More squalid details of China’s excesses and machinations in the Xinjiang region have been learnt by CNN-News 18. During Beijing’s so-called re-education campaign, Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities from rural parts of southern Xinjiang have been labelled ‘surplus labour’ or ‘poverty-stricken labour’ and sent to work in factories in other parts of Xinjiang or China.
Between 2017 and 2021, 600,000 ‘surplus labourers’ from southern Xinjiang were scheduled to be trained and transferred to new locations for work. Uyghur workers typically live in segregated dormitories and undergo organised Chinese-language and ideological training outside working hours. They are also subject to constant surveillance, and prohibited from practising their religion.
A labour-transfer task force known as the Systematic Labour Transfers from Poverty-Stricken Areas of Southern Xinjiang Leading Small Group was created in late 2018 at the regional level and headed by the head of the Xinjiang Organisation Department.
Birth control
During the re-education campaign, authorities in Xinjiang launched a series of crackdowns on ‘illegal births’ to curb the birth rate among Uyghur and other minority women. Minority women found to have violated ‘family planning’ policies face hefty fines, disciplinary punishment, internment and mandatory sterilisation. As a result, Xinjiang’s official birth rate fell by nearly half (48.74%) in the two years between 2017 and 2019.
Xinjiang’s bureaucratic inner workings fit a wider pattern of authoritarian rule in China. In fact, many of the governance techniques used in Xinjiang during the two campaigns were first conceived elsewhere, such as the grid-management system (Beijing, 2004) and the ten-household joint defence (Tibet, 2015). Some of Xinjiang’s governance tools are also being replicated elsewhere. In 2017, the Xinjiang PLAC hosted 22 inspection tours from the central government and other provinces. In 2018, Ningxia’s PLAC Secretary, Zhang Yunsheng, vowed 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-profile inspection tour to Xinjiang that year.
Hegemony at the grassroots
Chinese president Xi Jinping has unleashed the neighbourhood and village committees to expand the party’s visibility and control at the grassroots and to pre-empt any source of instability. Dividing local communities into micro-policing units as small as 10 families, the authorities have combined human and automated surveillance tools to profile and pre-emptively target mostly ethnic minorities, removing any sense of privacy or safety from their homes.
Police substations
By 2018, Xinjiang had more than 9,000 police substations, of which 7,400 were located in rural villages and 2,100 were attached to urban communities—in total staffed by around 10,700 police officers, 30,870 auxiliary police officers and 48,010 militia guards. In addition, thousands of new police checkpoints, known as ‘convenience police stations’, were constructed in late 2016.
Grid management
The grid-management system, first introduced in Beijing in 2004 and later in Xinjiang in 2012, works by dividing local communities into small geographical and administrative cells. In each cell, a grid manager and other staff collect information and report any potential problems to the neighbourhood or village committee and the police. The grid’s political purpose is twofold: extending the party’s reach at the grassroots level and securitising residential communities.
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