{"id":3791,"date":"2017-06-24T17:31:48","date_gmt":"2017-06-24T17:31:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.iuhrdf.org\/en\/2017\/06\/24\/chinas-far-west-perfect-police-state-emerging\/"},"modified":"2017-06-24T17:31:48","modified_gmt":"2017-06-24T17:31:48","slug":"chinas-far-west-perfect-police-state-emerging","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/chinas-far-west-perfect-police-state-emerging\/","title":{"rendered":"In China’s far west the ‘perfect police state’ is emerging"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Guardian<\/a><\/p>\n

It was Friday, the Islamic day of assembly, but outside Kashgar\u2019s Id Kah mosque on Liberation Avenue it was the growl of diesel engines that filled the air not a muezzin\u2019s wistful cry.<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
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One by one armoured personnel carriers, some with machine guns poking from their turrets, rolled towards People\u2019s Square where a 12-metre statue of Mao Zedong was preparing to preside over the latest in a series of tub-thumping \u201canti-terror\u201d rallies to be held here in the heartlands of China\u2019s Muslim Uighur minority this year.<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
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Open-backed lorries packed with heavily-armed troops joined the procession, red and yellow propaganda banners draped from their sides.<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
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\u201cUnity and stability are blessings! Separatism and unrest are a curse!\u201d read one.<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
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A second warned: \u201cLet all those terrorists who dare to be enemies of the people be smashed to pieces!\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
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To ensure the march went off without a glitch, police had placed this entire city of about half a million inhabitants on lock down. \u201cAll the roads are blocked,\u201d said a black-clad officer who was posted outside the mosque with a 12 gauge shotgun slung across his chest.<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
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The mass rally, witnessed by the Guardian at the end of April, came as a long-running crackdown in China\u2019s violence-stricken far west hit draconian new heights.<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
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Three days earlier thousands of armed troops had swept onto the streets of Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, where, according to one local newspaper, they vowed to \u201csacrifice everything for the party and the people\u201d in their fight against the Islamic extremists Beijing blames for a series of attacks on government officials and civilians. <\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
 <\/div>\n
\u201cPlease rest assured, my fellow countrymen, that I will … crack down on the arrogance of those violent gangs and terrorists so they are left with no road to go down and no place to hide,\u201d one participant told reporters.<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
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A week before, more than 1,000 troops flooded Aksu, a city in Xinjiang\u2019s south, for a three-day show of strength. \u201cSuddenly a siren rang out and vehicles shot out onto the streets like swords being drawn from their sheaths,\u201d read an account of the event by one local propaganda writer.<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
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\u2018The perfect police state\u2019<\/strong><\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
The parades are part of a wider security escalation that has gripped China\u2019s western frontier since Chen Quanguo, a Communist party hardliner who Beijing credits with quelling a wave of unrest in Tibet, was drafted into Xinjiang last summer.<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
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Adrian Zenz, a researcher who has studied the securitisation of both politically sensitive regions, said China\u2019s leaders believed Chen had managed to contain a surge in self-immolations in the Tibet Autonomous Region, using a series of innovative and repressive policies such as high-tech surveillance and the introduction of tight social controls.<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
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Now, they hoped he could do the same in Xinjiang, a vast and resource-rich borderland that has endured decades of bloodshed including anti-government uprisings, ethnic rioting and, more recently, terrorist attacks targeting civilians. \u201cI\u2019m sure he has been sent there \u2026 to pacify Xinjiang,\u201d said Zenz, from Germany\u2019s European School of Culture and Theology.<\/span><\/p>\n

Chen has wasted no time in putting his controversial ideas into practice. Since he became Xinjiang\u2019s party chief last August thousands of security operatives, ranging from elite special forces to poorly trained rookies, have been deployed onto the streets of villages, towns and cities. Many are low-level surveillance officers tasked with keeping tabs on the region\u2019s 23m inhabitants and \u2013 above all \u2013 members of the 10m-strong Uighur minority. <\/span><\/p>\n

Zenz said the recruitment of security staff in Xinjiang had gone \u201cabsolutely through the roof\u201d under Chen\u2019s rule. In the first five months of this year, 31,000 such jobs were advertised – more than the entire total between 2008 and 2012. Last year a record 32,000 security agents were hired.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201c[It is] almost like in the old East Germany,\u201d Zenz said. \u201cThe perfect police state.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWhat are they going to do? Start a war?\u201d<\/h2>\n

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A shopkeeper comes into the street brandishing a metal pole during a regular anti-terror drill in Tashkurga, Xinjiang. Photograph: Tom Phillips for the Guardian<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

During a week-long road trip through southern Xinjiang, the Guardian saw first-hand how the unfolding security surge was affecting life across the region.<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
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In a village near Upal, a Uighur market town 50km south of Kashgar, members of one local militia lined up in the main square, wielding 5ft metal rods, for what are now daily security drills. Nearby, the white and green armoured personnel carriers of China\u2019s paramilitary People\u2019s Armed Police raced past, along a corridor of white poplars. \u201cI haven\u2019t seen so many roadblocks since the last time I was in Hebron,\u201d said a European traveller who had come to the region in search of the ancient Silk Road but had instead stumbled across scenes from a conflict zone.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Further south in Tashkurgan, a town on the border with Pakistan, an alarm sounded and shopkeepers rushed into the street brandishing poles and clubs. At a local hotel, the receptionist greeted guests in a black stab jacket; a medieval-style cudgel, spikes soldered into its tip, was propped up against the entrance near a metal detector.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Down the road another drill was underway with police training local men and women to bludgeon imaginary assailants with an arsenal of improvised hand-held weapons. \u201cOne, two, three,\u201d the group shouted in unison, pummeling their invisible targets on the final count.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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A shopkeeper comes into the street brandishing a metal pole during a regular anti-terror drill in Tashkurga, Xinjiang. Photograph: Tom Phillips for the Guardian<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

