China's Tyranny

The New York Times received leaked documents showing how Chinese authorities are treating their ethnic minorities in the Xinjiang region, including Muslims. On return to their homes during a break from school, minority students found their families and neighbors had disappeared. The NYT writes:

Instead, they would soon be told that their parents were gone, relatives had vanished and neighbors were missing — all of them locked up in an expanding network of detention camps built to hold Muslim ethnic minorities. .... The leadership distributed a classified directive advising local officials to corner returning students as soon as they arrived and keep them quiet. .... “They’re in a training school set up by the government,” the prescribed answer began. If pressed, officials were to tell students that their relatives were not criminals — yet could not leave these “schools.” .... “I’m sure that you will support them, because this is for their own good,” officials were advised to say, “and also for your own good.”

Threats to the returning students included one that if they behaved badly their behavior could affect how long their relatives would be detained.

The papers the NYT received were 403 pages of internal documents. This constitutes one of the most significant leaks in decades of government papers from China’s Communist Party. The documents give a rather clear view of the Xinjiang clampdown. Over the last three years, China's minority oppression effort has up to a million ethnic Uighurs, Kazakhs and other minorities in internment camps and prisons.

In one of the documents, China's president Xi Jinping justifies the oppression by calling it an all-out “struggle against terrorism, infiltration and separatism” using the “organs of dictatorship,” while showing “absolutely no mercy.”