· China, Xinjiang, 喀什 Tashkurgan, 古城路Photo by Texco Kwok on Unsplash
On the territorial outskirts of China, secret facilities are erected almost overnight which are filled with local people who have been kidnapped or detained for dubious reasons. Inside these facilities which are ringed with barbed wire and concrete walls, innocent villagers are systematically tortured, raped, and injected with mysterious substances. The locations of these camps are highly secretive, and when passerby asks, “What are those buildings for?” the official answer is “a lumber mill.”
This is the story of Unit 731, the once top-secret germ warfare division of the Japanese Imperial Army whose story of gruesome violence committed upon innocent locals was only openly discussed and accepted decades after the event took place. When a Japanese journalist wrote a serial publication called The Devil’s Gluttony, the Japanese public was appalled and enraged, both at their own government as well as the post-war world order shaped by the Tokyo Trial, in which the American government agreed to cover up these atrocities in exchange for the results of their experiments. [1]
However, this is also the story of the Xinjiang Police State, in which hundreds of thousands of people have been detained, at one time or another, many of whom have detailed being jailed, chained to a pipe, constantly observed by camera and taken out weekly to be given injections which they have no means to refuse. The facilities used to house the unwilling test subjects are known as “schools” and “vocational training centers.”
The story of Japanese war crimes committed against the local Chinese was, for a long time, a magic weapon of the Chinese government, who brandished it gladly during trade disputes. But, as they rehashed wartime atrocities, they learned them by heart, and learned to apply them. By now, it is no longer a secret that an expensive and well-organized police state has been set up in Xinjiang, executing a strategy of ruthless experimentation on unsuspecting townspeople in the far distant reaches of the empire.
Both have wielded rape as a weapon in their complete dominance, and although rape is primarily a tool used to victimize women, it has been used on men as well. In memoirs and accounts of the inside of Xinjiang’s Police State, women’s prisons are known to be especially heinous.[2]
Additionally, both mass atrocities were, in some sense, supported by broader international tolerance, in which governments turned a blind eye in exchange for extracting their own concessions. During the Tokyo Trials, the United States government decided not to publicly try the head of Japan’s germ warfare unit, General Shiro Ishii, or his subordinates, in exchange for access to the data they produced. Ishii, a figure as gruesome as Blue Beard or any mythical monster, lived out the rest of his days as a free man, on a government pension.[3] A more disturbing miscarriage of justice can barely be imagined. The Soviet government held their own Khabarvosk Trials to try some of these so-called scientists as war criminals, but these courts and trials were widely denigrated as “show trials” which had little power to prosecute the offenders. However, most of what we know about the details of Unit 731 is due to the testimony of these trials.
· Harbin Photo by lin zhaohai on Unsplash
In Southwestern China, the mass detention and torture of average villagers was first known to the world outside Xinjiang starting around 2017 and 2018, but there was limited international reaction until nearly the beginning of the next decade. Remote villages in the south of Xinjiang were used as testing grounds for prototypes of the digital coercion and total surveillance of a classic Orwellian police state: digital door codes to your own apartment which wouldn’t open if you came home too late, requiring you to call the police and give them an accounting of why you’re late, cameras on street corners that alerted the police if you traveled outside your neighborhood, random body checks and pat downs at the entrance of the markets, restrictions on how much gasoline one could buy, rules and regulations that changed from day to day, detention quotas that incentivized officers to arrest you. However, even as reports of this new reality in the borderlands increased, many multinational corporations had invested so much into China that it was in their best interest to cover up this reality for as long as possible and minimize it when it came to light.[4]
In the United States, the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, enacted by the United States in 2021, began to make it the purview of companies themselves to investigate and clean up their supply chains of slave labor. Dishearteningly, nearly immediately after this law banned large, more transparent international clothing companies from using Xinjiang cotton harvested by corvee labor, consumers of cheap cotton clothing increasingly turned to Chinese online retailers to buy the same things.
Even today, many in Central Asian states which are threatened by their powerful and increasingly aggressive neighbor, parrot Beijing’s party line that Xinjiang was a hotbed of Uyghur separatist insurgency, on par with the Taliban, Al Qaeda, and the Islamic State. The initiation of the US War on Terror was a boon for both China and Russia in their quest to subjugate their borderlands. The legal policy that allows for the massive detention of villagers in Xinjiang is known as the campaign for the “de-extremification” of the population there.
Bombings, stabbings, and other acts of violence undoubtedly did occur in China and were perpetrated by some Uyghur people, some who claimed that they wanted an Islamic state, and some who claimed they were trained in Afghanistan. Additionally, sharing a border with Afghanistan, which was long occupied by Russians, then Americans, was felt acutely as a threat to the party state. Subduing the borderland was not a policy created by those in power and then popularly opposed; such harsh measures were supported and called for by many of the Han settlers into Xinjiang. It is not surprising then, when reading memoirs of the Uyghur diaspora, that racial criticism plays such an outsized role.
