The China Cables: Leak reveals the scale of Beijing's repressive control over Xinjiang
China main illustration(ABC News: Alex Palmer)
A leaked cache of secret Chinese Government documents reveals how authorities in Xinjiang province red-flagged 23 Australian citizens during a security crackdown that consigned tens of thousands of people to arbitrary detention and mass indoctrination.
Key points:
- Leaked Chinese government documents relate to the network of "training and education" camps in Xinjiang
- They shed more light on the system of mass surveillance and detention used to subjugate minorities
- Details about the operation of detention facilities show they are run like maximum security jails
The documents tell how the Australian citizens were identified among 75 people from China's Muslim minorities who were singled out in the surveillance sweep because of their passports.
While the fate of the Australians is unknown, the confidential report instructs public security officials to deport or detain those foreign passport holders for whom "suspected terrorism cannot be ruled out".
The documents dating from 2017 are part of a collection of highly classified Chinese Government papers. They were obtained by the
International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and shared with ABC News and 16 other international media partners.
The so-called China Cables leak provides a rare insight into what has been described as a dystopian world of surveillance, detention, re-education and forced labour designed to assimilate and pacify Xinjiang's Muslims.
Since 2017, more than a million members of the province's Muslim minorities have been rounded up and detained in a network of "vocational training" camps spread over the region in China's far west.
Most of the detainees come from Xinjiang's Uyghur community, a 10-million-strong ethnic minority of Turkic Muslims who are being collectively punished by Beijing over a series of terrorist incidents carried out by radicals.
Map of Xinjiang province(ABC News: Alex Palmer)
Olsi Jazexhi is a Canadian-Albanian historian and Islamic scholar who visited Xinjiang in August as a guest of the Chinese Government. He was sceptical of reports in Western media about the crackdown and wanted to see for himself.
But his preconceptions were very quickly swept away by what he witnessed at a show camp situated in Aksu district, bordering Kyrgyzstan.
"This vocational training centre, or what we call concentration camp, was a kind of Alcatraz prison in the middle of the desert," he said.
And he was under no illusions about what it was he was witnessing.
"What the Chinese are doing in Xinjiang at this moment is … a mass cultural genocide," he said.
A program of 'brainwashing'
Most of the documents are marked "secret" — the
second-highest tier in China's security classification system — and relate to Xinjiang's vast archipelago of so-called "training and education" camps.
They include "Daily Essentials Bulletins", which provide a never-before-seen glimpse inside the insidious bureaucracy of mass surveillance in Xinjiang.
Issued by the Chinese Communist Party's Xinjiang party committee, the bulletins describe an all-seeing data management system called the Integrated Joint Operation Platform (IJOP), which is the heart of the region's security apparatus.
"The IJOP is the kind of central nervous system, if you would, of Xinjiang's mass surveillance systems," said Maya Wang, China senior researcher at Human Rights Watch.
"The Chinese Government's goal here … is about designing and engineering society that would be completely obedient and pliant to its rule."
The documents reveal IJOP has become a Minority Report-style of intelligence gathering that enables authorities to predictively identify those suspected of harbouring extremist views and criminal intent.
One bulletin published on June 25 2017, describes how the IJOP system detected about 24,412 "suspicious" persons in southern Xinjiang during the previous week.
Of those people, 15,683 were sent to "education and training" — a euphemism for the camps — and 706 were "criminally detained".
While the grounds for suspicion are not spelled out, a
Xinjiang police notice published in 2014 listed 75 indicators of "religious extremist". These included:
- Owning a compass
- Abstaining from alcohol
- Wailing, publicly grieving or otherwise acting sad when your parents die
- Not letting officials scan your irises
- Telling others not to swear
- Not allowing officials to sleep in your bed, eat your food and live in your house
- Being related to anyone who has done any of the above
Holding a foreign passport is also grounds for suspicion, said Hong Kong-based academic and specialist in Uyghur nationalism studies Shih Chien Yu.
"Beijing believes they don't acknowledge the power of the Communist Party and the Chinese Government enough," Mr Shih said.
Which is why in another of the leaked bulletins, IJOP records the cases involving the 23 Australian citizens among the 75 foreign passport holders.
These 23 are in addition to another 15 adults and six children from the Australian Uyghur community who are being detained in Xinjiang, according to Adelaide-based Uyghur activist Nurgul Sawat.
A Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade spokesperson said the Australian Government had and would continue to raise concerns about the human rights situation in Xinjiang.
"We will look closely at the available evidence, and we continue to urge China to allow meaningful access to Xinjiang for independent international observers," the spokesperson said.
Kept from 'prying eyes'
The documents also reveal that in 2017, Xinjiang's then security chief, Zhu Hailun, was overseeing the camp system.
Mr Zhu, who remains the province's deputy party chief, is widely believed to be the right-hand man of Xinjiang party chief and architect of the crackdown, Chen Quango.
"We shall load our guns, draw our swords from their sheaths, throw hard punches and relentlessly beat, and strike hard without flinching at terrorists who must be brought down a peg or two,"
Mr Zhu said in a speech to security personnel in February 2017.
The language is reminiscent of the kind used in another set of leaked Chinese Government documents
published last week by the New York Times.
Those papers included the transcript of internal speeches made by Chinese President Xi Jinping who urged the use of the "organs of dictatorship" to "show absolutely no mercy" in dealing with the Xinjiang situation.
One of the most important documents contained in the China Cables is a secret nine-page "telegram" issued by the Xinjiang Political and Legal Committee and personally approved by Mr Zhu.
It marks the first time the world has seen the Chinese Government's own internal communications regarding how, in late 2017, it planned to administer Xinjiang's camp system and keep it hidden from prying eyes.
