So, I started a journalism internship last
month,
and I’ll be honest, it probably couldn’t
have happened at a more chaotic time in the
world.
I mean, it 
feels like the world is going through some
kind of apocalyptic event that’s the set
up for a dystopian young adult novel set a
hundred years in the future,
but at least that means things are interesting,
right?
Anyway, my first article was about coronavirus,
and some pretty shady things that are happening
in a place in China called Xinjiang,
and let’s just say some of the facts in
that article got out of date really quickly.
I thought it might be a good idea to catch
you up on what’s been happening, and update
you on the situation right now,
so here’s the deal with Xinjiang.
So, let’s rewind all the way back to the
25th of January.
That what when China celebrated Chinese New
Year,
and at the time, 35 million of their citizens
were in lockdown.
At the time, China had just 12 cities under
quarantine,
but since then that’s risen to 17 cities
in Hubei being under lockdown,
with almost 60 million people impacted.
If you doubled the population of Australia,
you’d still be about 10 million people short
of how many people in China are in quarantine.
However, those 60 million people aren’t
the only people in lockdown in China.
In the city of Xinjiang, 3 million Uighur
muslims have been held in concentration camps
that have been in operation since 2017.
China says the camps, which operate outside
of the country’s legal system,
are part of their “war on terror,”
But with coronavirus now classified as a pandemic,
the situation for the people has been getting
a whole lot worse,
and that’s a really high bar to surpass.
So, what’s it like inside the Xinjiang camps,
and who’s inside?
A lot of what we know about the camps comes
from a huge leak that happened last November.
A bunch of official documents
(which China says are fake)
were leaked to the International Consortium
of Investigative Journalists, who are calling
the documents “the China cables.”
The documents say that the Xinjiang camp has
“full video surveillance coverage,”
so it looks like China decided to revive Big
Brother before Channel 7 did.
What can I say, they’re ahead of the times.
In the camps, the detainees lives are really
tightly controlled,
just like any prison, I guess.
“Students should have a fixed bed position,
fixed queue position, fixed classroom seat
... it is strictly forbidden for this to be
changed,”
There’s also a memo from 2017 which was
written by the deputy-secretary of the Communist
Party at the time.
This memo tells the people in charge of the
day-to-day running of the camps to
“never allow escapes,” punish “behavioural
violations,” and “encourage students to
fully transform.”
Publicly, the Chinese government’s been
calling the camps “voluntary vocational
education and training centres,”
but the leak clearly paints a very different
picture.
So, the Chinese government was caught in a
lie and they decided to double down.
The U.K. Embassy of China put out this whole
statement saying that the leak was “fake
news.”
It said the camps were opened as a “preventative
measure” in response to “thousands of
terrorist incidents” in Xinjiang since the
1990s.
But when you actually take a closer look at
all the conflict in Xinjiang,
you can see that it stems from a lot of different
economic and cultural factors.
Time for a quick history lesson:
All the unrest in Xinjiang started almost
a hundred years ago in the 1930s,
during which time it was a disputed territory
that changed regimes several times
until China established permanent control
in 1949.
Then, between the 1950s and 70s, there was
a lot of state-sponsored migration into Xinjiang
by the Han Chinese ethnic group,
All of that migration ended up changing the
ethnic makeup of Xinjiang really significantly,
and it caused even more tension.
Then in the 1990s the Soviet Union went and
full-on collapsed, all of these independent
Muslim states popped-up,
which led to a lot more support for separatist
groups in Xinjiang
There was protesting on the streets, and then
a huge crackdown on Uighurs by the government
which drove a lot of that underground,
until there were ethnic riots in 2009 that
killed 200 Han Chinese, which was all the
Chinese government needed to crack down even
harder.
The largest separatist group in Xinjiang has
about 200 people,
but again, there are currently 3 million Uighur
muslims in the Xinjiang camps.
If you think that seems a little disproportionate,
you’re not the only one:
The United Nations released a report last
November condemning China for restricting:
“freedom of expression, freedom of association,
freedom of peaceful assembly, and freedom
of religion or belief, the right to education
and the right to be free from arbitrary detention
and enforced disappearance.”
Unfortunately, that hasn’t changed much,
because the camps are still open today,
and with coronavirus, conditions are only
getting worse.
If the new coronavirus strain got into the
camps,
the camp conditions would really help the
virus to spread.
This is because the camps are overcrowded,
unhygienic,
and there’s been outbreaks of tuberculosis
inside the camps before.
We’ve seen how fast coronavirus can infect
a cruise ship; it’d be even faster in Xinjiang.
Now, I’m saying “if” here, but the thing
is... we don’t know what’s happening in
the camps right now.
There could already be an outbreak in the
Xinjiang camps, and we wouldn’t know.
About a month ago China released this big
statement saying that the speculation about
coronavirus in the camps is “nothing but
fabrication and slander.”
And look, maybe that’s true.
Does the fact that in that same statement
China called the camps “vocational education
and training centres” make me likely to
believe them?
Probably not.
But we don’t know if there’s an outbreak
or not in the camps right now,
because there isn’t any really recent information
about the current conditions.
Yes, there’s been leaks, in terms of regular
and reliable info there’s not a lot.
So I’m not going to talk about if there’s
an outbreak or not, because there’s nothing
really forthcoming about that,
so I guess I’ll just have to talk about
the information that is out there.
In about November last year, the western media
picked up this manga called “What Has Happened
to Me”
It was getting a lot of traction in Japan
and Hong Kong and it was by an artist called
Tomomi Shimizu.
She’s a political activist who‘s been
making mangas about the camps since around
April last year,
when she made her first one after reaching
out to Uighur Muslims because she’d heard
about Xinjiang on the news.
Now, you might be thinking, why does it matter
that someone made a comic about the camps,
but the mangas, which are called “No One
Says the Name of the Country” and “What
Has Happened to Me”
have played a massive role in making this
issue way more mainstream,
especially with people who aren’t that political.
That’s why Tomomi Shimizu made it a manga,
to make the message really accessible.
Anyway, the second manga is about an Uighur
woman Mihrigul Tursun who actually testified
about what’s happening in Xinjiang.
But even with the manga of that testimony
getting over 2.5 million hits
and frames of it being used on Hong Kong protest
signs,
it’s still been difficult to get 
a lot of mainstream media coverage of what’s
happening in Xinjiang.
And with coronavirus dominating the headlines,
that’s not going to get easier.
So if the content of this video worries you,
and, it should,
then check out 
this hashtag that the relatives of 
people in Xinjiang have started to try and
get answers on if corona is in the camps,
and what’s happening to their family members.
And most importantly of all, in these trying
times,
wash your goddamn hands!