The story of Mihrigul, which I first encountered in an illustrated zine in a café in Taipei, immediately recalled to me the atrocities committed by Unit 731 in Pingfang, Harbin. Mihrigul was a very interesting Uyghur woman who had traveled to Egypt to study abroad, met a man there, and ended up giving birth to triplets. When she traveled back to Xinjiang to visit her family with her three infants, she was detained at the airport, separated from her children and jailed. In the detention center, she was injected with unknown substances, and when she was finally released (she had become an Egyptian citizen, and the Egyptian and Chinese government struck a deal for her release) only two of her children were returned to her. She was told one of her three children was dead, and upon viewing his body, she strongly suspected that he had been experimented on as well.
The story of Xinjiang’s Police State shares multiple elements with the activities of Unit 731. Both took place on remote outskirts of imperial territory, in which heinous experiments were committed upon primarily average village people, from a different ethnicity than that of the perpetrators, for the sake of strengthening the empire. Those who committed such actions thought of themselves as patriots despite how power hungry and self-serving they were. They turned remote regions of their empire into human laboratories, where they could commit gruesome experiments sheltered from the public eye. Although, in many rule-of-law societies, there is a tendency to view rape or murder as aberrant crimes committed by defective people, certain systems and scenarios encourage otherwise “normal” people to take part in and commit such crimes. The activities of Unit 731, though nominally a germ warfare lab, included torture, rape, murders, and beatings. The conditions of the Xinjiang Police State, though nominally about restoring order and alleviating poverty in a vulnerable region, also allow for the rape and beatings of average people. These activities were not aberrations of a system, but they were an integral part of it.
In the United States, the focus on terrorism in the past two decades has meant a focus on atrocities committed by non-state actors. In these narratives, illegitimate warlords bully and abuse the innocent, and the empowering of the modern, democratic state promises to prevent anarchic exploitation of the weak by the strong. It was in this context that several Uyghurs (part of a group that the US has now taken off the terrorist watch list) were taken into Guantanamo. Standing up against the violence of non-state actors can improve international relations between states, whereas standing up against the violence of states means going to war. Although the focus of US foreign policy of the past several decades has been on terrorist organizations and cartels, the state-sanctioned violence of autocratic regimes never paused, and it has likely been far more indiscriminate, destructive, and violent than activities by non-state actors.
References
Akhtar, Ali Humayun. (2022). 1368: China and the Making of the Modern World. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Bass, Gary. (2023). Judgement at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia. Knopf.
Gold, Hal. (1996). Unit 731 Testimony: Japan’s Wartime Human Experimentation Program. Tokyo: Yenbooks.
Haitiwaji, Gulbahar and Morgat, Rozenn. (2022). How I Survived a Chinese Reeducation Camp: A Uyghur Woman’s Story. Trans. Edward Gauvin. New York: Seven Stories Press.
Hoja, Gulchehra. (2023). A Stone is Most Precious Where it Belongs: A Memoir of Uyghur Exile, Hope, and Survival. New York: Hachette Books.
Izqil, Tahir Hamut. (2023). Waiting to be Arrested at Night: A Uyghur Poet’s Memoir of China’s Genocide. New York: Penguin Press.
Lillis, Joanna. (2022). Dark Shadows: Inside the Secret World of Kazakhstan. Bloomsbury Publishing.
Tohti, Ilham. (2022). We Uyghurs Have No Say. Brooklyn: Verso Books.
Turkel, Nury. (2022). No Escape: The True Story of China’s Genocide of the Uyghurs. Toronto: Hanover Square Press.
Potter, Philip B. K. and Wang Chen. (2022). Zero Tolerance: Repression and Political Violence on China’s New Silk Road. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Zenz, Adrian. (2018). ‘Thoroughly reforming them towards a healthy heart attitude’: China’s political re-education campaign in Xinjiang. Central Asian Survey. 38. 1-27. 10.1080/02634937.2018.1507997.
[1] Bass, Gary. (2023). Judgement at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia. Knopf.
[2] Turkel, Nury. (2022). No Escape: The True Story of China’s Genocide of the Uyghurs. Toronto: Hanover Square Press.
[3] Gold, Hal. (1996). Unit 731 Testimony: Japan’s Wartime Human Experimentation Program. Tokyo: Yenbooks.
[4] Hugo Boss, dogged by its role in designing and producing Nazi Germany’s military garb, came out in support for the use of Xinjiang cotton.
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