A new analysis from Yale University attempts to put a number on the staggering cost of the Chinese Communist Party’s campaign against Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities in Xinjiang.
As Beijing has modified its campaign from that of a program of mass arbitrary detentions to one where it comes up with a bogus legal basis for imprisoning individuals, Chinese courts have sentenced residents of Xinjiang to a cumulative 4.4 million years in prison, the report, released this week, found.
“This type of legalized form of repression is profoundly alarming — it is no less widespread nor humane than the former,” stated the report, from the Genocide Studies Program at Yale’s MacMillan Center.
“In fact, one might consider it even more harmful precisely because its veil of legal legitimacy renders it elusive to international scrutiny and legalizes human rights abuses.”
The anti-Uyghur program was brought to public attention in the late 2010s — culminating in the U.S. State Department’s designation in 2021 of the abuses as genocide. Since then, international scrutiny has lagged as Beijing has sought to reframe foreign perceptions of its rule over Xinjiang.
With the completion of campaigns to raze mosques, or otherwise convert them in such a way for access by Han Chinese, and other efforts to turn the region’s cities into tourist destinations, Beijing has welcomed visitors to the region. The party’s broader effort to add the perception of legal legitimacy to the mass detentions is part of this overhaul.
To reach the 4.4 million estimate, researchers — led by Rayhan Asat, a human-rights lawyer who campaigns for the release of her brother, Ekpar, from the camps — consulted data from the Xinjiang Victims Database, an initiative that pulls together information on over 62,000 specific victims from multiple sources including leaked Chinese law-enforcement documents.
They looked at 13,000 cases that listed a prison sentence, finding that the average sentence was 8.8 years, then multiplied that number by the 540,000 individuals the Xinjiang High People’s Procuratorate said it prosecuted from 2017 to 2021.
The report says the Xinjiang victims dataset reflects only a fraction of the true size of the prison program and that the “actual numbers are far more significant.” And while the Chinese authorities make public criminal records in other parts of the country, records from almost 90 percent of cases in Xinjiang are not public, it said.
The existence of this mass detention program, of course, is already widely known, if attention to the ongoing atrocities has flagged in the years that have followed the U.S. genocide determination. But the 4.4 million figure is new and noteworthy because it helps to measure the party’s employment of a legalistic charade, which is one less-known detail of the crackdown.
Like other aspects of the atrocities against Uyghurs, this advances Beijing’s effort to eliminate a people. “If the Uyghur population continues to be barred from maintaining their communities, it is only a matter of time before full ethnic incapacitation is realized and the damage is irreversible,” the report concluded.