The Chinese government has imposed 4.4 million years of cumulative imprisonment on ethnic Uyghurs in its far-western Xinjiang region, a new report has found.
The report, titled Uyghur Race as the Enemy and published by the Yale Macmillan Center’s Genocide Studies Program, finds high rates of incarceration are part of “racialised atrocity crimes” occurring in China against Muslim minorities.
It demands urgent action from governments to prevent genocide and ensure “the Uyghurs’ ability to continue existing as a people”.
The Uyghurs are a mostly Muslim, Turkic ethnic group, whose culture and language are distinct from China’s ethnic Han majority.
Since 2017, Chinese authorities have waged the “People’s War on Terror”, which they say is aimed at stamping out Islamic extremism.
At least 1 million Uyghurs and other Muslim ethnic minorities are estimated to have been detained extrajudicially in detention camps, which Beijing says are vocational training centres.
The study’s lead author Rayhan Asat, a Harvard law scholar and senior fellow with the Atlantic Council, told the ABC that the researchers set out to establish: “What is the Chinese government’s understanding of extremism?”
Cases analysed in Ms Asat’s report, based upon Chinese court documents, reveal “cruel and disproportionately harsh” punishments for alleged support for terrorism or extremism.
In June 2019, a Xinjiang court sentenced Zahire Memet to 15 years’ imprisonment for “wearing long clothes, covering her face, and wearing a hijab” between May 2010 and May 2015, against the advice of the village officials.”In another case that we looked at, they said ‘this person is financing terrorism’ basically [because] they bought a ring for their son in Türkiye,” Ms Asat said.
World’s ‘highest incarceration rate’ in Xinjiang
The report’s cumulative sentencing of 4.4 million years figure was based on available data about prosecutions, which showed the average prison sentence handed to Uyghurs in the region was 8.8 years.
Xinjiang legal authorities reported that between 2017 and 2021, a total of 540,826 individuals were prosecuted in the region.
“That makes China, especially the Uyghur region, basically the highest incarceration rate in the entire world,” Ms Asat said.
Xinjiang authorities have since stopped publishing this court data, meaning these were in fact conservative figures, she said.
In China’s opaque legal system, it is difficult to ascertain who is behind bars after formal prosecution and who is detained extrajudicially.
The country’s official prison population is reported to be 1.69 million.
According to World Prison Brief at the University of London, however, this figure only accounts for sentenced prisoners in Chinese Ministry of Justice prisons, excluding pre-trial detainees and those held in administrative detention as well as those in camps in Xinjiang.
While journalists and activists routinely became the enemy of the Chinese state, Ms Asat said, soaring rates of incarceration showed the entire Uyghur population had become enemies.
Ms Asat, whose own brother is serving a 15-year prison sentence, said that when a Uyghur is imprisoned in China, “the whole family goes in with them” — such is the level of trauma experienced by the community.
Australian Uyghur community leader Ramila Chanisheff said “every Uyghur that lives in Australia” has a family member or friend in Xinjiang “who they have lost connections with, who they don’t know their situation or whereabouts”.
Earlier this year, Human Rights Watch reported that Chinese authorities had changed the names of some 630 villages, to remove cultural or religious references, in an effort to erase Uyghur culture.
Mosques across China have been demolished or altered, including the removal of minarets, as part of authorities’ drive to “Sinicise Islam”.
From extra-legal jailing to authoritarian ‘lawfare’
While the Chinese government has consistently denied human rights abuses in Xinjiang, large amounts of evidence have been gathered by journalists, human rights groups, academics and the United Nations.
A report by the UN human rights chief released in 2022 corroborated previous findings from major human rights groups, concluding that “arbitrary and discriminatory detention of members of Uyghur and other predominantly Muslim groups … may constitute international crimes, in particular crimes against humanity”.
International scrutiny had driven Chinese authorities away from extrajudicial detention towards forms of “lawfare” and weaponising criminal prosecutions, Ms Asat said.
“Chinese authorities have continued to try to justify their patently illegal conduct by calling it the opposite,” wrote former China director at Human Rights Watch, Sophie Richardson, in a piece published by The Diplomat in response to the research.
“The tactic is designed to minimise international scrutiny and discourage the pursuit of accountability.”
Ms Asat said that little had been done by the UN human rights office since its landmark findings in 2022.
“With China opening up, after the COVID lockdown, we see everybody is going to China … as if this is doing business with a normal, democratic regime,” she said.
“To see the prime minister of Australia, going and shaking hands, smiling for the cameras, with the very people that are imprisoning my people. That’s been very difficult.
“There cannot be business as usual with the Chinese government.”
The UN Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of slavery concluded in 2022 that forced labour among Uyghur, Kazakh and other ethnic minorities in sectors such as agriculture and manufacturing had occurred in Xinjiang.
For years, trade unions and human rights groups have demanded Australia ban the import of goods such as textiles or solar panels suspected of being made with Uyghur forced labour.
Ms Chanisheff said the Albanese government should impose sanctions on Chinese officials involved in human rights abuses in Xinjiang — just as Australia had done for officials from Russia, Myanmar and Iran.
“We are sick of our government, our foreign minister and our now prime minister being sympathetic or empathetic. We’re sick of the words when we’ve got millions of people disappearing,” she said.
“Australia claims that we are the strongest partner for China, but what kind of friend do you have when you know they’re committing genocide, ethnic cleansing — and you’re quiet about it?”
A spokesperson for the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade said: “Australia has consistently condemned human rights violations against the Uyghurs and other ethnic and Muslim minorities in Xinjiang and across China.”
The spokesperson said that at the UN Human Rights Council in January 2024, Australia called on China to “repeal legislation and cease practices which discriminate against Uyghurs on the basis of race or religion, cease arbitrary detention, coercive labour transfer and family separation programs; and end restrictions on movement and on rights to enjoy their own culture and language”.
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