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Recent Developments in Xinjiang, with Adrian Zen... (Completed 07/09/20) Transcript by Rev.com

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Mark Elliott:

Well, good afternoon and thank you again for your patience. My name is Mark Elliott. I'm a professor of Chinese and Inner Asian history, here at Harvard. Also Vice Provost of International Affairs and a former Director of the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies. And I've been asked by the Director, Professor Michael Szonyi, to on his behalf extend a warm welcome to all of you here today for our talk; Chinese De-Extremification Campaign in Xinjiang by Adrian Zenz of the European School of Culture and Theology.

Mark Elliott:

I want to begin by thanking the co-sponsors of today's event, and they include the PhD committee on Inner Asian and Altaic Studies, the East Asian Legal Studies program, represented here by Professor Bill Alford, and the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Islamic Studies Program, represented here by its Executive Director, Harry Bastermajian. Harry, where are you? There you are. Thanks.

Mark Elliott: So, just a word to everybody. This event is being audio recorded, but there is no video recording today. And after Dr. Zenz's remarks, which will last approximately 40 minutes or so, we will do the usual Q&A and open the floor up to questions from the audience.

Mark Elliott:

Everyone here, I presume, is aware to some degree of recent developments in Xinjiang. Well, for nearly 10 years, there has been increased ethnic and political tension in the region. During the past 12 to 18 months, the situation has become considerably more dire, with mounting evidence of restricted religious, academic, and personal freedoms, and of the mass incarceration of hundreds of thousands of Chinese citizens. Nearly all of them Muslims, mostly Uyghurs, but also Kazakhs and Kyrgyzs. On apparent suspicion of supporting Islamic fundamentalism or extremism, of having sympathies for Xinjiang independence, or of being insufficiently loyal to the party, or some combination of one or more of these, or other charges.

Mark Elliott:

Reports on the establishment of the so-called re-education centers began to appear in the media a little over a year ago, and have now received considerable attention in the world media, and have also come to the attention of various parliamentary bodies around the world, as well as at the UN. These centers go by a variety of names in Chinese, the most official, I think, being jizhong jiaoyu zhuanhua peixun zhongxin, but there are a bunch of other names, very unstandardized if you look around. In English, they're called re-education camps or re-education centers. Some media voices have given them other names such as internment camps or concentration camps, both names going back to the 19th century, in fact. Our speaker, who has recently published the authoritative study on the creation of these centers, based on Chinese documents primarily, sees them as part of a "Large-scale, extrajudicial detention system." And estimates are that somewhere between several hundred thousand, perhaps as many as a million people, are being held in these facilities, which continue to be built today.

Mark Elliott:

The significant deterioration of the situation in Xinjiang is a cause for great concern among many China scholars. Quite a number of us can remember visiting the region when ethnic tension was not such an issue and when security concerns were nonexistent. My own first visit to Xinjiang came in 1983, a very



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different place than Xinjiang today, for sure. Today, we see that the region is under strict surveillance and that mobility of certain individuals is greatly limited. Many of our colleagues at universities in Xinjiang, including a number who have provided academic guidance and assistance to Harvard students, have been taken away and held incommunicado. The voices of intellectuals, poets, artists, and writers have been largely silenced. In sum, if reports of the widespread repression that is being visited upon Uyghurs and others in Xinjiang are true, we appear to be witnessing a violation of human rights on a mass scale.

Mark Elliott:

This situation is made even more distressing and confusing by the absence of much reliable, local information about what is actually happening. To help us understand these developments, we turn today to Dr. Adrian Zenz. He is lecturer in social research methods at the European School of Culture and Thought in Korntal, in Germany, which I believe is not far from Stuttgart, is that right? Dr. Zenz earned his PhD in Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge, that's the real Cambridge, the original Cambridge. Having studied before that at the University of Auckland, in New Zealand. He's an expert on Chinese minority policies with a research focus on ethnic policy and recruitment in Tibetan regions and in Xinjiang. He is engaged in researching minority language requirements and government recruitment in China's Tibetan areas, as well as in Xinjiang, focusing especially on the recruitment of security related personnel and minority teacher recruitment. And as you see, the title of his talk today, China's De-Extremification Campaign in Xinjiang. Please join me in welcoming Dr. Adrian Zenz.

Adrian Zenz: Wow. Thank you so much, everyone. Thank you, Mark, for this very helpful introduction. Thank you for the kind invitation to Harvard. It's nice to be back, in a sense. I've not been back in 24 years. I attended Harvard Summer School in 1994, if I remember correctly. I'm getting to that age where you have to start to try to remember what year something was in. So anyways, it's good to be back. Even though the topic of today's talk is rather sobering, Mark already did a very good job at giving us a general introduction of sorts to the region. Not planning to give a detailed ethnographic explanation, as you can see from the map, we are talking today about the so-called Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, which is home to about 11 to 12 million Uyghur's out of a regional population of 24 million. The region has close to 14 million Muslim minorities in total, this also includes Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Tajik, Hui, and a number of other minorities.

Adrian Zenz:

Now, to jump straight into the analysis, I'm a bit of a data analyst among anthropologists. I think I was one of the very few Cambridge PhDs who had charts in the PhD thesis and voluntarily attended an SPSS data analysis seminar, which my fellow students had to attend because of their research funding, knowing that they would never ever touch it again, after their field work. But here I am. And I have brought a few charts for you today, to give you a wider context. Now, we know there have been ethnic tensions in the regions. Of course, Xinjiang was taken over by Mao Zedong's armies in 1949. The Uyghurs did have a brief period of attempting an independent state. They have been a sort of very loosely governed people for a long part of history with Chinese overlordship, very changeable and fluid arrangements, as is so typical of these Western Chinese and central Asian regions.

Adrian Zenz:



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Now, this chart here shows the red line, a national rural disposable income, as a percent of urban disposable income. What this is supposed to show is the inequality gap between the countryside and the cities, which is one of the major axes of socioeconomic inequality in China. You see under Deng Xiaoping, rural incomes were just over half of urban average disposable incomes. If it was at 100%, then rural and urban incomes were the same. So, the lower the curves go, the higher the inequality, the higher the income gap between urban and rural. You can see with Decollectivization and then Marketization, especially proposed and promoted under Jiang Zemin in the 1990s, the so-called socialist market economy, these discrepancies increased very significantly.

Adrian Zenz:

The national level is the red line. You see that in both Kashgar, which is a Uyghur majority prefecture in the South, has a Uyghur population of 90%, so it epitomizes a Muslim Uyghur region, and Xinjiang, the drop was much steeper, as shown by the red arrow. The gap between national and Xinjiang and then Kashgar was substantial. Meaning the inequality, the difference between rural and urban incomes, especially in Kashgar, if you follow the green line, which is the lowest and stays lower until very recently, this income inequality was more pronounced.

Adrian Zenz:

Now, the little fire here is by the year of 2009, which is the year marking the Ürümqi riots, which were widespread riots in Xinjiang between the Uyghur's and the Han Chinese. And this was interesting to look at this from a little socioeconomic perspective, to understand some of the wider context in which all of this is happening. And of course, Xi Jinping has proposed the moderately prosperate society, which originally Hu Jintao talked about in the late 2000s. But he's really working towards reaching this goal. As you can see, progress is being made. But of course, all of this happened after decades of strong inequality, which is the wider context.

