China’s Repression of Uyghurs in Xinjiang
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- More than eleven million Uyghurs—a mostly Muslim, Turkic-speaking ethnic group—live in the northwestern region of Xinjiang.
- The Chinese government has imprisoned more than one million Uyghurs since 2017 and subjected those not detained to intense surveillance, religious restrictions, forced labor, family separations, and forced sterilizations.
- The United States declared in 2021 China’s actions constitute genocide, while a UN report later determined they could amount to crimes against humanity.
Introduction
The Chinese government has reportedly detained more than a million Muslims in what the Chinese government calls “reeducation camps” since 2017, with an estimated half a million still currently held in prison or detention. Most of the people who have been detained are Uyghur, (spelled alternatively as Uighur) a predominantly Turkic-speaking ethnic group located primarily in China’s northwestern region of Xinjiang (新疆), one of five autonomous regions in China. (The others include Guangxi, Inner Mongolia, Ningxia, and Tibet.) Uyghurs in the region have also been subjected to intense surveillance, forced labor, family separation, and involuntary sterilizations, among other rights abuses.
The United States and several other foreign governments have described China’s actions in Xinjiang as genocide, while the UN human rights office said that the violations could constitute crimes against humanity. Chinese officials claim they have not infringed on Uyghurs’ rights and that the reeducation camps were closed in 2019. While international reports have verified that many of these centers are now closed, the government has reportedly converted some into detention facilities. However, obtaining an accurate assessment of the region is difficult, as the Chinese government tightly restricts journalists and foreign visitors’ access to Xinjiang.
How many Muslims have been detained in China?
More than one million Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities, including ethnic Kazakhs and Uzbeks, have been detained since 2017, according to international researchers and U.S. government officials [PDF]. (Some watchdog groups put more recent estimates closer to 1.8 million). Many were held in the now-closed facilities that the Chinese government called “vocational education and training centers.” However, the most common terms used by international media organizations and researchers are reeducation camps, internment camps, and detention camps. While no official death toll has been released by the Chinese government, deaths in custody have occurred.
Outside of the camps, detention facilities, and prisons, the eleven million Uyghurs living in Xinjiang—officially called the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region—have continued to suffer from a decades-long crackdown by Chinese authorities. In 2017, Chinese President Xi Jinping issued Revised Regulations on Religious Affairs, stating that religious activity must not be used to undermine the nation’s ethnic unity. In Xinjiang, there have been reports of employment discrimination, the demolition of mosques and sacred Islamic sites, bans on religious dress, and enforced disappearances.
When did mass detentions of Muslims start?
Experts estimate that reeducation efforts started in Xinjiang in 2014 and were drastically expanded in 2017. Following a series of attacks on civilians in 2014, such as a mass stabbing at a train station in Kunming, Yunnan, and bombings in Xinjiang’s capital, Ürümqi, the Chinese government cited terrorism concerns as a motivating factor for the crackdown.
Beginning in 2017, experts and journalists documented the construction of new reeducation camps and the expansion of existing facilities for mass detention. Reuters journalists observing satellite imagery found that thirty-nine camps almost tripled in size between April 2017 and August 2018; they covered a total area roughly the size of 140 soccer fields. Similarly, German anthropologist and Xinjiang expert Adrian Zenz analyzed local and national budgets, finding that construction spending on security-related facilities in Xinjiang increased by 20 billion yuan (around $2.96 billion) in 2017. Zenz told Radio Free Asia in 2019 that his estimates for the number of internment camps in Xinjiang likely figure more than a thousand.
In late 2019, Xinjiang’s governor said that people detained in the reeducation camps had “graduated,” and Chinese authorities say they have the freedom to travel. But it is difficult for journalists to verify such claims, as access is highly restricted and speaking with local residents could put them in danger of detention. Independent reports have shown that some released detainees faced house arrest, movement restrictions, and forced labor.
