Many Western governments and human rights organizations, including the United States, have condemned the Chinese government for serious human rights violations against Uighurs and other minority groups in Xinjiang. Beijing accuses the West of hyping the issue of Xinjiang, which is full of lies and disinformation. Josh Summers, an American, and Canadian couple Gary and Andrea Dyck, who have lived in Xinjiang for more than a decade, told Voice of America what they have seen firsthand and what they feel is systematic repression and discrimination against the Uighur community.
A native Texan, Summers and his wife embarked on a trip to Xinjiang in 2006 by chance. They first worked as English teachers at a school in Karamay and then settled in Urumqi.
Now fluent in Chinese, Summers didn’t speak a word of Chinese before arriving in Xinjiang and knew nothing about this Uighur-populated region of northwest China, but the people and culture of Xinjiang drew him and his wife to stay for 12 years. He started a travel website, wrote travel guides about his life and travels, and made videos to introduce the natural beauty and customs of Xinjiang to Western readers.
I love the diversity, the biological diversity, the ethnic diversity, the food and culture diversity,” he says. All of it makes life very interesting because I never get bored. There’s always something different and special to explore.” As a Christian, he also feels accepted by and integrated into the local Muslim culture.
This cultural atmosphere is one of the reasons the Dykes, who are from Canada, chose to live and start a business in Xinjiang. They did some non-government work in Central Asia before moving to Xinjiang in 2007, and later ran a composting plant in Turpan that processed agricultural waste. They speak fluent Uyghur and Chinese and have made many Uyghur friends, as well as some government workers.
The beginning of change
But after the July 5 events in Urumqi in 2009, that all began to change.
Before 2009, Uyghurs were very hospitable, surprisingly hospitable,” says Summers. After that, it changed. They were still very nice, but they were wary of me. I found out later that many of my friends were harassed (by the authorities) because of their relationship with me.”
The July 5 incident began as a demonstration and evolved into days of riots and bloody, violent clashes between Uighurs and Han Chinese. Chinese authorities blamed “extremism, separatism and terrorism” for the events, and since then the Communist Party has shifted its policy on the border, emphasizing heavy-handed stability maintenance.
The Dykes said they could sense tensions between Han and Uighurs before, and that mistrust between the two sides increased further after the incident. Gary Decker said, “Then we started to see more and more policies against Uighur culture, Islam, Uighur religion, suppression of Uighurs as a people.”
Ubiquitous surveillance
After 2016, the Dykes saw more visible changes: more police on the streets, checkpoints at every major intersection, only one entrance and exit allowed in residential neighborhoods, and surveillance cameras installed everywhere. That year, Chen Quanguo, the former party secretary of the Tibet Autonomous Region, was transferred to lead the Xinjiang administration.
Every week there are new policies and new restrictions,” said Andrea Decker. …… It’s like gradually building a police city with face recognition cameras, police patrols at every street corner, police cars going around every block, and security checks between towns.”
Gary Decker said he saw an elderly Uighur man trying to get inside a market one day, but the market happened to be closed and the security guard wouldn’t let him in. The frustrated Uighur man raised his voice and said something and shoved the security guard a few times, and within half a minute, police cars and officers were on the scene and took the man away.
Summers, who was living in Urumqi at the time, also experienced firsthand the escalating surveillance and various restrictions. “It started out in very small ways, and eventually it was, walking from the bus station to my residence in Urumqi, I had to go through 12 sets of cameras.” By the time I left Xinjiang, he says, “there were police posts about every 100 to 300 meters, and checkpoints on the street where the police would check cell phones.”
He remembers one time when his phone suddenly didn’t work, so he went to consult his phone operator, who sent him directly to the police station, where they checked the phone and deleted WhatsApp, Skype and VPN programs from his phone before he was able to go back to the operator and restart the service.
The various checks and controls affect everyone, but are relatively lenient on Han Chinese in terms of enforcement. Summers gives an example: “If there are ten people crossing a checkpoint, for example, and three are Uighurs, three are Han Chinese, and one is a foreigner, then the three Uighurs and the foreigner will be called aside and the three Han Chinese will be able to pass straight through. This always happens.”
“The feeling is that you are always under suspicion.” He says, “I always have to defend what I didn’t do. I think the Uighurs feel the same way.”
A pervasive fear
By 2017, some of Summers’ Uyghur friends began to “disappear.”
“I knew that some of them were in re-education camps,” Summers said.
The Dykes in Turpan also began hearing regularly about people being sent to detention camps, which locals call “schools. Andrea Decker said, “I knew a lady who was sent to the camp just because she had been out of the country for a holiday a few years ago.”