Adrian Zenz:

A similar thing can be observed for minority education. Under Deng Xiaoping, there were strong, what we call, means of privilege quotas. This was, of course, artificial. Competition was artificially reduced. The Minzu, or the minorities, Minzu means ethnic minority in Chinese, for those who don't know it. Got significant numbers of added points in order to enter university that were even core to us to ensure. The ethnic minority population in Xinjiang is the black line, about 60%, roughly. The number of tertiary students approximated the population, even though education was much worse. The number of secondary students was much lower, but then increased dramatically. And that Xinjiang men market competition was introduced.

Adrian Zenz:

The minority photos were gradually abolished. The result is why secondary minority enrollment increased to reach minority population share. Meaning the same percentage of the population of minorities would get a secondary education. As the Han majority, the tertiary enrollment share fell dramatically. Again, the low point was in 2009, the year of the riots. The state responded, as you can see this quota has increased again by about 10 percentage points, but it has not done so by helping minority students, per se. It has done so by promoting Chinese language skills among the ethnic minorities. So a lot of those who enter university now, a lot of the Uyghurs who enter university in Xinjiang, do this based on studying in Chinese, passing the university entrance examination in Chinese, as opposed to in the Uyghur or in the Kazakh language.



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Adrian Zenz:

You see an inversion of educational opportunities. Their Minzu, or ethnic minorities, made up nearly 70% of those graduating from primary school, but only 25% of those admitted to university in 2006. Whereas the Han share increased from 31% to 75% in inversion of educational opportunity back in the years just before the writing began and before this whole security situation exploded.

Adrian Zenz:

Now, we also have to understand that the geopolitical significance of the province of Xinjiang, the region of Xinjiang, increased dramatically with Xi Jinping's signature initiative, the Belt and Road initiative. The minorities have traditionally been at the periphery of the Chinese world. They were almost a bit like the barbarians around the Chinese empire, which learned from Chinese culture. With the Belt and Road, this is now changing. Xinjiang is actually called the core region or the hub of the circled initiative as China is looking outward, rather than merely inward. And this, of course, justifies even is considered a necessity to integrate the Western minorities more firmly into the Chinese nation. And therefore we should not at all be surprised to see a greater trend towards assimilation. Assimilating minorities in terms of culture, language, and other aspects.

Adrian Zenz:

A brief chart on police recruitment. We are comparing the Tibet Autonomous Region, in blue, and the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, in red. This is per capita so that we can compare, put advertised new police positions or security related positions, per capita. We see that during the riots in Lhasa, which were in 2008 and those in Ürümqi in 2009. The number of per capita advertised security positions, tripled or quadrupled, however, all of this between 2007 and 2010 is absolutely nothing compared to what has happened since. In 2011, Wu Yingjie became the new Party Secretary of Tibet. Under him, police and security recruitments skyrocketed, of course, coinciding with the onset of Xi Jinping, as China's ruler. We also see a spike in Xinjiang. Then Tibet has calmed down. Tibet has been officially pacified. There's very few incidents happening. So this has been going on dramatically.

Adrian Zenz:

However, Uyghur separatists we're able to carry out attacks outside of Xinjiang and other parts of China, Tiananmen Square in Beijing-Kunming train station. The Chinese state declared war on terror on the Uyghurs, of course, a war on terror had occurred before, even since 2001. China sort of launched onto the whole 9-11 trend, but the Chinese security state really took off, especially when Chen Quanguo, the Party Secretary of Tibet, was then brought to Xinjiang. And you can see that things have gone through the roof. The Chinese have established a police state in Xinjiang, like no other. And this is the data to sort of support that thesis.

Adrian Zenz:

Now, the main focus of my talk is on what has happened most recently in the region with the so-called Re-Education Campaign. What is the historical context? China had a national re-education through labor system also called laodong jiaoyang, or short, laojiao. Established under Mao Zedong, in order to domesticate opponents of socialism, dissidents, and others who needed a correction, of different sorts. The system was then abolished in 2013, it was considered to be no longer appropriate for a state or society governed by law. The government itself abolished it. What distinguishes the system is it is extralegal. There are no legal proceedings and nobody's sentenced. There is no form of charge. This also differentiates it for example, from the reform through labor, the laojiao system. Now from the early two



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thousands, a new term arose called transformation through education or, jiaoyu zhuanhua, however one translates it. It arose in the context of treating Falun Gong sect members.

Adrian Zenz:

It was also used, and continues to be used, in the context of cost isolated detoxification of drug addicts, which in China, is done by the police. And now, this concept is being mentioned and applied in a context of re-educating Muslims in Xinjiang. The methodology for my research is mostly Chinese sources, government work reports, budget reports, state or local media reports, public recruitment notices, public bids, which often contain some very detailed facility descriptions. And we also have some visual evidence, both from government reports or satellite, or from journalists who travel in the region. And there are some very strong correlations if we put all that data together. Now to understand a little bit about the context of what's going on in Xinjiang, various officials in the years before, started to talk about some of the concept or the theory of De-Extremification. Re-education, actually occurs always in the context of De-Extremification, of removing a so-called extremist religious thought from people.

Adrian Zenz:

Officials were saying that in a typically Muslim village, most people are just influenced by the surroundings, but you have about 30%, and other officials would give different percentages, who are polluted by extremism. That's quite a significant share, if one would take that seriously. The latter group requires concentrated education work. When the 30% are transformed, the village is basically cleansed.

Adrian Zenz: Now back then re-education only took place among a relatively small share of the population, among so-called key persons or target persons. What has happened since, is Chen Quanguo, he doesn't do anything below 100%. When he came on, he racked up everything, police recruitment, social control, everything, and he apparently is implementing more or less what has been stated and espoused by officials in the region for a number of years. He is simply actually doing it. Which is unbelievable, of course, but in a Radio Free Asia interviews with local officials, local officials stated to RFA that they had been given internment photos of 10 to 20% of the population, in some cases higher, meaning a certain percentage of the population simply needs to be detained and put into re-education camps.

Adrian Zenz:

Why? And that without formal charges, necessarily. Those who get former charges, they go into different parts of the criminal system in China. This is on top of regular detentions and prison population and imprisonments. This is completely separate. We have to understand as two separate systems.

Adrian Zenz:

Well, this is simply for treatment. Re-education is like a treatment for people who have a medical condition. It's like free medical treatments some documents said. So this is the context. What happened in 2017? In the summer, we first had reports about large scale detentions. Information was given by various sources on the ground that talked about late March, early April as the onset of an absolutely unprecedented detention campaign. People were simply disappearing by the thousands and thousands. Now on March 30, to come into effect April 1, the Xinjiang government issued a so-called De-Extremification ordinance. They explicitly, among some of the points, mandated the use of re-education. Very strong coincidence, in terms of timing.



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Adrian Zenz:

If we look at government bid documents that specify the construction of a new re-education facility, and these are bids that specifically mentioned transformation through education, we see that they were very rare before Chen Quanguo assumed power. We can see over here. A single one, in April, 2016. That's the only one, I was able to find, of course. This is only the ones that I was able to find. So, if anybody has any other, just let me know. Chen Quanguo assumed power in August, September. He was still busy recruiting all that police and building all those convenience police stations and establishing other forms of social control, at the time. In March is when the new, De-Extremification ordinance came into effect. We see...

