‘They are concentration camps’: What life is really like inside China’s orphanages for Uighur children

Built like prisons with 60 orphans per room, China’s ‘protection centres’ are anything but. Brian McGleenon speaks to escapees and former camp employees about grim conditions on the inside

Uighur children watch as police officers pass their home in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang (Getty)

I hope they have already died because if they are alive it is worse torture for them.” Tahir Imin’s voice breaks with grief for the children in his family, who have been detained for years at unknown locations across China’s vast Xinjiang autonomous region. The academic’s brother Adil was sentenced to 10 years in prison, his step-mother to 15 and three of his cousins received up to 10 in “re-education” camps as a consequence for his activism against the mass detention of the country’s Uighur Muslims. Now in political asylum in the United States, he tells me: “My family are all in camps or in prison, if they are still alive.”

When Chen Quanguo became Communist Party Secretary of Xinjiang in 2016 he immediately began implementing the same social engineering policies he used to suppress Tibet, which rapidly transformed the region into a police state under his mantra of “rounding up whoever needs to be round up”. Uighur families were torn apart in the name of “coerced isolated detoxification” at so-called re-education centres. Once incarcerated they would only be released when ideologically “healthy” and rehabilitated from “the disease” of Islam. As the detained adults multiplied, so too did their orphaned children, thousands of whom have been left alone in the homes where their parents were arrested. Government data mined by German anthropologist Adrian Zenz revealed that in one rural area in particular, over 400 children whose parents were “double detainees”, meaning both had been interned, have been abandoned.

Tahir Imin, founder of the Uighur Times Agency, based in Washington DC, says many of these abandoned children have died from starvation or hypothermia, especially during the unforgiving Xinjiang winter. No Uighur adults are left that could look after them, he says, and many Han Chinese neighbours are wary about coming to the aid of “the children of terrorists”. After the detentions escalated, many of the orphans drifted onto the streets to beg for food. So, at the Ninth Party Congress of the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, Chen Quanguo ordered a new directive: “to concentrate all orphans into institutions by 2020”.

Contracts were tendered for new orphanages, and a building frenzy began. The number and size of these centres multiplied with the construction cost rising to £1bn in the southern region of Xinjiang alone. However, Imin says referring to these centres as “orphanages” disguises their true nature. He describes them as being built like prisons, adding: “It is as though Chinese authorities fear that one day the children’s parents would come to their rescue.” These so-called “protection centres” have cramped dormitories with 50 to 60 children to a room. “They are not orphanages, they are concentration camps for children,” says Imin.

Under Quanguo’s control state, terror has been relabelled a “counter-terrorism initiative”, conducted with a fervour not seen since the Cultural Revolution. That includes a dedicated policy to securitise the orphanages by procuring advanced surveillance technology and employing designs usually seen in high-security prisons. Doctor Zenz’s research has uncovered evidence of the securitisation of 40 facilities for children in one region alone, with one company installing “three-line defence systems in these camps consisting of high walls, electrified fences and sophisticated surveillance apparatus to monitor every activity on-site”.

Tahir Imin with his nieces and nephews, whose whereabouts are still unknown after their parents were detained (Tahir Imin)

At the beginning of Quanguo’s self-proclaimed “counter-terrorism initiative”, some Uighurs were employed to work in the orphanages, but recruitment stopped in March 2019. Since then, the vast majority of teachers and supervisors have been Han Chinese. In the past year, thousands of highly paid teaching positions in the Xinjiang camps were advertised. In the job descriptions, little education is required but there are always two essentials: a prospective applicant must have communist ideological leaning and be able to speak fluent Chinese. Doctor Zenz says these positions do not require any vocational training on the welfare and education of young children, adding that “quantity rather than quality” was the crux of the recruitment objective. However, due to the climate of fear around the camps, and the emphasis on ideological reinforcement rather than academic learning, few Han Chinese have actually applied for the roles, in spite of the high pay.

Uighur poet Abduweli Ayup says employees have not been properly vetted, that anyone is allowed to work in the centres for children as long as they are Han Chinese. Alongside their salary, Ayup says they are given free accommodation, as well as their pick of the detained Uighur’s belongings. The workers are instructed to run the camps militarily, and “no one checks or monitors these teachers, they are a law onto themselves”, he says. An Uighur woman who fled to Holland in 2019 after working as a teacher outside Kashgar told Ayup systemic physical and sexual abuse is rife in the orphanages. She recounted a distressing incident from September 2018 when a Uighur teacher heard a young girl crying under the stairs. He went to investigate and discovered the girl was being sexually abused by one of his Han Chinese colleagues. He immediately intervened and took the girl away. The next day the Uighur teacher was arrested and taken to one of the adult re-education camps. In October 2019, Ayup discovered the man, who was a keen athlete, had died as a result of torture.

A facility believed to be a re-education camp for Uighur Muslims near Kashgar (AFP/Getty)

Of the few remaining Uighur teachers that work in the centres there are punishments if they are detected using their own language. Speaking anonymously to Italian human rights organisation CESNUR, a Han Chinese teacher who relocated to Xinjiang to work said: “The school’s leaders conduct inspections of students regularly. If a student uses the Uighur language to answer a question in class, the teacher’s wages will be deducted.”

There are the stories of suicide attempts. The children are powerless, crying all of the time. They are not used to the conditions, and many I fear will go insane

When thinking of the missing children from his family, Imin says fear of the unknown causes the most intense anguish. Details from the camps come in fragments. He says: “We get leaked reports via eyewitnesses and online videos that sometimes manage to get out. Then there are the stories of suicide attempts. The children are powerless, crying all of the time. They are not used to the conditions, and many I fear will go insane.”