Although journalists found that several camps indeed closed in late 2019, the following year, researchers at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) identified [PDF] more than 380 suspected detention facilities using satellite images. They found that China refashioned some lower-security reeducation camps into formal detention centers or prisons; expanded existing detention centers; and constructed new, high-security detention centers throughout Xinjiang. (Chinese officials have said that ASPI is an anti-China tool funded by Australia and the United States.)
Instead of detaining people in reeducation camps, authorities now increasingly use the formal justice system to imprison people. In 2022, the Associated Press found that in one county, an estimated one in twenty-five people had been sentenced to prison on terrorism-related charges, all of them Uyghurs. According to a 2025 report [PDF] from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, there are more than half a million people still being held in formal prisons or extrajudicial internment in the country.
What happened in the reeducation camps?
Most people detained in the reeducation camps were never formally charged and had no legal recourse to challenge their detention. The detainees seem to have been targeted for a variety of reasons, according to media reports, including traveling to or contacting people from any of the twenty-six countries China considers sensitive, such as Turkey and Afghanistan; attending services at mosques; having more than three children; and sending texts containing Quranic verses. Often, their only crime was being Muslim, with many Uyghurs being labeled as extremists simply for practicing their religion, according to human rights groups.
Information on what happened in the reeducation facilities remains limited, but many detainees who have since fled China described harsh conditions. The UN human rights office released a report [PDF] in 2022 based on interviews with dozens of people, including twenty-six former detainees, that found “patterns of torture or other forms of cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment” in the camps between 2017 and 2019.
The UN report affirmed previous findings by international journalists, researchers, and rights organizations. Various exposés showed that detainees were forced to pledge loyalty to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and renounce Islam, as well as sing praises for communism and learn Mandarin. Some people reported prison-like conditions, with cameras and microphones monitoring their every move and utterance. Others said they were tortured and subjected to sleep deprivation during interrogations. Women have shared stories of sexual abuse, including rape. Some released detainees contemplated suicide or witnessed others kill themselves.
Detention also disrupted families. Children whose parents were sent to the camps were often forced to live in state-run orphanages. Many Uyghur parents living outside of China faced a difficult choice: return home to be with their children and risk detention, or stay abroad, separated from their children and unable to contact them. Many families have also reported that their children were taken to boarding schools without their consent. According to independent UN experts, the language of instruction in the schools is almost exclusively Mandarin, and the students have limited interaction with their family.
What do Chinese officials say about the camps?
Government officials first denied the camps’ existence. By late 2018, however, officials started acknowledging that there were “vocational education and training centers” in Xinjiang. They publicly stated that the camps had two purposes: to teach Mandarin, Chinese laws, and vocational skills and to prevent citizens from becoming influenced by extremist ideas by nipping “terrorist activities in the bud,” according to a government report. Pointing out that Xinjiang has not experienced a terrorist attack since December 2016, officials claimed the camps have prevented violence.
As global condemnation of the abuses has grown, Chinese officials and state media have worked to discredit reports on Xinjiang using a range of tactics, including disseminating disinformation and harassing activists. They have repeated a narrative that “anti-China forces” in the United States and other Western countries are spreading “vicious lies.” Beijing tried to prevent the UN human rights office from releasing its 2022 report on Xinjiang. After its release, Chinese officials tried to discredit it as false information, claiming in a published rebuttal that foreign governments and organizations “spread numerous rumors and lies” about Xinjiang.
Why is China targeting Uyghurs in Xinjiang?
Chinese officials are concerned that Uyghurs hold extremist and separatist ideas, and they viewed the camps as a way of eliminating threats to China’s territorial integrity, government, and population.
Xinjiang has been claimed by China since the CCP took power in 1949. Some Uyghurs living there refer to the region as East Turkestan and argue that it ought to be independent from China. Xinjiang takes up one-sixth of China’s landmass and borders eight countries, including Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Kazakhstan.