PART 1 OF 4 ENDS [00:24:04]

Adrian Zenz:

a very strong peaking, especially in the summer months, and then it's gone down a bit since. We need to keep into account of course, by no means are reeducation camp construction is reflected in these bits. We cannot at all assume that. This is only one indicator variable that we can use, but it does yield very interesting results.

Adrian Zenz:

Now, 76 government bids show that new facilities have been constructed, but also that existing facilities have been converted for longterm use. Existing facilities, sometimes they are party schools, sometimes they're different facilities, there've also been reports of regular public schools being converted to reeducation camps. One of the bid documents pertains to a primary school. Firstly, dormitories were added, people now stay there over longer periods of time, kitchens, upgraded sanitary facilities, heating for all seasons, meaning some of these facilities were for short term or daytime use, and they were now being upgraded for longterm use. We don't know how long. Comprehensive security features were added mostly to existing facilities.

Adrian Zenz:

This just gives an example. In the Maralbexi County, Kashgar Prefecture, which I had mentioned as one of the regions with the 90 or 91% weaker population share in the very South of Xinjiang region, a legal system training school, there's different types of schools, they have different names. I really don't have time for a lot of details in this presentation, for reasons of time, one could go into much more detail on that. Of course, the research report that I published on this is publicly available.

Adrian Zenz:

One bid talked about, just to give you an idea of some of the details that one can find in these bid documents, renovating heating pipes, a guard room, a meeting room, a bathroom, four watchtowers, hardening floor space, and the satellite image show the hardened floor space. I assume they do that. There's nothing green, there's no trees, you can't hide anywhere, and you can't dig. You cannot dig a tunnel because it's completely concrete covered, the entire areas. Security nets, security doors and windows, fences, and so on. And a second bid even talks about armed police living quarters, a hospital detention room, and a supermarket, over 10,000 square meters. I guess you guys think more in square feet, so maybe you can convert that, one meter is 3.1 foot, so a square foot should be-

Speaker 1:



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About 10 times bigger.

Adrian Zenz:

About 10 times, yes.

Adrian Zenz:

Now, with the help of a student from Canada called Chan Zhang, who has identified a bunch of locations, I went about to verify some of the satellite images related to these camps, which are very fascinating. Here you have red underlined the bid document, the bid document talks about an address, it says the address identified a region on Google Maps. This is a bid, again in Kashgar Prefecture, for a reeducation school, 27,000 square meters at a cost of 140 million renminbi. The first signs of construction are evident from the buildings, before it was just fields, completed in the picture shown on November, which also fits the timing. Close up pictures show, and this is very characteristic of reeducation facilities in contrast to detention facilities or prisons, they have often relatively large open spaces, and these spaces are segregated and separated by high fences. The shadows give an indication of how tall they are. They're two stories tall, or something like that, with barbed wire at the top. And often each building itself is surrounded by a fence, so this makes very good crowd control, which is very necessary because these facilities are very overcrowded. And former detainees have said some of them house up to 6000 detainees. And so the open spaces, also some photos that circulate on the internet, indicate some of these open spaces are being used for teaching.

Adrian Zenz: Now the watchtowers also, as you can see in the one bid of course described watchtowers, the watchtowers of reeducation camps are often square. You can see they're often blue or red, they have a color, this also shows the shadow, see how tall those things are. Detention centers, often these camps, reeducation camps, are often built right next to detention centers, existing detention centers, detention centers often have these little mushroom shaped watch towers and the walls look like those, so one can often distinguish them.

Adrian Zenz:

This is a second example, a very large facility, and that's a legal system transformation through education school, and vocational training school, so mixing vocational training and reeducation in the same bid. 82,000 square meters, times 10 for square footage. You see, again, it's built right next to an existing detention center, that shows all the typical signs of a detention. Here you can see the address where it's located, Yecheng County, that's also in Kashgar Prefecture, that's where these examples are from, but you find them of course everywhere. Prior to the construction bid, it's an empty space. Then building starts, eight buildings have been commissioned. And so, interesting, this eight building design with a very large courtyard in the middle, you find that exact same design, almost with the same square footage, actually, you find in several locations. It's like a blueprint for some of these camps.

Adrian Zenz:

Finished. Again, a classic feature is a very large courtyard compared to the detention center down there, which has hardly any courtyard because there's no outdoor teaching happening there. That's the difference. Again, you have a reeducation camp watchtower, this time red, square. And down there, the detention center watchtowers, which are like white mushrooms.



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Adrian Zenz:

This is the Wall Street Journal. They visited a facility in Topan based on informant reports. They were able to snap this photo from outside. You can see the watchtower, the fence, a wall with barbed wire on top, the fence in front of it. And next to it is a police station. This classic pillar. And this is the parking lot where they took ... I've heard that by now it probably would not be possible to take these kinds of photos, the Chinese are now very careful to not let anybody come close enough to these facilities to take a photo like that. So this was, I think, in June or July this year. And down below you have the satellite image of the exact same facility and you can very nicely match even the pillar of the police station here, with the shadow that it casts. The police station, the exact same sort of ... not octagonal, but the same sort of design with these angled sides. And then right next here, the wall here. And then if we looked further, we could see ... I didn't put this on this slide, we see many more of the details and we see all the classic features of a reeducation camp with the watchtower and the fences and all the classic features.

Adrian Zenz:

A German TV crew was able to take secret footage out of a taxi, or car, drove right past a camp. Very nice footage. This is a screenshot from their video, a very clear shot of, again, blue square shaped watchtower, high walls, barbed wire. You notice there's massive solid iron bars in front of the windows. Also matches a lot of these bid descriptions.

Adrian Zenz:

Now, of course the Chinese government would like us to think that this is a very beneficial type of vocational skills training, what's going on in there. Now, vocational skills training certainly does take place in Xinjiang and has been a massive campaign, the interesting thing is though some of the bids for vocational skills training facilities say that they need to have surrounding walls, fences, police stations, surveillance systems, equipment for visiting family members. That's a video conferencing system that's typically found in prisons so you can visit a prisoner without meeting face to face.

Adrian Zenz:

There's also bids for vocational skills training centers that are stated to meet the city's critical security need, this is Karamay City in Northern Xinjiang, to subject key persons to reeducation. So quite a link there in the government issued description. And of course, then we also have a lot of recruitment announcements, which very suddenly came up in April and May last year, hundreds of trainers in multiple counties, altogether several thousand of these sort of trainers. Most of them needed no more than a middle school degree and Chinese language skills. If you look at comparable announcements for other parts of the country, or even for Xinjiang in what is actually a vocational training college, these positions typically require a university degree in a related relevant subject. But we likely have a continuum of facilities, they can blend over, some maybe have more skills training, others are more purely political indoctrination. Indoctrination of course you can find even in the public school system in Xinjiang, or anywhere in China for that matter. So there will be different types of facilities. Like when you hear of incidents of torture in a facility, that doesn't mean that all of them will be the same, yeah? So there's complexity.

Adrian Zenz:

This is from a government report, Hotan Prefecture, again a weaker majority region. Officials visit a vocational skills education training center, tall fences with barbed wire are evident in the background.



