cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/30155582

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East Turkestan — or Xinjiang, as it is known in Chinese — is a border region where ethnic minorities are subjected to the Chinese regime’s stifling repression.

Subjected to arbitrary arrests and forced labor, sterilizations to torture, more than one million Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, and other minorities are estimated to have been locked up in so-called “re-education” camps and prisons in the region over the last decade, according to the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights.

While China contends it is fighting ‘terrorists,’ to others it seems the objective is to annihilate any cultural and religious particularism which could be seen as an impediment to the ethnic purity component of the “Chinese dream.”

The United Nations has warned that what is happening in the region may amount to “crimes against humanity,” while others, including the US State Department, have gone further, labeling it a genocide in 2021, especially due to measures intended to reduce the number of children being born.

This repression is not confined to China, but takes on a transnational dimension: even beyond the country’s borders, Beijing persecutes those who have been designated as its political opponents. In Central Asia, the former Soviet republics, heavily economically dependent on their Eastern neighbor, are home to a pervasive interference that extends the repression.

China has built hundreds of detention centers along the border of its Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region and the eastern frontiers of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan, making those countries a common landing spot for refugees fleeing Chinese repression.

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The region between China and Kazakhstan had become a border of tears, where many families mourn the loved ones who have never returned from the Chinese camps, and where the survivors of the camps who managed to make it across the border have carried with them the trauma of the experience.

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Because the repression in Xinjiang is still ongoing, a single wrong word can lead to deportation, imprisonment, or death for witnesses and their relatives if they are identified by Chinese or Kazakh intelligence.

In those conditions, most survivors are terrified to be acknowledged as such, and not likely to speak to journalists. Building a network of contacts within persecuted communities therefore requires a great deal of time, caution, and trust.

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