The Chinese government has built a vast network of re-education camps and a pervasive system of surveillanceo monitornd subdue millions from Muslim minorities in the Xinjiang region.
Now China is also turning to an older, harsher method of control: filling prisons in Xinjiang.
The region in northwest China has experienced a record surge in arrests, trials and prison sentences in the past two years, according to a New York Times analysis of previously unreported official data.
As the Chinese government pursues a “strike hard”ecurity campaignaimed overwhelmingly at minorities in Xinjiang, the use of prisons is throwing into doubt even China’s limited protections of defendants’ rights.
Courts in Xinjiang — where largely Muslim minorities, including Uighurs and Kazakhs, make up more than half of the population — sentenced a total of 230,000 people to prison or other punishments in 2017 and 2018, significantly more than inny other period on recordn decades for the region.
During 2017 alone, Xinjiang courts sentenced almost 87,000 defendants,0 times morehan the previous year, to prison terms of five years or longer. Arrests increased eightfold; prosecutions fivefold.
Experts, rights advocates and exiled Uighur activists say that Chinese officials have swept aside rudimentary protections in their push. The police, prosecutors and judges in the region are working in unison to ram through convictions, serving the Communist Party’s campaign to eradicate unrest and convert the largely Muslim minorities into loyalists of the party.
Arrests, the critics said, are often based on flimsy or exaggerated charges, and trials are perfunctory, with guilty judgments overwhelmingly likely. Once sentenced, prisoners face potential abuses and hard labor in overcrowded, isolated facilities.
“Clearly, what we’re seeing is an amazing jump in numbers,”onald C. Clarke, a professor at the George Washington University Law School who specializes in Chinese law, said in an interview after reviewing the statistics.
“It’s impossible to imagine that even if a judge in Xinjiang wanted to give a fair hearing to a defendant, that such a thing would be possible,” said Professor Clarke, who has written about theass detentions in Xinjiang. “If they’re not having mass trials, then what they’re having is, essentially, judges giving blank documents to the police or prosecutors so they can just fill in the blanks.”
Xinjiang, like other parts of China, does not disclose how many people are in prison, and the regional government did not answer faxed questions about incarceration and the legal statistics. Not all the people imprisoned in Xinjiang are from Muslim minorities, and not all charges are baseless.
The wave of arrests, prosecutions and sentences, however, points to an enormous upswell in imprisonment. It also appears unequaled in China’s recent past, based on official reports going back decades.
“It’s as if the whole population is treated as guilty until proven innocent,” saidean R. Roberts, an anthropologist at George Washington University who studies Uighurs, whose religion, Turkic language and traditions set them apart from China’s Han majority. “These internment camps and prisons are not going away and stand as a warning to the population that they better be more loyal to the party.”
The rates in Xinjiang, which has 24.5 million residents, far outpace comparable Chinese provinces. By contrast, Inner Mongolia, a northeast region of China that has roughly the same size population, including a large ethnic minority,entenced 33,000 people last year.