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That's a very secure way to learn your skills, I would say. Certainly you can leave your wallet anywhere and nobody's going to break in and steal your wallet in there, if you have one, if you can bring one in. Closed style centralized vocational skills training, that's the title of the government report for Bachu County, again in Kashgar Prefecture. The report said that in January 2200 persons who were trained, I believe this was for three months intensive. You can see them sort of marching. And you see again the classic large empty courtyard, large empty spaces, surrounded by tall buildings.

Adrian Zenz:

Much of the discussion focuses on number estimates. Number estimates are inherently speculative and problematic. A particular leaked document that was picked up by Japanese Newsweek, supposedly from a public security authority somewhere in Xinjiang, origin cannot be verified, that document stated 892,000 detainees in March this year, or February this year. When you upscale that, because several cities were not included in that, you would get at just over one million. That's 11.5% of Xinjiang's Muslim minority population aged 20 to 79 according to the 2010 census and then extrapolated by 2015 population data. Now, that share matches quite nicely with what a number of officials have told Radio Free Asia about detention courthouse they were given of 10% upward.

Adrian Zenz:

Various sources indicate a low estimate of at least several hundred thousand. I think that's a conservative estimate. Very likely we do not have less than 1000 facilities because Xinjiang has 1200 administrative units between the township and the Prefecture level, and several government documents from 2014 to '16, those government documents were actually quite honest in describing this whole system. Described a multi tiered system at multiple administrative levels. And we have among the procurement bids evidence of facilities on all administrative units, including village.

Adrian Zenz:

Now, whichever estimate you prefer, any of them would exceed the entire former national reeducation through labor system in all of China that was abolished in 2013, which, according to official data, had 160,000 persons interned in 350 facilities. When you combine this with visitor reports that talk about empty roads, empty bazaars, deserted villages, boarded up houses and shops, it is very likely that we are looking at a very high number of detained persons, quite likely the upper end of our estimate.

Adrian Zenz:

Now, China's official position on the camps is very interesting. It's interesting to see how it's changing. In April or May this year the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs was asked about these camps and they said, "Well, we've not heard about any camps." Then, when it came to the United Nations, the anti-discrimination hearings in August, China was forced to respond to allegations of a very large extrajudicial detention campaign. The official response was with respect to criminals involved only in minor offenses. The authorities provide them with assistance and education by assigning them to vocational education and employment training centers to acquire and implement skills and legal knowledge.

Adrian Zenz:

Now, on the surface, a lot of what the Chinese responded looks like a denial, but actually, if you closely look at this, having studied the reeducation system, it's quite a strong acknowledgement. Criminals on minor offenses, there's no talk about legal proceedings applied to them because the sentence before



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that talks about those who are formally charged. So a minor offense could be having some kind of religious material, some kind of religious thought.

Adrian Zenz:

Education of course takes place, education can be anything, including reeducation, political education, employment training, likely takes place in many of these facilities in some form or other. Legal knowledge is taught in all of them, we know that from official government reports, they actually say that what happens in these camps is learning Chinese and learning about the law. Then the Chinese ambassador to United Kingdom said, "The education and training measures taken by the local government of Xinjiang has helped those lost in extremist ideas. It is time to stop blaming China for taking lawful and effective preventative measures."

Adrian Zenz:

Now the reeducation campaign is described as taking lawful and effective preventative measures. Preventative is something you do before something has happened, right? So detaining 10 or 20% of a Muslim population for no particular reason other than that a, in actual reality, fairly small percentage of the Uyghurs have radicalized themselves. And that is a fact, Uyghurs have radicalized themselves, they have been affected by the rise of global jihad, of course, in the entire context of disaffection with Chinese rule and all the discrimination that they have perceived in that context, we could go into details on that. There have been, of course, what we would call attacks, acts of resistance, terror attacks, however you call them.

Adrian Zenz: Global Times on August 14th wrote, "China is turning to preventative measures according to laws. The ways China has adopted for deradicalization are most stringent," more stringent, "Yet they work." And the more stringent, the article compares it to what Europe has done. It basically says what Europe is doing to stop Muslim radical terrorism and radicalization is not working, but what China is doing is more stringent, but it's working.

Adrian Zenz:

That's where we're at now. That's the status quo in terms of the Chinese response, pretty much. Preventative apparently is the internment of a population without evidence of criminal activity or legal proceedings. Those who are put into camps often in many instances do not know why they are in a camp, nor do they know when they can get out, nor do their relatives know oftentimes in which camp they are or why they're in a camp or when they can get out. That's the situation, basically.

Adrian Zenz:

Some do. One of the criteria for getting put into the camps is if you have anything religious on your cell phone, even a government approved Koran translation, or if you have any contact with abroad, if you've been an overseas student, you need not have had any contact with any Uyghur splitters or other group, nothing at all, you simply go to Harvard University, learn something, come back, or be in touch or call your mother. Your mother is related to you, your mother has you overseas, so your mother's liable to be put in a camp, you are liable to be put in a camp. In fact, if you as a Uyghur return home from abroad, you are 100% guaranteed to be put in a camp, which is why Germany and likely Sweden are stopping any deportation of Uyghurs based on humanitarian grounds.



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Adrian Zenz:

Now, where is this all headed? Or what is some of the deeper attitude or perspective behind all this? I could greatly expand that section, for reasons of time I have to be fairly brief, also in my conclusion. Just to understand a little bit more about the very substantial topic of the Chinese state, or also, to a lesser extent, the Han majority view of the ethnic minorities in China. I think a very characteristic statement, perhaps one of the most characteristic statements I've ever come across, was issued by Zhang Yijiong, Deputy Head of the United Front Work Department during the 19th party Congress, which was in autumn last year. He said, "All of you," and that was a group of journalists, "May have noticed the cultural performances," meaning dancing, "Exhibitions and costumes of ethnic minorities while traveling to minority areas throughout the country. Even in Beijing one can taste the special snacks of all ethnic groups. This is precisely as a result of our protection efforts."

Adrian Zenz: Now, if you are an ethnic minority in China, you may just about define your unique identity a little bit wider and deeper than offering your ethnic snack to the Han in Beijing, or dancing around in your costume made in Guangzhou, or showing off a cultural performance, wherever it is, often choreographed in certain tourist dominated contexts. There's language, there's identity, there's religion. So much of minority identity is bound up in these things, and especially in religion; the Tibetans, Buddhism, the Uyghurs, Kazakhs with Islam, right? It just goes to show that the accepted performance of minority identity is often very superficial. An eye witness to one of the reeducation camps who was able to visit, he was able to visit a reeducation camp, a Uyghur himself, he was then able to flee to Turkey and was there interviewed by the BBC. He said, "They," and he's talking about the Uyghurs in these reeducation camps, "They were like robots. They seemed to have lost their souls. They behaved as if they weren't aware of what they were doing."

Adrian Zenz:

Now, the top part is perhaps a very characteristic sentence of the Chinese state view on minorities. The bottom sentence is for me a characteristic statement on the effect of the reeducation campaign on the Uyghur and Kazak and other peoples. It's a forced change of the very core of your being. That is the goal. The goal is to really thoroughly change the people deep within. And to be honest, that ... I mean, I'll leave that without commenting.

