CYRUS SOLHJOU — In the North West region of China, for the last 6 or so years, the Chinese Communist Party has installed “Internment Camps” in the Xinjiang province. The camps were created to repress the Uyghur population in China. Uyghur people are commonly known to be Muslim and speak forms of Tukic languages, most commonly the Uyghur language itself. Uyghur people are native to Mongolia, which is just north of China, with most of the current day population (10 million people) living in the Xinjiang region. The other estimated 300,000 people live in Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan.
According to Birtanica, the Uyghur people first rose to prominence in the 8th century, when the first known Uyghur kingdom was established along the coast of the Orkhon River in current day Mongolia. However, in 840 the river and the Uyghur kingdom were taken over, and the Uyghur people were forced to migrate to the mountain range in southwest Mongolia named the “Tien Shan,” or “Celestial Mountains.” Nowadays, inside China, the Uyghur people are being persecuted in Xinjiang and the CCP is trying their hardest to cover it up.
According to the Council of Foreign Relations, in Xinjiang Uyghur people are kept under heavy surveillance, experience religious restrictions, and succumb to forced labor and forced sterilizations by the CCP. Since 2017, the CCP has already detained an estimated one million Uyghur people in internment camps. The CCP calls these camps “vocational education and training centers,” but according to the USA and UN, what the CCP has been doing with these camps constitute grounds for crimes against humanity and can be considered genocide.
The main point of these camps is to cut down on the Uyghur population in China, meaning that prisoners are inevitably supposed to die. As of 2020, satellite imagery showed 201 reduction camps and 179 more detention centers within the Xinjiang region. The reason for these camps is because the CCP believes that Uyghur people hold extremist and separatist ideas, and thus viewed the camps as a way of eliminating threats to China’s government and population. Yet, interestingly, Xinjiang was only claimed by China after the CCP came into power in 1949. Some older native people in the area refer to the Xinjiang region as East Turkestan and argue that it should just be separate from China, like it originally was, especially since the CCP has such a radical belief that Uyghur people so greatly want to overthrow and sabotage the country. But, since the rise of the current Chinese president, Xi Jinping, there has been a push in China to reach a uniform order in all parts of the country, so the likelihood for China to separate from the Xinjiang region is astronomically unlikely.
To conclude, the Chinese Internment Camps positioned in Xinjiang are posed as camps to reduce the population of Uyghur people in China through forced labor and execution since the Chinese government believes that Uygher people want to overthrow the CCP, while the CCP simultaneously wants to reach a uniform liking by the Chinese population.
The Dutch Report 