropologist Adrian Zenz—a leading researcher on the topic whose past work shed light on the internment of an estimated 1 million or more Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region since 2017.

The camps were part of the ‘medicine’ prescribed by Xi for the ‘disease’ of separatism. Detainees in the facilities, which Beijing has called ‘vocational education and training centers,’ were subject to extreme neglect, torture, forced sterilization, and rape, according to the U.S., in what both President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump‘s administrations characterized as a ‘genocide.’ A spokesperson for Chinese embassy in Washington told Newsweek they were “schools” and compared them to Western anti-terrorism programs.

Zenz says the groundwork for the campaign to stamp out perceived extremism was in place even before year before Xi declared a ‘people’s war on terror’ in 2014.”

Read the full article from Newsweek.

Dr. Adrian Zenz is Senior Fellow and Director in China Studies at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, Washington, D.C.