Adrian Zenz:

So, what is the longterm agenda? The vision is of course a Chinese nation, the Chinese term is "zhonghua minzu", that's actually a ... one would have to explain that term a bit, there's not the time really for it. A multiethnic Chinese nation under CCP leadership. China envisions itself as a multiethnic state, there must be ethnic minorities. Both past empires have derived their glory and status from it, and the current Chinese state also very much sees it this way. I'm strongly of the opinion that what is going on in Xinjiang is not to exterminate or kill the Uyghurs, there's no intention of genocide, in my opinion. I-

PART 2 OF 4 ENDS [00:48:04]

Adrian Zenz: There's no intentional genocide, in my opinion. I'd be very surprised if that would be the case, because the ideology is to change the people and integrate them into the Chinese nation. And they're supposed



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to be happy and glorious ethnic citizens of a glorious Chinese nation under CCP leadership. That's really what it's all about.

Adrian Zenz:

Now, we can understand the assimilation or integration project from two particular angles in my opinion. One is a more racial, cultural angle. To understand, this one of China's eminent anthropologists, Fei Xiaotong, talked about the fact that the gradual or his view, which is widely echoed in Chinese state circles, that the gradual amalgamation of all ethnic minorities into the Han core culture, is an inevitable historical process. In this context, of course, any cultural distance between Han and minorities in terms of language, customs, religion, is increasingly viewed as a liability, as a security hazard, even. As a matter of state security, which is one of the reasons why Chinese language is being taught in the Uyghur concentration camps. Why the internees are watching Chinese television.

Adrian Zenz:

The second access along which the integration is occurring, is the communist socialist angle, conformative to what Xi Jinping has emphasized as core socialist values. Here we are looking at the gradual disappearance of alternative ideologies to socialism, communism. Especially religion, of course, classic perspective of religion as the opium of the masses, by which they are deceived. Now, religion has in fact turned out to be the potentially most formidable opponent or perceived foe off the Chinese socialist state. It has not disappeared with material progress. That's the tenet of communism. Religion will eventually appear once the material base has changed, once there's a socio-economic equality, et cetera, et cetera.

Adrian Zenz:

So now the state is really forcing the issue through tried old methods. The tried old method of reeducation, which is of course, a classic tool of many communist states. And of course, was one of the classic tools under Mao Zedong in particular. And with this slightly complex picture, I am ending my presentation and hope it was mostly understandable. Thank you.

Mark Elliott:

I think it's safe to say it was completely understandable, not just mostly understandable. If I could, while the audience is collecting its thoughts, if I can begin with a question or two about the geographical distribution of these camps.

Mark Elliott:

You referred to quite a number in Kashgar Prefecture, which is very big. And I just wondered if you can give us some sense of how many roughly the proportion are in so-called Nanjiang, in the southern part of Xinjiang, below the Tian Shan mountains. How many are in Beijiang and how many would be in the Turpan region or in the Ili region, those being the four basic areas into which Xinjiang is usually divided. And the Uyghur population being primarily in the southern part of Xinjiang. Do you have any sense of that?

Adrian Zenz:

Yes. Now the bid documents that I analyzed, do have a significant concentration in the southern Uyghur majority regions, and also particularly in different counties in Kashgar. But they're a fairly poor proxy in



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my opinion of actual distribution. For example, seven or eight of these bidded documents pertain to one particular camp that's being expanded with different buildings. Also, as I have said, we cannot assume that all re-education facility construction has a bid notice attached to it. Or that I was able in my research to find all the relevant bid documents.

Adrian Zenz:

And therefore in my reports, I've always been very cautious to talk about regional distribution, because I do not believe that the data that I published-

Mark Elliott:

In the article.

Adrian Zenz:

Yeah, gives a fully authoritative picture of that. I think, 40 of 68 counties have some kind of bid notice attached to it. You can find some camp notices in the Chinese majority regions, city of Karamay, some other parts in between counties that have a lot of Kazakh populations, such as Ili and others. There's not any ... Well, there's, I think, only one or two related to Urumqi, but according to anecdotal evidence, there's quite a fair bit of re-education going on in Urunxi, simply that we don't have the documents to back that up.

Mark Elliott:

One further, and just a point of information kind of a question. What's the difference between a detention center and a re-education center? Apart from the different shape of the watchtower roofs, which you were showing us.

Adrian Zenz:

A detention center is a facility where people are kept typically for up to 15 days, although they can be kept there longer. Which on the one hand they're being kept there to evaluate whether formal criminal charges are going to be pressed against a suspect or not, so it's basically a place where suspects are being kept. They're also places where persons can be kept for a limited amount of time. I think it allows more or less 15 days, as a lighter form of punishment or a warning in case criminal charges are not pressed. And therefore they're just part of the formal system.

Mark Elliott:

So if somebody is brought to a detention center, they may either be sent home after a couple of weeks, they may be sent to a re-education center? Or they may be sent into the criminal system and potentially to the prison, is that ...?

Adrian Zenz:

Now, the reality on the ground is apparently very messy. Meaning, re-education camps are so overflowing that there are reports ... This one eyewitness from Kazakhstan, or who's a Kazakh who fled to Kazakhstan, reported of receiving re-education in a detention center for a certain amount of time. And they are not limited to 15 days. But then he was transferred to another facility, which was worse he said.



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Adrian Zenz:

Another eye witness report said he was three months in a detention facility, absolutely crowded. And apparently the authorities were trying to assess if people there should be transferred on or not, but to some extent they were not being transferred on because the re-education camps were just completely overflowing. He eventually got out by building connections there and paying a bribe. So the system on the ground is quite messy.

Adrian Zenz:

Also, I'm sure many of the thousands, especially in the early campaigns, were simply detained and transferred directly to re-education without any evaluations, simply because they had to meet population quotas. If you get caught at a checkpoint, there's many parts of the Xinjiang security system I was not able to talk about, there's many checkpoints and they check cell phones and everything. They just plug in a device, the device automatically checks all the contents of the cell phone, even deleted files apparently. And if anything is found, then you would be presumably then brought to a detention center to evaluate your status.

Mark Elliott:

So I think we'd like to open the floor for questions. Our normal procedure would be to ask questioners to identify yourself and your affiliation. Today I think, given the sensitivity of this topic, we'll leave that up to you. And I recognize Mr. Porter, Dr. Porter here.

Dr. David Porter:

Hi, I'm David Porter, I'm a graduate of the PhD program here in Chinese History. Thanks for this really important work you've been doing and this really interesting talk. I want to ask a little bit about the conclusions that you've raised at the end. You said that you don't think the Chinese state is moving towards something like a genocide. I think that certainly we all hope that's true. And as you say, I think there isn't yet evidence that they have been doing anything like that.

Dr. David Porter:

But you suggested the idea is that these camps will create a happy, well-integrated Uyghur population. Obviously I think there's a lot of reason to be skeptical that they will achieve this goal. And I wonder if you have any sense from any of the work you've done on whether there is a timeframe for this attempted project of making people into happy, well-adjusted Han-like citizens. What happens if this project is deemed to have failed at that goal? I mean, is there a sense that you have of where the state might go if in fact the results of this or that ... Or not that people end up being happy citizens of a harmonious China.

Adrian Zenz: Now, thank you. The evidence that we have so far from those who were able to escape, or there're very few who were released and able to leave the country. The evidence of that is that they are severely traumatized. They are a very strong state of fear, as of course are all the relatives or those who ... Anybody who speaks with Uyghur's who has been visiting area, talks about the atmosphere of fear that engulfs the entire place. Also those who are not in the camps, of course.