Under a section entitled "Strict secrecy", the document discusses the need for all staff to observe "political and secrecy discipline" and to double down on escape prevention. It also discusses the use of undercover informers.
It then reminds supervisors to ensure adherence to "behavioural norms and discipline requirements" relating to daily activities such as getting up in the morning, washing, going to the toilet, eating, sleeping and even "closing the door".
"... students should have a fixed bed position, fixed queue position, fixed classroom seat, and fixed station during skills work, and it is strictly forbidden for this to be changed."
Sayragul Sauytbay, a Chinese citizen from the Kazakh community who escaped and now lives in Sweden, says inmates in the camp where she was forced to teach in 2018 were allotted just two minutes to go to the toilet — in a plastic bucket.
According to the document, detainees are placed into one of three "management areas" — similar to the minimum, medium or maximum classifications of western jails — when they arrive at the camp, correlating to the level of re-education required to normalise their behaviour.
Camp authorities then use a points-based behaviour-control system, which provides a means to assess the "ideological transformation, study and training, and compliance with discipline".
Uyghur men and women sit in a classroom during a Chinese Government-organised tour of Kashgar in Xinjiang.(Reuters: Ben Blanchard)
The document states that detainees must meet six conditions before being released, including:
- Attaining a high score in the points-based system
- Completing at least a year of detention
- Being assigned to the minimum security "management area"
"The vocational training centres, as the state refers to them now, are not schools in a regular sense at all," said Darren Byler, a researcher at the University of Colorado who specialises in Uyghur affairs.
"They in almost every case use barbed wire or razor wire. They're controlled as a prison would be controlled. People are not permitted to leave."
The widespread nature of the crackdown has ripped through the global Uyghur community, said East Turkistan Australian Association's Adam Turan. His own 80-year-old father died shortly after being released from detention.
"Every single one of us has a family member or a friend or teacher or a student or a neighbour who has been detained in concentration camps."
Cause for suspicion
The IJOP system flags activity the state feels deviates from the norm by crunching oceans of information about Muslims in Xinjiang, including location, family relationships, and even which smartphone apps they use.
The document cache reveals one of the priorities of Beijing's mass surveillance operation in Xinjiang is funnelling ever more personal data into the IJOP system. And the significant human maintenance required to do so.
Local authorities are told to address information challenges — phones that are not registered with real names, for example — and to "enter households, visit, inquire, and investigate thoroughly" when directed by an IJOP notice.
"In particular, data on the suspect's behaviour and relationships should be combined to form a chain of evidence and transferred to the prosecutors and courts," one document reads.
A
recent report from Human Rights Watch (HRW) re-engineered the mobile phone app used by police to communicate with IJOP.
Its analysis suggests authorities are encouraged to collect even the most mundane details about residents — water use, car registration, and behaviours like "often avoiding using the front door" — so IJOP can identify any deviations in behaviour.
The author of the HRW report, Maya Wang, told ABC News that Xinjiang's Muslim minorities do not always know which activities could flag them in the system.
"The idea is to implement … [an] all sensing system that can detect irregularities and pre-empt problems or dissent against the Government," she said.
The IJOP is the central nervous system of the Xinjiang surveillance network.(ICIJ / Ricardo Weibezahn)
Smartphones and communication apps are a surveillance focus for the regime, and even the use of a popular file-sharing app can attract dangerous attention from authorities.
A bulletin from June 29, 2017, asks authorities to investigate users of software known as Kuai Ya (also called Zapya), because of concerns about the transmission of content "with violent and terroristic characteristics".
It reveals the IJOP platform was used for "screening and analysis" to identify 1.9 million Uyghur users of Kuai Ya, which was developed by the Chinese company, Dewmobile.
The bulletin breaks down app users into notable categories such as 3,925 "unauthorised imams", as well as people associated with those who have left China, and asks authorities to examine them "one by one".
If authorities cannot eliminate the suspicion of wrongdoing, suspects are to be put in "concentrated training", the usual euphemism for the Xinjiang camps.
Government
reports from 2017 describe cases where individuals were arrested after using Kuai Ya, apparently for spreading videos that the Chinese Government said were extremist or terrorist in nature.
It is unclear how Chinese authorities knew who installed the app, which allows users to share documents without cellular data.
The documents provide no indication Dewmobile cooperated with Chinese authorities. The company did not respond to requests for comment.
Uyghurs have described
phones being scrutinised and sometimes scanned by authorities. Some visitors to the region are
reportedly forced to install a police app that monitors for suspicious content.
Popular Chinese apps and websites targeted at Uyghurs
have also been the focus of malware attacks in recent years.
In 2017, Android malware dubbed Spydealer was identified by researchers from US cybersecurity firm Palo Alto Networks after targeting several Chinese apps, including Kuai Ya.
The malware's activities largely resembled forensic software that a police force might use to extract messages and call history from a smartphone, according to Edith Cowan University malware researcher Peter Hannay.
"I would certainly say we're looking at something produced by a well-resourced organisation," he said.
"The purpose is surveillance."
Nurmuhammad Majid, president of the East Turkistan Australian Association, confirmed the view among Uyghurs that online apps such as messaging platform WeChat have played an important role in monitoring the ethnic group.
"All these popular apps are helping the Government to collect our information," he said.
In response to questions from one of the media partners in the China Cables collaboration, the Chinese embassy in London has emphatically denied the existence of detention camps.
A spokesperson restated the official line that the facilities were "vocational education and training centres" where "trainees" took various courses and enjoyed guaranteed personal freedoms.
"The so-called leaked documents are pure fabrication and fake news," the spokesperson said.
