Since the existence of concentration camps for Uighurs and other minority peoples in the Xinjiang Autonomous Region was first reported in mid-2017, the Chinese Communist Party and its leader, dictator Xi Jinping, have been blamed for the violations of human rights to which these peoples have been submitted. Although the attribution is correct, the lack of knowledge about the network of supporters that guarantee the permanence of the repression system makes it difficult for everyone involved to be incriminated.
Published by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) on Oct. 19, an extensive report entitled “The architecture of repression”, by researchers Vicky Xu, James Leibold and Daria Impiombato, troubled China’s Ministry of Interior Affairs by mapping out no only the public policies that sustain the repression – such as the internal surveillance programs of the Uighur families -, as some of the main names involved in the persecution of minority peoples.
“Xi Jinping has an obsession with county party secretaries; that is (…) the top officials in about 3,000 administrative regions at this level in China,” says the report. For the dictator, these committees are the “front line” of the Chinese Communist Party, and the local secretary is the key to popular mobilization and for “the very existence of the regime”. Between 2014 and 2017, Xi personally trained some of these members.
During the drafting of the document, researchers compiled the names and background information of hundreds of Xinjiang County party secretaries between 2014 and August 2021. Among them, three stand out that were most incensed by the Chinese media and, sometimes, by the Xi Jinping himself. THE People’s Gazette had access to the full report that contains the profiles of these representatives and reproduces, below, the main excerpts of the document:
the devout intellectual
Last July 1st marked the 100th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party. The day before, Xi Jinping met 103 local officials from across the country who were awarded an honorary title. The youngest among them was 36-year-old Yao Ning.
Yao is the portrait of the intellectual devoted to the cause, and he gained considerable attention in the Chinese media thanks to his training at two of the most important universities in the world: Tsinghua, in China, and Harvard, in the United States. In early 2019, he was appointed party secretary for Maralbeshi County, predominantly Uighur. In it, ASPI researchers identified nine detention facilities built or expanded since 2017.
“Yao personifies Xi Jinping’s ideal picture: young, loyal and capable. After spending his early years in Shanxi Province, Yao studied engineering at Tsinghua University. Upon graduation, he actively participated in student politics, heading the Communist Youth League and the party’s arm of his court, and was elected president of the student association,” reports the document.
Since college, Yao displayed strong nationalism and political ambition “[Eu gostaria de] go to the place where the homeland needs it most [de mim]”, he said. That year, he was selected by the university to be an “Outstanding Member of the Graduate Communist Party.” In 2018, in a conversation with students, Yao said he was “grateful for the opportunity to serve in Xinjiang.”
Yao’s loyalty to the party is reaffirmed in its networks. In December 2019, he posted on Weibo – the Chinese Twitter – that an official close to him had suddenly passed away, “exhausted from so much work” in Xinjiang. he wrote, “for the south of Xinjiang to have the peaceful situation it is today, so many cadres sacrificed themselves.”
In the same year, he published a photo with the Maoist slogan “Serve the people” and the caption: “Whenever [estou] exhausted, I find this photo taken years ago and look at it. [Minha] only hope is never to lose sight [minha] original aspiration”. The expression “original aspiration”, according to the researchers, is a famous catchphrase by Xi Jinping.
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Eleven deputy governors share the Xinjiang provincial government, below the party secretary. The most recent of these is Yang Fasen, 50, who is also the youngest ministerial-level official in the region. He was responsible for creating a set of pro-Communist Party propaganda policies that became known as the “Bay County Experience”, since the experiment took place while Yang was serving as party secretary in the largely Uighur Bay County.
According to the report, the “Bay County experience” consisted of centralizing state media resources, government websites, and outward-facing advertising funds to form an in-county advertising superstructure, the Bay County Propaganda Center.
Created in January 2013, the center has three floors, over 600,000 square meters and cost around US$314,000. In it, party members organized media interviews, produced content and sent unified messages to different platforms, including radio, television, social media and village loudspeakers. The center also produces and disseminates advertising leaflets, pamphlets, plays, paintings and jingles in line with the party’s ideals. In addition, the Propaganda Center mobilized civilians to combat the “religious extremism” of the Uighurs, encouraging espionage and indoctrination.
For all that, the Bay County Experience was widely promoted by the Chinese media, and Yang fell in favor of Xi Jinping. In 2015, during the party meeting, he was one of five men to shake hands with the dictator and speak at the Great Hall of Beijing. In the same year, he won the “Outstanding County Party Secretary” award and, in 2016, was promoted to Deputy Party Secretary for the Hotan region, where there are more than 52 centers of detention.
the converted uighur
Since 2017, almost all deputy party secretaries belonging to ethnic minorities in Xinjiang have published in writing, at least once, a promise to be “grateful to the party, listen to the party and follow the party”, always remembering “the generosity of the broken”. They vow to “end the party of enemies” – literally, “eradicate them and crush them in bloody battles to death”.
The first Uighur official to make this promise was Obulqasim Mettursun. At the start of the re-education campaign, he was deputy party secretary of Jay Township in Keriye County, and his name went viral on the Chinese internet after publishing “A Warning to Other Uighurs.” According to the text itself, Mettursun wrote the open letter after being “inspired” by a series of military parades held in Xinjiang.
In the letter, written on February 19, 2017, he expressed gratitude for the party’s policies and stated that Uighurs should take a firmer stance in the fight against “the forces of evil”. On March 3, the text was circulating on Keriye’s official WeChat account – Chinese Facebook. On March 25, the Xinjiang Party Committee launched a region-wide campaign for the Uighurs to “learn from Comrade Obulqasim Mettursun”, who received the title of “Outstanding Member of the Communist Party”.
Later that year, Uighurs would begin to disappear in the “re-education” camps. Mettursun would be invited to give lectures to prisoners, encouraging them to “listen to the party, be grateful to the party and follow the party.” He was presented by the party with Xi Jinping’s book and appeared holding it in several articles in the state media. In them, Mettursun promised to “kill enemies until they were extinguished.” His career, however, has stalled: Uighurs are hardly allowed in higher positions in the party. Still, in 2021, Mettursun continues to testify to foreign journalists that “in Xinjiang people’s wallets are getting fuller and the happy smiles on their faces getting more and more beautiful.”
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