Adrian Zenz:



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But inside the camps, it must be absolutely terrifying. And some of the former detainees report memory loss, memory loss is a classic posttraumatic stress disorder symptom. So basically the Chinese state is very likely to produce a large number of heavily traumatized individuals. And as we all know, such individuals are far more likely than a normal, healthy, happy person to become lone wolves or to become extremists, have some sort of ideology.

Adrian Zenz:

In terms of timeframe, in the past, there were timeframes. The most hardened or stubborn group was given 20 days of reeducation, and the least hardened groups was given four days. And that's history. It's unheard of that anybody is released within 20 days, or even a month or two or three or four. In fact, from the information that we have, if somebody gets in, it's very uncommon for them to have been released. I personally know of a persons who have been there since the beginning of 2017, that's going on to two years. Just very recently, a document has circulated on Twitter that stated the local authorities ... It's a government report. And they basically were saying, "We need to seize the next two to three years to thoroughly finish the re-education." And that document was from September. That's not much evidence, but that's what we got.

Mark Elliott:

A question in the back here. Yes.

Stacey Van Vleet:

Thank you. Hi, I'm Stacy Van Vleet. I'll be an Assistant Professor next year at Indiana in Tibetan Studies. My question is about the effect of this on families. Are there designated women's camps, and are children being separated from both of their parents for either the duration of the stay or longer?

Adrian Zenz:

Thank you. There are some eyewitness reports that say that either a camp had a women's section, it was separated by gender, or camps entirely for women. There's very little detailed evidence of that, or very little detailed statements. Of course, we have some pictures, some of which you have seen, that show only men. Men are often particularly targeted. There is an impression that men are missing from streets and public life, by those who visit.

Adrian Zenz:

here have been numerous reports and numerous evidence, although I've not really specialized on researching that aspect, of the fact that they have established new kindergartens, new schools, new orphanages, or educational orphanage institutions, some of them heavily secured, specifically for, the government reports talk about disadvantaged families, or special families that fall into certain groups. Which is often like a euphemism that can include a whole range of population groups.

Adrian Zenz:

So yes, there's significant evidence, and there have been also a media reports on the fact that many children are orphaned, because both parents are in a re-education camp. It's very hard to get any statistics or any air hard evidence on it.

Mark Elliott:



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Yes.

Ross Terrill:

Ross Terrill of the Fairbank Center. You mentioned the extremists, of course, not all Islamic believers are thus, and the Chinese government doesn't think all Islamic believers are extremists. Along those lines, do the camps allow any religious observance for the stricter Islamic believers? Friday prayers, presence of imams, prayer mats, some equivalent to a mosque meeting.

Adrian Zenz:

There's fairly strong evidence, and I have the report and a number of photographs from a person, an academic, who visited the region, who gave me some very detailed information that the Xinjiang government has proceeded to close down and lockup many of the mosques in China. Not in China, sorry, in Xinjiang, in the region. So many of the mosques are closed. The smaller ones are being demolished, they're trying to focus them on the big ones. But the big one, they're very heavily secured. They have a metal gate, you have to scan your ID. You have to look into a facial recognition camera to be admitted.

Adrian Zenz:

She went to several large mosques during the Eid Festival, the religious festival, on Friday, and the mosque was shut. Nobody was going in, nobody was coming out. This was a very big mosque in Urumxi. And there was absolutely not a single sign that any religious activity was taking place in it. Now in some mosques, of course, religious activity does take place, but it's very heavily restricted in general society. Now in re-education camp, there are reports. And of course we only have anecdotal reports, that those who are considered more conservative religiously, are forced to eat pork, drink alcohol, do all kinds of other things to make them realize, "Well, this is just harmless. Your religion's just indoctrinating you to not do these things."

Adrian Zenz:

Also, party cadres have been severely punished for not smoking in public or not smoking in front of elders, which is considered very inappropriate in Uyghur religious culture. And also, the Chinese have organized dance festivals. Some pictures were circulating of places being converted into selling alcohol, et cetera. Shops are forced to sell alcohol, also during Ramadan. So the kind of religious freedom that you would hope for in a re-education camp, does not even exist outside a re-education camp. And in, I forget what time last year, there was announcements that in Uyghur and Kazakh regions, that people had to hand over all copies, any copy of a Quran, and any prayer mat. And it's not legal to say family prayers.

Adrian Zenz:

In fact, one of the lone wolf knife attacks that took place in late 2016, early 2017, was sparked by a father who was just saying family prayers, and a cadre's were visiting and found out. And he was being penalized and he got very angry, and that's how this attack was apparently the last publicly known attack in Xinjiang, took place, through the prohibition of normal religious practice. If you can give me any piece of evidence or if you can tell me any Muslim religious practice that's safe to practice in Xinjiang, without being liable to be put into a re-education camp, then please do so. I'm not aware of any,



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Mark Elliott:

I believe the person sitting next to Professor Terrill also had a question. So since we're in that part of the room, I'll come back over here, I promise.

Speaker 2:

Thank you for a great talk, very informative. I wonder what's the similarity between this situation with the US war on terror and its own detention center that we all well know of, Guantanamo and other places. I wonder if there's any cultural differences and similarities. Thank you.

Adrian Zenz:

So very interesting question. I do not claim to be an expert on that subject matter. If I were asked my personal opinion, we do realize that the United States was opening detention in Guantanamo and other places in a way that would also be considered extralegal, that different forms of torture were applied. Just like we hear of torture occurring and Chinese reeducation camps.

Adrian Zenz: In my opinion ... Well, I'm not sure how the United States assessed the interment, what criteria were used in the internment of those people. What I see is clearly a much stronger focus, like what the Xinjiang authorities did in 2014 and 15. They were identifying so-called extremist persons, it was a very small percentage of the population at the time. Similarly, the United States has not gone and turned 10 or more percent of the populations of the Muslim nations that they occupied. So I would see very major differences, but it's also certainly very interesting to maybe compare the similarities.

Mark Elliott:

Questions from ... Yes, please. Just wait for the microphone. Thank you.

Andrew Mertha:

Thank you very much. Andrew Mertha at Johns Hopkins SAIS. I have a question that may be a little bit outside of this, but your wonderful talk and your research I think really raises a number of important questions about China's international relations. And particularly you'd mentioned Belt and Road. And I'd like to come at it from a different angle, which is to say, it seems to me that this is not the kind of thing that you would want to be undertaking if you want to shore up a positive relationship with potential partner countries that have a fairly large or a significant Muslim population.

Andrew Mertha:

And I'm just curious, do you have access to any of the debates or discussions on whether that's even an issue? Or is this something that is really a matter of national identity and a stronger national narrative that transcends this significant, but nonetheless, transitory policy of Belt and Road.

Adrian Zenz: Yes, very relevant question. Now I think we do need to understand the re-education campaign and the context of a much wider crackdown in China on religious freedom in general. Also among house churches, also among Hui Muslims in Ningxia, other provinces and areas. It is very much Xi Jinping's ... A bit like Chen Quanguo, in some ways, going back to the roots and going back to the ideological thought work that was in some ways maybe partially abandoned, partially, by Deng Xiaoping and the likes and



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the reform process of focusing on improving the material base belief. The Chinese belief that the material base has now grown to an extent where the ideological thought work is now coming again to the forefront with regular academics, even intellectuals or artists or actors being subjected to mandatory political courses in mainland China. We're talking Han Chinese here.

