What really happens in China's so-called 're-education' camps: 'There was suffering and violence'

There are no detention camps in Xinjiang, Chinese authorities said once the evidence and outcry became too much to deny completely – only vocational education and training centres. And those held there, they said, are not detainees at all but trainees who benefit greatly from their stay.

“The centres provide free education,” Chinese official Aierken Tuniyazi told a session of the UN Human Rights Council in June 2019. “The dormitories are fully equipped with radio, TV, telephone, air conditioning, bathroom and shower. A sports ground and library have been built.” The trainees’ personal dignity and freedoms are protected and they are allowed to go home on a regular basis, he said. Many had already “graduated” from the centres to live “a happy life with better quality”.

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This was the narrative carefully propagated by Chinese government and state media, and armies of online commentators. None of it corresponded with the experiences of Uyghurs, Kazakhs and others caught up in the crackdown on Xinjiang’s Muslim minorities that a 2022 United Nations report found could constitute crimes against humanity, and the United States and other countries have described as genocide. 

Only a tiny fraction of the estimated one million detained in camps and prisons managed to escape abroad. I spoke with a series of them in Turkey, Kazakhstan and the US while researching my book, Those Who Should Be Seized Should Be Seized, which investigates China’s oppression of its Muslim citizens. They had been held in different facilities across Xinjiang. All described systematic indoctrination, mistreatment and torture. Similar testimony has been gathered by rights groups and journalists and is supported by numerous leaked government documents. 

People were taken to the camps for exhibiting what the Chinese government deemed signs of extremism – and that could be almost anything. Praying at the local mosque, wearing a headscarf or growing a beard. Quitting smoking, travelling to see family members abroad or just receiving a phone call from a foreign number. Saying “God bless you”. 

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Arrests came in the form of summons to a local police station or armed squads pounding on doors late at night. Detainees were driven to massive facilities then stripped of their clothing, jewellery and phones and given uniforms. They were put in crowded cells that sometimes had beds but often did not, and watched over by ceiling-mounted CCTV cameras. The cells were unbearably warm in summer and when winter came the detainees pressed together for warmth. They were given only brief access to toilets or had to use a bucket in their cell and were allowed cold showers once a week. Food was meagre. Several described only a thin soup for each meal, sometimes with a small piece of bread. Others talked of even less and a terrible, gnawing hunger.

There were classes most days that involved sitting in cramped and silent rows listening to lectures on Chinese language or the legal system. Guards would make them memorise patriotic songs and elements of Xi Jinping Thought, the president’s political doctrine. There would be videos too, detailing Xi’s foreign policy achievements or the power of China’s military. 

Medical attention came only in an emergency and sometimes not even then. Most detainees said they were given regular pills or injections, however. None of them knew what they were given but it fogged their minds, made them lethargic and seemed to disrupt the women’s menstrual cycles. 

There was violence. Beatings with fists, boots and shock batons for the slightest infraction and sometimes for no reason at all. Detainees spoke often of the device known as the tiger chair that guards strapped people into for hours or days at a time. The worst punishments often seemed to be reserved for Uyghurs. 

Women described suffering and witnessing sexual violence. One told me men in medical masks took women from the cells at night and that when it happened to her, she was raped and beaten by several guards.

Those who emerged from the camps said that they were so broken they no longer recognised themselves. Frail and tired, unable to remember things anymore or to think clearly. Always they carried with them the fear that they might somehow be taken back to the place of their suffering. They were tormented further by the Chinese government’s continued denials and its efforts to chase down and silence those who had escaped abroad. After the camps, they said, they would never be truly free.

Those Who Should Be Seized Should Be Seized: China’s Relentless Persecution of Uyghurs and Other Ethnic Minorities by John Beck (Melville House, £25). You can buy it from the Big Issue shop on bookshop.org, which helps to support Big Issue and independent bookshops.

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