After Times report, China defends its crackdown on Muslims

The Chinese government Monday portrayed the country’s crackdown in the western region of Xinjiang as a great success against terrorism, trying to counter renewed international criticism following a New York Times article detailing the internal deliberations that led to the mass detention of Muslims in reeducation camps and prisons.

A spokesman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Geng Shuang, criticised the newspaper’s report, published Sunday, saying it smeared China’s efforts against extremism. But he did not dispute the authenticity of 403 pages of leaked internal documents that confirmed the coercive nature of the measures used against Uighurs and other Turkic Muslims in western China over the past three years.

The documents, provided by a member of the political establishment in China who is concerned about the policy, showed the direct involvement of senior officials in conceiving and ordering it. The papers included internal speeches by China’s leader, Xi Jinping, that laid the philosophical groundwork for the clampdown.

“It is precisely because of a series of preventive counterterrorism and deextremism measures taken in a timely manner that Xinjiang, which had been deeply plagued by terrorism, has not had a violent terrorist incident for three years,” Geng said in response to questions at a regularly scheduled briefing.

The Communist government once flatly denied reports on the mass detentions of as many as 1 million Muslims as fabrications, but since evidence of the camps has become irrefutable, it has stepped up attempts to defend its actions as justifiable steps to stamp out a national security threat.

Xinjiang has experienced violent attacks, but their extent remains unclear, in part because authorities censored reports on them at the time and continue to restrict independent reporting.

After The Times published its report, China’s state media tried to rebuff criticism from ethnic Uighurs in the United States, whose criticism has been highlighted by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

The Global Times, a newspaper owned by the Communist Party, reported that its own reporters had visited the relatives of those Pompeo cited and found them living happily in Xinjiang.

“They are ashamed of the scum among their families,” the report said, referring to the Uighurs now living abroad.

The Chinese efforts have not tempered international criticism. A group of 12 UN human rights experts has presented the Chinese government with a scathing critique of its counterterrorism laws and deradicalization regulations, warning that they flout binding obligations under international law and risk stoking the extremism they are said to be intended to prevent.

In a 21-page letter addressed to Foreign Minister Wang Yi, the experts said that laws and regulations that provide the legal framework for China’s mass incarceration of Uighurs and other Muslims are “neither necessary nor proportionate.”

“While cognizant of the security situation that China may face, we are deeply concerned that the approaches taken in the counterterrorism law not only violate fundamental rights but also may contribute to further radicalization of persons belonging to the targeted minorities, creating major and growing pockets of fear, resentment and alienation,” they said.

The letter added that “multiple laws, decrees and policies, in particular those concerning national security and terrorism, deeply erode the foundations for the viable social, economic and political development of society as a whole.”

The chilling details contained in the documents obtained by The Times — such as Xi’s description of Islamist radicalism as a virus or a drug addiction that required “a period of painful, interventionary treatment” — also prompted new condemnations from Western politicians.

Australia’s foreign minister, Marise Payne, called the disclosures disturbing, as did several US politicians, including Sen Marco Rubio, R-Fla, and Sen Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg, two leading candidates in the Democratic presidential race.

Given the sensitive nature of the subject — and the source — China’s state media made little other mention of the issue. The Times’ website is blocked in China, but there were signs that the disclosures had filtered through the country’s so-called Great Firewall, as they received unexpected expressions of support.

One user on Weibo, one of China’s most prominent social media platforms, singled out an official cited in the documents, Wang Yongzhi, who had been assigned to oversee the city of Yarkand, a cultural capital of the Uighurs. Wang, part of the Han ethnic majority in China, initially put in place many harsh measures but became increasingly concerned about their effectiveness. When he quietly ordered the release of more than 7,000 camp inmates, he was arrested.

“History will not forget this person and this page of paper,” wrote the user, identifying himself as Still Your Old Yang.

Others expressed support for the official who leaked the documents.

But Geng, the Foreign Ministry spokesman, said that Xinjiang had become a model for counterterrorism efforts.

“The New York Times not only shut its eyes and ears to the above-mentioned facts,” he said, “but even use the clumsy tricks of grafting flowers and twigs to taking out of context and hyping the so-called internal documents to smear and discredit China’s anti-terrorism and deextremism capabilities in Xinjiang.”