Adrian Zenz:

So this has to be seen in this context, but I do believe that the Chinese are trying to achieve a very definitive solution to the Uyghur problem in Xinjiang, because Xinjiang has become geopolitical so important as part of the Belt and Road. And of course, if Xinjiang is just a perpetual police state, we have checkpoints every 200 meters and the highest police per capita per proportion in the world. And if that just goes on like this, it makes business very difficult. It makes Xinjiang a very unattractive place to live.

Adrian Zenz:

I think the Chinese are probably trying to literally pacify it by force, so that one day you can cut the police force by half or more. You can remove a lot of the security installations because nobody dares to say anything, do anything. Everybody's so scared. So they're really scared, and their children are so, they're really indoctrinated by being separated from their parents, that you have created something like what ... Or on the outside could be shown off as a happy place. That you can say, "Oh, come on. Xinjiang is the safest place in China. Used to be the least safe place. Here, look at what we've done. So successful, no extremists anymore. Go and do your business. A happy Silk Route, the trains are leaving. The trains are whistling, et cetera.: So those are some of the thoughts that would come to my mind to answer your question.

Speaker 3:

Just a very quick question. I noticed in Xinjiang that many of the people who're working at the check stations-

PART 3 OF 4 ENDS [01:12:04]

Speaker 4: I noticed in Xinjiang that many of the people who were working at the check stations are actually Uyghur or Kazakhs themselves. So do you know the ethnic composition of the people working in the camps? Is this the same situation? Thank you.

Adrian Zenz:

Yeah. China had a very good practice of publishing minority quotas of cadres in statistical yearbooks in the early 2000s, and then in 2002 and 2003, they stopped doing that. Since then, we have no official statistical information on the ethnic composition of government workers anywhere in China. However, as part of my police recruitment research, which would be a whole separate presentation which I haven't done today-

Mark Elliott:

You're here tomorrow, though, right?

Adrian Zenz:



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Yeah. Tomorrow morning, yeah. I could do eight o'clock before my flight. Mark is getting ideas, "Well, we bought your ticket here and we're going to buy you dinner, so didn't we tell you?" Anyway, to answer your question, it is very... Well, it is not easy to find police recruitment outcomes that show ethnicity directly. Many, however, of these documents do show names. Sometimes you can infer ethnicity from names. A few documents that I was able to find indicate a very high share of Uyghurs being recruited into the police force in Uyghur-majority regions. These jobs, of course, are also very attractive to minorities. Police jobs in Xinjiang pay very well now. I'm talking about informal lower-level assistant police who are contract-based, who don't have employment guarantee, but they now come with very good job, fairly decent benefits, and they require very low educational requirements; no college required, sometimes even just junior middle-school is enough. So of course we do not know who all works in a re-education camp. One of the documents I saw this week stated, a very interesting interview of the former police officer from a re-education camp, he said his camp had about 230 police stationed in the camp.

Aria Mwalim:

First of all, thank you for coming, and giving this very, very informative talk, all the way from Germany. I'm Arya Moallem PhD student in EALC. My question primarily pertains to this last slide and the longterm agenda. Namely, the scalability or possibility of the expansion of the system outside of Xinjiang either, one, due to necessity or two, because it's considered successful within the autonomous region. One of the things that came up repeatedly during your talk was the overcrowding of both the detention centers and the re-education centers. So is it possible that they're becoming so overcrowded that they're going to have to expand outside of the province in order to meet these quotas? Or is it also possible that this same system could be exported and utilized for different purposes? Given that, again, this isn't just about racial, cultural assimilation, it could be used in other ideological contexts. Or if it pertains primarily to Islam, perhaps somewhere like Ningxia also, again, given that Chen Quanguo, his strategies were considered so successful in Tibet that then they were exported to Xinjiang. So what do you think the possibility is that this system could be expanded outside of the region? Thank you.

Adrian Zenz:

Yeah, thank you. There's a very good possibility, in my opinion, and I've written about this to an extent in an opinion piece in foreign affairs. In my opinion, there's a very good possibility that the system is going to be tested and tried and examined in Xinjiang and then adapted elsewhere in different ways, possibly as part of the social credit system. I would not be surprised if the Chinese state decides to use the re-education system to move against very resistant pockets of religious belief throughout China, which would be the Hui Muslims in Ningxia, strong pockets of Christianity. I guess those are the two main ones that are being considered dangerous because they're supposedly not indigenous. As to the overcrowding, now there is some evidence that the system continues to expand. There are two sites, one identified by the New York Times that show significant signs of expansion both of the detention center, a second one being built; a bigger one, and of what is likely to be a secondary education facility in the same site, bigger than the first one, 114,000 square meter area. Then we have some very interesting reports which are probably hard to corroborate, but they're very interesting, again, from Radio Free Asia on prison transfers. That re-education inmates... Well, re-education detainees are transferred to prisons in mainland China because of a situation where those who are running a camp-

Mark Elliott:

By mainland, you mean interior provinces of China?



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Adrian Zenz:

No, Eastern-

Mark Elliott:

Eastern China?

Adrian Zenz:

Eastern China, yeah. Eastern China. Sorry, I misuse that term a bit. Eastern China. Some of those running the camps or having important in the camps end up having their own relatives or family inside the same camp they're running, which just shows the scale of what is going on. This was one of the reasons given in the report. The report talked about a swap. Meaning that those in the other parts would then come to Xinjiang, so I'm not sure if that's equivalent to an expansion or not. But we do see signs of these facilities expanding. Now, since my report came out in mid May, the region has basically stopped issuing government bids that mentioned these terms, so it's very hard to track camp growth that way.

Speaker 5: Thanks very much for your presentation. I'm just wondering in terms of the response outside of China. In terms of this being on the popular sort of mainstream media, it doesn't seem to have reached yet a level that may be perhaps of things like what's going on in the US with the supreme court and the occupations and other things like that. There is an effort, it seems to be, by legal scholars and various to raise this issue more in the public consciousness. From your perspective, do you see that if this becomes more of an issue among various stakeholders, whether it's Western governments or broader public, if there was more of a issue that this was on the agenda, that there would be a potential change in calculus in how this might be responded by from the Chinese government side? You mentioned some of the justification by the official governments, do you see any? Or is it the fact, for example, now there's the trade war and it's so much more complicated, what's going on, that they would just potentially double down? Yeah.

Adrian Zenz:

Yeah. That's-

Mark Elliott:

[crosstalk 01:20:09] How does this all fit into the larger picture of US-China relations and China's relations with the rest of the world is a great question.

Adrian Zenz:

Yes, a very good question. Very good question. Now, of course it depends what country you're talking about. The United States-China relationship has become, of course, very complicated and very high profile in a number of ways. Now, the Trump administration is interested to target China. The question is how interested is it to target China in relation to the Uyghurs or on religious freedom? I myself have spent some time in... Well, have had some meetings in Washington DC that would indicate that interest is high, action might be moving ahead. Of course, it really depends how that's then perceived by the Chinese or how the Chinese can play it. Chinese can, of course, combine that or portray it as an anti China campaign by the United States as the hegemonic power. If several other nations would come



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together or through the United nations, this would become a more multilateral initiative. We might have different dynamics.

