Inside China’s campaign against the Uyghurs

Thousands of Uyghurs and other Muslims have been detained in a growing network of indoctrination centres as Beijing pushes to erase centuries of religious tradition. Nathan VanderKlippe reports from China’s Xinjiang region.

Across the westernmost stretches of China where Islam has flourished for centuries, the signs of a government effort to engineer a society of model citizens loyal to the Communist Party stand in plain sight.

In the sun-scorched lowlands of Turpan, a city in the Xinjiang region, cranes tend a construction site where high walls surround both completed buildings and concrete shells. This site, part of an expanding network of centres for forced political indoctrination and skills training, will soon hold additional people who authorities say need to be scrubbed of what they deem to be extremist thoughts. Western scholars estimate hundreds of thousands of people are already detained in such centres, many of whom are Uyghurs, a largely Muslim ethnic group.

In the regional capital of Urumqi, past the scanners that register each person entering a residential compound, stickers affixed to apartment doors ask residents to report for an “in-home interview.” At a prominent mosque in the city, the prayer hall sits empty behind locked doors. A security guard says it’s under renovation.