The Xinjiang internment camps,[note 1] officially called vocational education and training centers (Chinese: 职业技能教育培训中心; pinyin: Zhíyè jìnéng jiàoyù péixùn zhōngxīn; Wade–Giles: Chih2yeh4 chi4neng2 chiao4yü4 p'ei2hsün4 chung1hsin1) by the government of China,[12][13][14][15] are internment camps operated by the government of Xinjiang and the Chinese Communist Party Provincial Standing Committee. Human Rights Watch says that they have been used to indoctrinate Uyghurs and other Muslims since 2017 as part of a "people's war on terror", a policy announced in 2014.[1][16][17] The camps have been criticized by the governments of many countries and human rights organizations for alleged human rights abuses, including mistreatment, rape, and torture, with some of them alleging genocide.[18] Some 40 countries around the world have called on China to respect the human rights of the Uyghur community,[19] including countries such as Canada, Germany, Turkey and Japan. The governments of more than 35 countries have expressed support for China's government.[20][21][22] Xinjiang internment camps have been described as "the most extreme example of China's inhumane policies against Uighurs".[11]
The internment of Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims in the camps constitutes the largest-scale arbitrary detention of ethnic and religious minorities since World War II.[33][11][34][35] As of 2020[update], it was estimated that Chinese authorities may have detained up to 1.8 million people, mostly Uyghurs but also including Kazakhs, Kyrgyz and other ethnic Turkic Muslims, Christians, as well as some foreign citizens including Kazakhstanis, in these secretive internment camps located throughout the region.[36][2] According to Adrian Zenz, a major researcher on the camps, the mass internments peaked in 2018 and abated somewhat since then, with officials shifting focus towards forced labor programs.[37] Other human rights activists and US officials have also noted a shifting of individuals from the camps into the formal penal system.[38]
In 2019, at the United Nations, 54 countries, including China itself, rejected the allegations and supported the Chinese government's policies in Xinjiang.[46] In another letter, 23 countries shared the concerns in the committee's reports and called on China to uphold human rights.[47][48] In September 2020, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) reported in its Xinjiang Data Project that construction of camps continued despite government claims that their function was winding down.[49] In October 2020, it was reported that the total number of countries that denounced China increased to 39, while the total number of countries that defended China decreased to 45. Sixteen countries that defended China in 2019 did not do so in 2020.[50]
The Xinjiang Zhongtai Group is running some of the reeducation camps and uses reallocated workers in their facilities.[51]
^ abCite error: The named reference auto1 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
^Tung, Li-Wen(董立文) (October 2018). 「再教育營」再現中共新疆 工作的矛盾 [The Reprise of the Contradiction of CCP's Work in Xinjiang Due to "Re-education Camps"] (PDF). 發展與探索 Prospect & Exploration (in Chinese (Taiwan)). 16 (10). Retrieved 18 December 2019.
^Rajagopalan, Megha; Killing, Alison; Buschek, Christo (27 August 2020). "China Secretly Built A Vast New Infrastructure To Imprison Muslims". Buzzfeed News. China has established a sprawling system to detain and incarcerate hundreds of thousands of Uighurs, Kazakhs, and other Muslim minorities, in what is already the largest-scale detention of ethnic and religious minorities since World War II.
Cite error: There are <ref group=note> tags on this page, but the references will not show without a {{reflist|group=note}} template (see the help page).