Adrian Zenz:

Now, there are signs, of course, the Chinese have been forced to respond. We don't see strong signs that the Chinese are directly responding to this on the ground, but I believe there's a possibility if this keeps going and if this continues to be a significant public relations liability, which it is developing into being. It's developing into a public relations liability for the Chinese, because you have more and more media attention. There is a possibility that that could promote some kind of adaptation such as phasing out sooner, or Chinese could take away the fences and the cameras and stuff and then invite the Western press in, or put up some vocational training things, or enhance existing vocational training. Since we have such limited information, that this could turn into a public relations campaign. That is a possibility too.

Adrian Zenz:

Just like the American government dynamics are very complex with very different actors and interests, the same as on the Chinese side. The Chinese really want to nail this one from their perspective, and they do believe that their method is working. I guess the Chinese must believe that this method is working because it's consistent with their ideology. If they didn't believe in it, then they would have to abandon it because they have to basically substitute God, yeah, to bring it to a point. So, very interesting question.

Mark Elliott: Question up here, and then maybe one or two after that we'll be done.

Austin Jordan:

Thank you so much for the wonderful talk. My name is Austin Jordan. I'm a second year student in the PhD program in government here. My question concerns the experience of detainees after their release. I was wondering if you could elaborate a bit more about the effect of their imprisonment. You mentioned that they suffered from some memory loss, but what do they typically do after their experience? Do they return just back to their job as normal? What are the impacts on their home life? Has this had any ramifications on social trust within the province?

Adrian Zenz:

I don't believe social trust in Xinjiang is at a very high point at all, but I don't have a lot of empirical evidence to back that up. To your very interesting question, of course, we have not nearly enough material to properly answer it. At the same time, some evidence suggests that those who are released are told not to talk about it and they don't. They don't even talk to their own children, to their own spouses about what happened. That's very, very anecdotal evidence. There is some evidence that those who have come out have a record on their file and it shows on their ID, and if they go through checkpoints they get flagged as a higher risk persons, which is ironic because should be the opposite, right? If you've been released from a re-education camp, you should be considered a more trustworthy citizen. So, there must be some kind of doubt.

Adrian Zenz:



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This is an inherent contradiction, right? But some very anecdotal evidence suggests that actually that is a significant disadvantage that can also get you barred from... I think I seem to remember one person was not able to leave their village or area at all. They're basically confined to a place. In Xinjiang, you cannot freely travel. You need permit, yeah. Especially, yes, if you're Uyghur or if you're flagged, I guess. But especially if you're Uyghur, you need to get permits. You need to have a clear file. You can get stopped anywhere. There's so many checkpoints. It's become such a police state. Movement is so tightly controlled. These are some of the information we have, and maybe PhDs like you in the future will go there and research their longterm consequences.

Mark Elliott:

Please.

Speaker 6:

I'm just wondering about the numbers of people who are being detained. How reliable do you think sources are for these numbers? Is there a sense of what percentage of these numbers are people being kept for 20 days, and what percentage of these numbers are people being kept for significantly longer than that?

Mark Elliott:

Okay. Can I add onto this really, I think, important question with an addendum? Which is that my conversations with friends in China a few weeks ago where this topic came up, most of them were aware of the detentions, but they also didn't believe the numbers. Well there may be a few people who are being locked up, but probably they deserve it, or the government is sincere in its effort to try to stem extremism and so forth. The numbers that we are hearing of a million people, that's just not possible. Since, as you say yourself, the numbers are extremely unreliable, we get to this point of where your numbers are as good as my numbers and we just don't know, right?

Adrian Zenz:

Very good point. There are no reliable numbers. The only thing that I would say, the reason why I give a conservative lower estimate is because we have puzzle pieces. We have a very incomplete puzzle. We have no hard numbers, really. But if we take together the information of the structure of the system from previous years and the evidence from the tenders and all kinds of other things, and an anecdotal evidence, we have some data on the size of facilities, we have some piecemeal data on dormitory size square meters. Then somebody else, three or four eye witnesses, talk about how many people were in one room, how big was that room, so how many people can sleep there per square meter, et cetera, et cetera. We got all these pieces and one can put them together to an extent and say, "Well, it's very unlikely that it's less than this or that." Then if you look at visitor reports of people, we'll say missing people, you piece all of that together, but it still remains a very incomplete puzzle and there's no hard data to say it's definitely at least a million or more.

Mark Elliott:

But several hundred thousand is-

Adrian Zenz:



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I'd be very surprised if it would be less than one or 200,000. That's my low conservative minimum, which of course is, again, subjective and I need to defend it. But I'm willing to defend it. But yeah, anything else is... There is no hard numbers on that.

Mark Elliott:

We have time for one last question here for you.

Charlotte Eickles:

Charlotte Ikels, Fairbank Center. I'm just wondering how other minorities are viewing this. How are the Tibetans looking at this?

Adrian Zenz:

The number of independent public opinion service in China in recent times is unfortunately very low. Since I have not personally spoken or have talked to those who have spoken to Tibetans on the ground and what information they have, I really am not sure how much the Tibetans, for example, even know, because the information they would get... See a lot of the information is through networks. Now, the Hui in Ningxia, they are much more aware of the situation because they have connections, right? So within either the same ethnic group, and there are many Hui Muslims in Xinjiang, or within the same religious group you have all kinds of connections and networks, and information flows informally. The Hui in Ningxia are very concerned about what they call the Xinjiangization of Ningxia. Meaning that the same sort of methods will be applied eventually and increasingly in their province.

Adrian Zenz: So they're acutely aware and acutely concerned, and of course there are a significant first signs of some of this occurring. But you have some anecdotal evidence from the Han Chinese, which I've heard very similar, and that would be a typical attitude. Other minorities, that's very interesting. Now, I have done a lot of research on the Tibetans on their attitudes towards other religions, especially other ethnic groups, and the Tibetans one can safely say truly hate the Muslim ethnic groups around them, truly hate is the best way to put it, and their religion and what their religion makes them believe and do and everything. So I would not expect the Tibetans to be particularly favorable or sympathetic with what is going on. Lest, of course, they fear that similar things might happen to them.

Mark Elliott:

So that brings us to our time. Before I draw this completely to a close, I'd like to point out that although there have been many reports in the media, Western media, in recent weeks and months about the unwillingness of American academics and American academic institutions to take on tough topics regarding China, and that we are cowed and afraid and dare not offer any criticism, however framed, that today's event and other events that have happened at the Fairbank Center this year, and that have happened in the past and that will happen in the future, are evidence that we remain as committed as always to looking at situations in the bright light of facts and of what can be known and acknowledging what we can't know, and calling the situation as we see it, as unpleasant as it might be. It's indeed been a sobering 90 minutes, but I think we're all much better informed about the situation in Xinjiang as a result. I'd like to extend thanks on behalf of everybody at the Fairbank Center, everybody here in this room, to Dr. Zenz for his presentation today. Thank you very much.

Adrian Zenz:



Page 24 of 24

Thank you.

PART 4 OF 4 ENDS [01:32:15]

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