China's 'War on Terror' uproots families, leaked data shows

[guillaumeb]

37. Perhaps in your reading, you overlooked this part:

The database emphasizes that the Chinese government focused on religion as a reason for detention — not just political extremism, as authorities claim, but ordinary activities such as praying, attending a mosque, or even growing a long beard. It also shows the role of family: People with detained relatives are far more likely to end up in a camp themselves, uprooting and criminalizing entire families like Emer’s in the process.

And perhaps you also missed this:

“It’s very clear that religious practice is being targeted,” said Darren Byler, a University of Colorado researcher studying the use of surveillance technology in Xinjiang. “They want to fragment society, to pull the families apart and make them much more vulnerable to retraining and reeducation.”

And perhaps you missed this, as well:

China has struggled for decades to control Xinjiang, where the native Uighurs have long resented Beijing’s heavy-handed rule. With the 9/11 attacks in the United States, officials began using the specter of terrorism to justify harsher religious restrictions, saying young Uighurs were susceptible to Islamic extremism.

And, perhaps you missed this, aswell:

Detainees and their families are tracked and classified by rigid, well-defined categories. Households are designated as “trustworthy” or “not trustworthy,” and their attitudes are graded as “ordinary” or “good.” Families have “light” or “heavy” religious atmospheres, and the database keeps count of how many relatives of each detainee are locked in prison or sent to a “training center.”

Possibly, you even missed this:

Reasons listed for internment include “minor religious infection,” “disturbs other persons by visiting them without reasons,” “relatives abroad,” “thinking is hard to grasp” and “untrustworthy person born in a certain decade.” The last seems to refer to younger men; about 31 percent of people considered “untrustworthy” were in the age bracket of 25 to 29 years, according to an analysis of the data by Zenz.

And, perhaps you missed this as well:

That didn’t stop authorities from detaining the imam, who is in his eighties, and sentencing him on various charges for up to 12 years in prison over 2017 and 2018. The database cites four charges in various entries: “stirring up terrorism,” acting as an unauthorized “wild” imam, following the strict Saudi Wahhabi sect and conducting illegal religious teachings.

Perhaps, even this escaped your reasing:

None of Emer’s three sons had been convicted of a crime. But the database shows that over the course of 2017, all were thrown into the detention camps for having too many children, trying to travel abroad, being “untrustworthy” or “infected with religious extremism,”or going on the Hajj, the Muslim pilgrimage to the holy city of Mecca. It also shows that their relation to Emer and their religious background was enough to convince officials they were too dangerous to let out from the detention camps.

I tried to be as thorough as possible, but it is truly difficult to avoid the obvious, that being a theist is sufficient reason to be put in a concentration camp in China.