Reports from the camps indicate a strict regime of reciting communist tracts by heart, watching endless hours of Xi Jinping’s dialogues and chanting, “I love the CCP! I love Xi Jinping! I am a member of the people’s republic of China!”

A surprisingly candid detail of life within the camps for children came from a Han Chinese teacher, who posted his experience on an educational blog. He said: “In August 2017 I learned that Xinjiang needed a large number of Mandarin teachers in the border area of the motherland. I arrived at Hotan, the worst and most backward area in Xinjiang. When I arrived I had never seen so many special police officers armed with guns. The school was really bad. The students in my class still wearing thin, shabby, old, dirty, and smelly clothes. They have not changed for a long time. When I walked into the classroom, the smell was extremely unpleasant. I later learned the parents of the children had all been taken to the re-education centres.”

Imin and his daughter, who was recently reunited with her mother in Xinjiang (Tahir Imin)

Party officials have been known to enter the orphanages to interview children and collect evidence to use against their parents. If the child admits that their parents may have read the Quran or wore headscarves they could be unknowingly damning their parents to prolonged detention in one of the camps for adults.

The extreme conditions in Xinjiang stem from the central Chinese government’s reaction to two terrorist incidents: the first in March 2014, when Islamic fundamentalists ran through Kunming railway station with knvies stabbing commuters at random, killing 33 and injuring 140; and the second two months later when two vehicles smashed into a market on a busy shopping street in Urumqi, loaded with explosives and killing 31 people.

Following these events, Quanguo was relinquished from his role in Tibet and set loose in Xinjiang, with a responsibility to “stabilise” the situation. On paper, statistics would prove his method of control is working: there were 37 terrorist incidents in 2014, but in 2017, one year after he took control of Xinjiang, there were only six. The government argues the measures imposed in the region are benefiting the Uighur children, alleviating them from poverty and removing them from becoming prime targets for radicalisation, ensuring the children “happily grow up under the loving care of the party and the government”.

Ethnic Uighurs take part in a march in Brussels calling for the EU to demand China respect human rights and close the re-education centres (Getty)

Quanguo’s hardline approach in Xinjiang has its precursor in the liquidation of Tibetan culture, where “the Chen Quanguo effect” first originated. Quanguo violently demanded compliance, and even moderate symbols of Tibetan uniqueness were met with the spiked club, or “wolf’s teeth”, and the agonising “tiger chair”, within the network of police stations he constructed across the high altitude plateau. Now the reclusive governor is impressing central government, who are enthusiastically studying the results of his social re-engineering policies to assimilate and indoctrinate the children of the Uighur minority. The aim is to create a generation of loyal cadres who, in the words of Tahir Imin, are “more Chinese than the Chinese and more communist than the Communist Party”. A generation taught to despise their biological parents and to affirm that President Xi Jinping is their father.

Imin’s daughter. He was forced to divorce her mother by the Chinese authorities

A former re-education camp teacher, Qelbinur Sidik, an ethnic Uzbek, says the Chinese government is trying to make the current generation of “stolen” Uighur children the last ever progeny. Sidik says she received a message on her WeChat in 2017 asking for women from her region aged 18 to 49 to come to a centralised location to “have their bodies checked”. The purpose of this, she found out, was to give each woman an intrauterine device. Sidik went to the clinic and said that she did not want children as she was 45 and asked to be able to skip the process. But the medical officials told her that it was compulsory and if she did not undergo the procedure there would be a harsh punishment waiting for her.

Later when she started working as a teacher in one of the re-education camps for adults, Sidik saw a female detainee who was unconscious, blood trickling down her legs. The young woman was being led away by two guards. When she asked a work colleague what had happened, she was told, “it is part of the family planning policy”.

Describing the grim conditions in the camps for women, Sidik says each inmate was allowed to use a toilet three times per day, they were given one minute to wash at a water bucket per day and were allowed one opportunity per month to have a shower. The women were covered in lice and kept in blocks of 20 floors with around 20 rooms on each that were “so crowded that people had to take turns to lie down and sleep as there was so little floor space”.

This family planning policy would seem to be working, as Chinese government statistics from 2018 showed a significant drop in birth and population growth rates among the Uighur minority. Also, research by Doctor Zenz who studied family planning budgets and local government reports from Xinjiang, found “a systematic policy and campaign of subjecting at least 80 per cent of women of reproductive age to long-term effective birth control surgery”. Doctor Zenz added: “The data from two minority Uighur counties showed specific targets for how many thousand Uighur women were to be sterilised.”

These policies of demographic genocide have leaked slowly downwards from the centre of power in Beijing to permeate all of Chinese society. There is even a distinct impact on the nation’s youth. In 2019, when Sidik was last in Xinjiang she sat on a bus in front of a group of Han Chinese school children. Suddenly the children scrambled to look out of the bus window, their fascination stoked by a Uighur mother and child. One of the children said: “Oh, look apparently there are still Uighur’s here!”

This strategy of ethno-racial domination where the Han Chinese population is encouraged to increase and the Uighur population slowly eradicated is partly motivated by the political and economic significance of resource-rich Xinjiang. President Jinping has placed the region at the crossroads of his multibillion-dollar infrastructure project, the Belt and Road Initiative. As Imin says: “China needs the land, they don’t need the Uighurs.” He then raises an uncomfortable question: “Why is it necessary for them to even keep our children when the Han Chinese believe they will be a danger when they reach adulthood?”