Concentration camps and forced labor: China’s repression of the Uighurs, explained

Jewher Ilham said she had not heard from her father since 2017.

Her dad, Ilham Tohti, is an economics professor and prominent Uighur intellectual in Xinjiang, China. He ran a website, UighurOnline, that focused on issues pertaining to the Muslim ethnic minority group.

Chinese authorities repeatedly shut down the website. Jewher says the family received death threats. Chinese authorities also disappeared her father multiple times before detaining him in 2014 and quickly finding him guilty on separatism charges. He was sentenced to life in prison.

At first, Jewher told me, because her father was a political prisoner, the family could visit him every few months. But then the Chinese government cut off access entirely.

Jewher is in the United States; she still has extended family in Xinjiang, the northwestern region in China where most Uighurs live. She does not talk with them, either. “If they talk to me or if they receive a phone call from me, I don’t think anything good will happen to them,” she told me over the phone in July.

Jewher’s father was targeted by the Chinese government for his advocacy of Uighur rights. But in recent years, the Chinese Communist Party has arbitrarily detained between 1 million and 3 million other Uighurs in so-called “reeducation centers” and forced them to undergo psychological indoctrination programs, such as studying communist propaganda and giving thanks to Chinese President Xi Jinping. Chinese officials have also reportedly used waterboarding and other forms of torture, including sexual abuse, as part of the indoctrination process.

Researchers from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, using satellite imagery and other evidence, have documented more than 380 re-education camp detention centers and prisons in Xinjiang, with at least 61 having been expanded or updated within the last year.

It is the largest mass internment of an ethnic-religious minority group since World War II…