More sordid details of China’s excesses and machinations in the Xinjiang region have been learned by CNN-News 18. During Beijing’s so-called re-education campaign, Uighurs and other ethnic minorities in the regions rural people in southern Xinjiang have been branded as ‘surplus labour’ or ‘labour poor’ and sent to work in factories in other parts of Xinjiang or China.
Between 2017 and 2021, 600,000 “surplus workers” in southern Xinjiang were to be trained and transferred to new workplaces. Uyghur workers generally live in separate dormitories and undergo organized Chinese language and ideological training outside working hours. They are also subject to constant surveillance and prohibited from practicing their religion.
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A labor transfer task force known as the Systematic Labor Transfers from Poverty-Stricken Areas of Southern Xinjiang Leading Small Group was established in late 2018 at the regional level and led by the head of the Department of Xinjiang organization.
birth control
During the re-education campaign, authorities in Xinjiang launched a series of crackdowns on “illegal births” to reduce the birth rate among Uyghurs and other minority women. Minority women found guilty of violating “family planning” policies face heavy fines, disciplinary action, internment and forced sterilization. As a result, Xinjiang’s official birth rate fell by nearly half (48.74 percent) in the two years between 2017 and 2019.
Xinjiang’s bureaucratic machinery fits a larger pattern of authoritarian rule in China. In fact, many of the governance techniques used in Xinjiang during the two campaigns were first devised elsewhere, such as the network management system (Beijing, 2004) and the common ten-household defense (Tibet, 2015). Some of Xinjiang’s governance tools are also replicated elsewhere. In 2017, the Xinjiang PLAC organized 22 inspection tours from the central government and other provinces. In 2018, Ningxia PLAC Secretary Zhang Yunsheng pledged to “learn and borrow” from Xinjiang’s experiences after inspecting the Stability Maintenance Command and the IJOP. The Hong Kong government’s counterterrorism task force also made a high-level inspection tour of Xinjiang that year.
Grassroots Hegemony
Chinese President Xi Jinping has unleashed neighborhood and village committees to extend the party’s visibility and control to the grassroots and to anticipate any source of instability. By dividing local communities into micro-police units as small as 10 families, authorities have combined human and automated surveillance tools to preemptively profile and target primarily ethnic minorities, removing any sense of privacy or security from Their houses.
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Police stations
In 2018, Xinjiang had more than 9,000 police sub-stations, of which 7,400 were located in rural villages and 2,100 were attached to urban communities, in total composed of about 10,700 police officers, 30,870 auxiliary police officers and 48,010 militia guards. In addition, thousands of new police checkpoints, known as “community police stations”, were built at the end of 2016.
Network management
The network management system, first introduced in Beijing in 2004 and then in Xinjiang in 2012, works by dividing local communities into small geographic and administrative cells. In each cell, a network manager and other staff collect information and report any potential problems to the neighborhood or village committee and the police. The grid’s political purpose is twofold: to expand the party’s reach at the grassroots level and to secure residential communities.
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