A new study by German scholar Adrian Zenz and an interview with him by the newspaper were published on Wednesday on the website of the French weekly Le Moniteur. The international law expert believes that if the report is true, the evidence reaffirms that the Beijing government has committed Crimes Against Humanity in its policy toward the Uighurs in Xinjiang. The report focuses on the forced labor of young Uyghurs in Xinjiang. Observer reporter Gao Jie introduces the main points of Zheng Guon’s report and interviews the author.
Zheng is recognized as a leading Western expert on Tibet and Xinjiang’s ethnic minorities, and was the first to sound the alarm about Xinjiang’s re-Education camps in 2017 and 2018, authorizing the publication of his latest investigative report on Uyghur youths by the French weekly The Observer, the British BBC radio, the German state journal Süddeutsche Zeitung, and the Canadian Globe and Mail. International criminal law experts believe that if the report is true, the evidence is sufficient to prove that Beijing has committed two crimes against humanity.
In his first report on forced labor in Xinjiang, published in December 2020, Zheng divided the phenomenon into two parts: first, members of Xinjiang’s re-education camps, who are still forced to work in nearby factories or sent to cotton fields after completing their studies in the camps. The second is the lesser-known group of rural Uyghurs in Xinjiang, known to Chinese scholars as the “surplus labor force of southern Xinjiang. Many of these young people, who make up 90 percent of the population in the impoverished southern Xinjiang region, lack regular jobs and are recruited and trained by the Communist government and then sent to work in factories elsewhere. Through his research of numerous reports and materials, Zheng Guoyen found that in fact the majority of the so-called recruitment and training are done under pressure, and they are in fact a form of forced labor, whose purpose is to tame the young Uyghurs in the southern border.
Changing the mindset of young Uyghurs
Zheng Guon’s latest report, “Forced Labor and Forced Migration in the Framework of Labor Transportation in Xinjiang,” examines the young Uyghurs who are being relocated by the authorities within Xinjiang. His research is based on a series of official Chinese Communist Party publications, particularly a 2018 study by Nankai University in Tianjin, known as the “Nankai Report.
In the report, he explains that while the CCP has emphasized that the relocation of surplus farmers in Xinjiang is first and foremost about poverty alleviation, it is clear that the economy is not the primary objective. In fact, for the Beijing authorities, the primary goal is to reduce the proportion of the Uyghur population in the traditional Uyghur areas of southern Xinjiang and to break up the traditional structure of Uyghur villages and families. According to reports published by Chinese scholars on ethnic policy, Beijing’s plan to send these young Uyghurs to work in factories in other countries, measured in the long term, is aimed at changing the traditional structure of Uyghur society and changing the way of thinking of young Uyghurs to move them out of the “narrow”, “backward” and religious world. “and religious world. To make them more modern, more free-moving, more attracted to money and material pleasures. In the end, it is about changing their worldview and their mindset.
Why does this constitute a crime against humanity?
Another major goal of programs like the Nankai Report is to send young Uyghurs from southern Xinjiang to areas like the Chinese coast so that they will be melted into the greater Han Chinese. Zheng believes that these young Xinjiangis sent to the coast are in fact victims of forced labor, as they have no choice but to be classified as extremists and sent to re-education camps if they refuse to accept government “assistance. Thus, similar labor transportation meets the International Labor Organization’s definition of forced labor. In other words, the relocation of Xinjiang farmers, which is presented by the Chinese media as a “poverty alleviation project,” is in fact just one of the measures to destroy the social fabric of the Uyghurs, who number between 1.6 and 1.8 million.
A number of international criminal law experts believe there are credible grounds to believe that Beijing’s labor relocation program for Uyghurs, who are being forcibly relocated and persecuted, qualifies as two counts of crimes against humanity under the International Criminal Court.
In an interview with the New Observer Weekly, Zheng Guoyen described the Nankai report as the most critical of the research materials he found, and that its authors are prominent scholars at Nankai University, one of whom was once an official of the Tianjin Municipal Committee, which works closely with the police department in the southern border city of Hotan. The report’s authors had traveled to Hotan in 2018 to examine the feasibility of labor migration on the ground. The Nankai report was pulled from the Nankai University website six months after it was published, replaced by a brief introduction, and the reference to reducing the density of the Uyghur population was removed.
The Nankai report clearly states that labor migration is the most effective way to change people’s thinking and promote social integration. In fact, Chinese academics have long repeatedly emphasized that the Uyghur population in southern Xinjiang is too dense and poses a threat to national security. Measures must be taken as soon as possible to put surplus young people into the labor force, send them to other regions, limit their fertility rates, etc. It is clear that the policies Beijing has adopted with regard to Xinjiang are not just about fighting poverty. From this perspective, it is easy to understand the connection between Beijing’s labor migration program in Xinjiang, forced birth control, and its campaign against extremists.
How many Uyghurs have been sent out of the country by the South Xinjiang Uyghur Youth Migration Program?
Zheng Guon’s report finds that between 2017 and 2019, approximately 76,000 Uyghurs and members of other ethnic minorities were transported outside of Xinjiang, a pace that is accelerating as Beijing aims to reach the standard of 50,000 per year. And, it is important to note that the labor transportation and re-education camp policies are, in fact, two-pronged and complementary. In particular, after 2017, the most highly educated elites at the top of Xinjiang were sent to re-education camps, while the lowest class of not-quite-educated peasants were sent to other lands, with Beijing thus controlling both the upper and lower ends of the Xinjiang population. Moreover, the report reveals that Xinjiang farmers who go abroad to work give up their land use rights to government agencies, with the government providing annual financial subsidies. The government takes care of the elderly as well as the children of the same farmers’ families, giving the young people no reason to reject the government’s policy. Measures such as the ceding of land ownership mentioned above have sparked concern among many Uyghurs that they will eventually lose their homes.
Zheng concluded by pointing out that the same policy is gradually spreading in Tibet, where the labor migration policy has been gradually implemented again since 2019, while, on the contrary, the oppressive stabilization policy was first implemented in Tibet and then spread to Xinjiang.
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