The effects of Chen\u2019s surge are also impossible to miss in Kasghar itself, a 2,000-year-old Silk Road oasis town where petrol stations, considered possible targets, now resemble prisons, with vehicles only allowed through their razor-wire perimeters one at a time.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

By night the city lights up like a flickering disco ball as hundreds of newly built police strongholds, positioned at almost every intersection, illuminate the darkness with their red and blue glow.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

As the sun rises, guards with clubs that resemble giant rolling pins and halberd-style spears assemble outside schools, shops and government buildings. Surveillance vehicles cruise the streets and troops with assault rifles man checkpoints on the outskirts of town, searching boots and demanding documents from commuters who are ordered off yellow city buses. It is almost impossible to walk without running into a security agent of some description.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s extreme now,\u201d sighed one local, who said they were shocked by the scale of the recent parades. \u201cWhat are they going to do? Start a war?\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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Weapons at the entrance to a hotel in Tashkurgan. Photograph: Tom Phillips for the Guardian<\/span><\/div>\n
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The crackdown has been accompanied by a ratcheting up of controls on religion in a place where it was already forbidden for under-18s to enter mosques, to broadcast calls to prayer or make unauthorised pilgrimages to Mecca. <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

This year there have been reports of authorities forbidding \u2018Islamic\u2019 names<\/a> such as Islam, Muhammad or Mecca, outlawing face veils and \u201cabnormal\u201d beards and even ordering imams<\/a> to praise Chinese President Xi Jinping during religious services.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

At Kashgar\u2019s Id Kah mosque – where the pro-Beijing imam was stabbed to death<\/a> in the summer of 2014 – worshippers file out through an arch fitted with at least six CCTV cameras. A nearby sign in English for tourists reads: \u201cAll ethnic groups warmly welcome the party\u2019s religious policy … All ethnic groups live friendly together here.\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Social controls have also been stepped since Chen took office with some citizens have reportedly being told to surrender their passports to police<\/a> while others have been instructed to install GPS tracking devices<\/a> in their vehicles. There are plans for the mass collection of DNA samples<\/a> a move human rights campaigners lamented as a sign Beijing was taking \u201cits Orwellian system to the genetic level\u201d.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u2018I would prefer to be a Syrian refugee\u2019<\/span><\/span><\/h2>\n

Daily life in Xinjiang goes on in spite of the crackdown. \u201cIt\u2019s like this every day. It\u2019s normal,\u201d shrugged one Kashgar resident as a convoy of armoured vehicles sped by. But the tightening has pushed others to breaking point. Fighting back the tears, one young Uighur clutched this reporter\u2019s arm as they described their growing despair at the repression and hope – one day – of fleeing overseas.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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 CCTV cameras at Kashgar\u2019s Id Kah mosque. Worshippers are filmed by at least six CCTV cameras as they enter and leave. Photograph: Tom Phillips for the Guardian<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI would prefer to be a Syrian refugee than Chinese,\u201d they said, their hands trembling. \u201cThis is hell for me.\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Another resident captured the almost universal fear of discussing, let alone questioning, the changes sweeping the region. \u201cThe system is very tight, so we must be careful.\u201d In 2014, Ilham Tohti<\/a>, a Uighur intellectual known for his moderate public criticism of Beijing\u2019s policies in the region, was jailed for life for separatism.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Nick Holdstock, a British author who has written two books on Xinjiang, cautioned against lumping all Uighurs together as members of an \u201centirely down-trodden, oppressed minority\u201d. \u201cOn some level things are getting better in Xinjiang. The infrastructure is improving. Its economy is quite healthy.\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

But Holdstock said the outlook for Uighurs had grown increasingly bleak over the last three decades, with cultural and religious controls ramping up after a succession of now-notorious outbreaks of ethnic violence in 1990<\/a>, 1997<\/a> and 2009<\/a>.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThere is no sense in [the government\u2019s] minds that anything that they are doing is necessarily part of the problem. It is the sense that the more troops you can have, the more security checkpoints, then that is the way to keep going.\u201dWang Hongwei, a national security expert at Beijing\u2019s Renmin University, said the \u201chigh-pressure crackdown\u201d was designed to intimidate Islamist militants who threatened China\u2019s national and political systems. \u201cThey are like millipedes whose bodies keep wriggling even when they are being cut into pieces,\u201d Wang said, claiming there was nothing \u201cexcessive at all\u201d about the recent mass parades.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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On Liberation Avenue, outside Kashgar\u2019s Id Kah mosque, Uighur men watch security forces file past for the city\u2019s latest mass \u201canti-terror\u201d rally Photograph: Tom Phillips for the Guardian<\/span><\/div>\n
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Authorities defend the tightening as a necessary offensive against extremists they blame for a series of horrific attacks on civilians, such as <\/span>a machete attack on a train station in Kunming<\/a> and <\/span>a bombing in Urumqi<\/a>.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
But many experts – who believe much of the violence is fuelled not by religious extremism but economic exclusion, government meddling and the erosion of Uighur culture and traditions – fear clamping down further will only breed more resentment and bloodshed.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

\u201cI think they are going at the flies with a sledgehammer,\u201d said one western Xinjiang scholar who asked not to be named for fear of not being allowed back into the country.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Zenz meanwhile warns the current policy by Beijing could inflame rather than extinguish anti-government anger.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cXinjiang is a powder-keg \u2026 much more so than Tibet,\u201d he said \u201cThe combination of securitisation and crackdown on normal religious practise is an absolute recipe for disaster … This is absolutely a ticking time-bomb.\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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