The couple later saw that a detention camp had been built about 10 minutes from their home. Gary Decker said, “The walls were at least 15 feet high, like one of those prison facades with apartment building-like structures inside, erected with barbed wire, with only one entrance and exit, one of those three-way security gates, and guarded by security cameras and guards.”
Because of his business, Gary often travels to villages and towns around Turpan. He said he used to be able to see hundreds of people on the streets of those villages and towns, but in 2017 and 2018, there were only a handful of people on the streets. He said, “Because people are afraid and because people are being sent to re-education camps, it is clearly visible that there are fewer people in the villages.”
Reports from the U.S. government and human rights groups have concluded that at least one million Uighurs and other Muslim minorities are believed to have been put into re-education camps since 2017, where they have been subjected to brutal treatment such as torture and forced labor.
Daniel Nadel, director of the U.S. State Department’s Office of International Religious Freedom, said the Chinese government has essentially turned Xinjiang into an “open-air concentration camp.” The U.S. government, the Canadian, Dutch and British parliaments and, most recently, the Lithuanian parliament have all characterized China’s practices in Xinjiang as genocide.
China refutes these accusations, insisting that the facilities are merely “vocational skills education training centers” designed to combat poverty, de-extremism and terrorism. Beijing accuses the United States and other Western countries of using the Xinjiang issue to destabilize and contain China, saying they “would rather believe the lies of a few people than listen to the common voice of more than 25 million people of all ethnic groups in Xinjiang and 1.4 billion Chinese people.”
The Dykes said that when the government first began to tighten security checks and restrictions, some of their friends believed they would help combat terrorism and keep people safe, but as the policies and measures continued to increase, they too felt the irrationality and unfairness of them, but were unable to do anything about it and were afraid to speak out.
“They fear for their lives and fear being sent to re-education camps,” Gary said.
“Everyone has to be very careful, you know, there are cameras everywhere.” Andrea says, “They are afraid to say anything, and fear pervades everywhere. One of my friends cried to me and said, ‘I can’t be separated from my child. If they put me in there, I have to take my kids with me. She was very afraid of being separated from her own children.'”
She said her son’s friends are afraid of turning 18 “because they’re afraid that they might be sent to a re-education camp when they become adults.” She sees young people taking pictures of themselves smoking and drinking to put on social media so they “don’t look like Muslims.”
Summers said his Uighur and Han Chinese friends have publicly nodded in support of the government’s policies, but he said, “I know from my personal experience how [the authorities] have treated me. I have been treated much better as a foreigner than the local Uighurs. I can imagine their difficult situation, I can imagine how they feel: if I want my son to have any future, I have to live with my mouth shut, and if I want my wife to be safe, I have to live with my head down.”
Summers and his wife were deported by Chinese authorities in 2018, despite the fact that his words and footage show a mostly positive picture of Xinjiang that differs from the Western narrative, and despite the fact that the CCTV English channel had interviewed him just two years earlier for a feature report on his decade in Xinjiang. Summers said, “I think [the Chinese authorities] they probably thought that I was sort of a journalist because I was constantly wandering around with a camera and writing, and they looked uncomfortable. So they explicitly told us to leave.”
The Deckers also left the place where they lived for more than 10 years in 2018 and returned to Canada. That year China tightened its visa policy and a large number of foreigners left Xinjiang.
The Deckers said they also chose to leave because they feared their foreigner status would put their Uyghur friends in danger – after all, many were sent to re-education camps for having travelled abroad or for other very minor reasons.
They said they wanted to talk about their experiences a long time ago, but no one was willing to listen at the time, and now, as people are more concerned about the problems in Xinjiang, people are more willing to listen. They said they didn’t want to and don’t want to believe what they saw even when they were in Xinjiang, but “they see these things happen every day.”
Summers, who left China with his family for Thailand, still has his website and YouTube channel promoting travel to Xinjiang, which is no longer updated, but still offers help to visitors who ask about it. In his opinion, the best way to learn about Xinjiang and China is to experience and feel it for yourself. He says he doesn’t care much about politics, and what he would prefer to do is see his former friends again than the various discussions surrounding the topic of Xinjiang at the moment.
After leaving China, both Summers and the Dykes voluntarily cut off all contact with Xinjiang and never contacted their friends there again. “I didn’t want to cause them any trouble,” Summers said.
In that CCTV feature, Summers had believed that Xinjiang would continue to develop and envisioned a future with his family in that part of the world. Looking back now, Summers laments, “The future and development depended on a lot of different factors that are no longer there.”
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