Uighurs are forcefully sent off to faraway places from their homeland to take jobs, confirmed a leaked report for Chinese officials suggests, in an attempt to erode their personal and regional identity.
There are multiple reports which have pointed out gross human rights violations happening in Xinjiang. Since 2016, China has detained someone million Uighurs in their homeland of Xinjiang in hundreds of prison camps across the region.
China claims the Uighurs are a terror threat. The Chinese authorities are accused of brainwashing Uighurs and trying to slash birthrates, prompting the US and other western nations to accuse Beijing of genocide. China’s actions are characterized by forced abortions and sterilizations, rape, arbitrary arrests, forced labor, and relentless surveillance.
The report was obtained by the BBC and Dr. Adrian Zenz, a leading scholar on China’s actions in Xinjiang. The report, based on surveys conducted in Xinjiang’s Hotan Prefecture, was put online in December 2019 but removed in mid-2020, according to Zenz’s analysis. The BBC said the report was accidentally placed online.
The report called the job transfers “an important method to influence, meld and assimilate Uighur minorities” and achieve a “transformation of their thinking.” A visitor to a detention camp told the BBC in 2018 that he saw people being forced to sing propaganda songs in order to get food.
“Let them gradually change their thinking and understanding, and transform their values and outlook on life through a change of environment and through labour work,” the report said.
Chinese academics consider these work transfers “are a crucial means to ‘crack open the solidified society’ and to mitigate the negative impact of religion.”
Zens further said that, “The primary aims of labour transfers are not economic, but political and demographic,” adding that he believed they form “an integral part of the state’s campaign of cultural and demographic genocide.”
“Government documents state that labour transfers are part of ‘raising population quality’ … a concept commonly found in family planning policy that has been associated with eugenics,” Zenz wrote.
