In an edifying investigation broadcast Tuesday evening on Arte, Romain Franklin and François Reinhardt give the floor to survivors, witnesses and experts to explain the reasons for the persecution of the population of Xinjiang.
A great crime committed outside of any war, any revolutionary spring or independence rebellion. The Chinese authorities have embarked on an operation to destroy the Uyghur people and culture in Xinjiang which is striking in its scale, radicalism and systematism. A repressive and concentration camp machine which is in the process of “to annihilate an entire ethnic group”, as summarized by a young Uighur at the opening of the documentary by Romain Franklin and François Reinhardt.
These are these “genocidal violence” that the French deputies, after other Western parliamentarians, condemned on January 20, enjoining the government to take steps to put an end to the situation. Arrests, confinement, re-education, torture, rape, forced sterilization, separation of families, destruction of heritage… the acts now leave no doubt to understand how from conception – even before birth – until after death – the destruction of cemeteries – the Uyghurs are targeted, erased.
The interest of this documentary is to dissect the criminal enterprise of the Chinese leaders. Both by detailing the abuses perpetrated, but also by telling how the project was discovered and by analyzing the reasons for such mass persecution which summons up the communist and Nazi precedents of the 20th century. And it is this triple approach that makes this film a reference on the concentration camp and genocidal enterprise led by Xi Jinping.
“Realizing the Chinese Dream”
Romain Franklin and François Reinhardt give the floor to camp survivors. Facing the camera, despite the risks they run, they are still devastated by what they have endured and seen: Omer Bekali, chained and tortured for seven months; Qelbinur Sidik, recruited to teach prisoners in chains; Tursunay Ziyawudum, forcibly raped and sterilized.
They are the victims of an ultra-nationalist project, of a “China which wants to become rich and powerful”, “achieve national revival, make the people happy, show their strength”, described political scientist Shen Dingli. “This Chinese dream is that of Xi Jinping, of all Chinese people and it is also mine.
In western China, the Xinjiang region is at the heart of this project. Three times larger than France, a border crossroads with eight states, it is essential to Chinese development. Rich in natural resources, Xinjiang produces 20% of the world’s cotton and has become a crucial crossing point for the new silk roads put in place by Xi Jinping since 2013. “This project is vital for Xi Jinping, for the economy of the whole country and the survival of the nation,” points out Xia Ming, a former official of the Chinese Communist Party, now a political scientist in the United States.
Made up of Uyghurs, “close to the peoples of Central Asia”, recalls anthropologist Sean Roberts, Xinjiang saw the arrival of the Han from the east. This migration, which began in 1944 and which also upset Tibet, aims “to swallow the other ethnic groups”, continues Xia Ming. It accelerated under Xi Jinping.
A “long and painful treatment”
But this “Chinese dream” which becomes the quest for hypothetical greatness, is realized by attacking the foundation of the identity, culture and religion of populations and minorities. Xinjiang – or East Turkestan according to the Uyghurs – has been the scene of riots against the occupation of the territory and the repression. In 2009, a demonstration degenerated and left hundreds dead on the Han and Uyghur sides in the capital Urumqi. In 2013, then 2014, jihadist attacks sowed panic and obliterated the idea of harmony between ethnic groups. Above all, since the fall of the USSR in 1991, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has had the deep fear of an independence contagion that has gripped the former Soviet republics and of a dislocation of its vast red empire.
Coming to power in 2012, Xi then declared war on “separatism, extremism and terrorism”. He takes the opposite view from his father Xi Zhongxun, a survivor of the Cultural Revolution purges, who had shown himself to be empathetic and open to discussions with local elites and non-Han groups in the 1980s. “loyal subjects of the communist party or disappear” and Xinjiang appears as “the front line of terrorism”, according to Xi. The Chinese President intends “strike the enemies of the regime hard”. He dispatches to Xinjiang Chen Quanguo, a former soldier and CCP baron who has put Tibet under control. Xi Jinping promises a “long and painful treatment”. And will use “all the tools of dictatorship” to achieve this, as revealed by the Xinjiang papers, the 400 pages of internal CCP documentation that the New York Times publish in 2019.
“Treating evil with evil” : the operation of destruction is an implacable machine. It took off with thousands of arrests in 2017, as Radio Free Asia journalist Shoret Hoshur finds out. It continues with the construction of curious “vocational training centers” brought to light by the German anthropologist, specialist in public policy, Adrian Zenz. He delves into thousands of online documents and comes across calls for tenders for buildings that will have to be equipped with cameras without blind spots, barbed wire, high walls, armed police stations… A colossal concentration camp network that has between 1,300 and 1,400 camps where at least a million people are interned, according to Zenz. The Uyghurs are not exterminated there, but they are tortured, re-educated, starved, raped.
“Ethnic Unity Week”
“The brainwashing practiced in China since the early days of the CCP should make the people fearful and obedient,” recalls political scientist Xia Ming. Building the new man, a flagship project of the communist world from the Soviet gulag to the Khmer Rouge terror, continues in the camps of Xinjiang. Make good Chinese. “Only national unity will allow China to become a true world power”, assures with haughtiness, Hu Angang, adviser to the Chinese government. “You should learn from China to see how this country will continue to succeed,” he shoots at the camera of Romain Franklin and François Reinhardt.
The Chinese project is still ongoing. Births are limited, if not stopped. Textbooks have been cleaned. The generalized Mandarin language. Inter-ethnic marriages encouraged. Forced Assimilation. The Orwellian video surveillance system completes the total control. And in case the Chinese big brother has faults, the Chinese leaders have established the “ethnic unity week” : every month, Uyghur families are visited for several days by a Han who comes to live in their home to detect any action deemed suspicious or seditious. The trap is total. And endless crime.