Under Chinese President Xi Jinping, the CCP has pushed to Sinicize religion, or shape all religions to conform to the officially atheist party’s doctrines and the majority Han-Chinese society’s customs. Though the government recognizes five religions—Buddhism, Catholicism, Daoism, Islam, and Protestantism—it has long feared that foreigners could use religious practice to spur separatism.
The Chinese government has come to characterize any expression of Islam in Xinjiang as extremist, a reaction to past independence movements and occasional outbursts of violence. In recent decades, the government has blamed terrorist attacks on the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, a separatist group founded by militant Uyghurs. (In 2020, the United States removed the group from its list of terrorist organizations, saying there was no credible evidence that the group had operated for at least the previous decade.) Following the 9/11 attacks, the Chinese government started justifying its actions toward Uyghurs as part of the Global War on Terrorism. It said it would combat what it called “the three evils”—separatism, religious extremism, and international terrorism—at all costs.
In 2009, rioting in Ürümqi broke out as primarily Uyghur demonstrators protested against state-incentivized Han Chinese migration to the region and widespread economic and cultural discrimination against Uyghurs. Nearly two hundred people were killed, and experts say it marked a turning point in Beijing’s attitude toward Uyghurs. In the eyes of Beijing, all Uyghurs could potentially be terrorists or terrorist sympathizers. Over the next few years, authorities blamed Uyghurs for attacks at a local government office, train station, and open-air market, as well as Tiananmen Square in Beijing.
While visiting Xinjiang in 2014, Xi warned of the “toxicity of religious extremism” and advocated for using the tools of “dictatorship” to eliminate Islamist extremism in a series of secret speeches. In the speeches, revealed by the New York Times in 2019, Xi did not explicitly call for arbitrary detention but laid the groundwork for the crackdown in Xinjiang.
In 2017, Xinjiang’s government officially recognized the use of training centers to eliminate extremism. The proliferation of reeducation camps for arbitrarily detained Uyghurs followed.
The COVID-19 pandemic also offered another reason for a tighter clampdown and the restriction of journalists. Xinjiang experienced stringent lockdowns and food shortages. Authorities also censored online posts criticizing the government’s lockdown policy—some social media users were detained by police and accused of spreading rumors. Pandemic policies also made it nearly impossible for foreign journalists to travel to and report from Xinjiang.
Are economic factors involved in this crackdown?
Xinjiang is an important link in China’s Belt and Road Initiative, a massive development plan stretching through Asia and Europe. Beijing hopes to eradicate any possibility of separatist activity to continue its development of Xinjiang, which is home to China’s largest coal and natural gas reserves.
Many people who were arbitrarily detained have been forced to work, according to multiple reports. ASPI estimated that, between 2017 and 2020, eighty thousand previously detained Uyghurs were sent to factories throughout China linked to eighty-three global brands. Some reeducation camps were documented as having factories on their grounds. The government has also increasingly used coercive methods to take control of Uyghur land, forcing farmers into factory work. Researchers from the Center for Strategic and International Studies say forced labor is an important element of the government’s plan for Xinjiang’s economic development, which includes making it a hub of textile and apparel manufacturing. Chinese officials have described the policy as “poverty alleviation.”
At the same time, the CCP has been promoting domestic tourism in Xinjiang since 2023 in an effort to rebrand the region and commodify the Muslim minority culture. Tourists participate in the aspects of a tightly orchestrated version of Uyghur culture, including Uyghurs hired to perform traditional dances and to work in restaurant and hotel industries. International hotel chains have significantly expanded their development in Xinjiang, too—the Uyghur Rights Projects tracks at least 115 international hotels as of April 2025, and 74 are in various planning stages. Total tourism in Xinjiang reached an all-time high of 302 million visits in 2024; the region’s tourism bureau aims to boost visits to 400 million by 2030. Spending on luxury hotels and other accommodations reached $97 million in 2023, with hopes to attract more foreigners.
