Arte – Tuesday, February 8, 8:50pm – Documentary
“All suspects, everywhere, all the time”: this is the fate of Uyghurs, Western China, Xinjiang, Turkic and Muslims. In the face of jihadist attacks in 2013-2014, China will start in 2017 with a policy of mass internment far beyond the “usual suspects”: hundreds of concentration camps, over a million people forced to brainwash in prison conditions due to detainees Uncertainty and arbitrariness and even more inhumane.
China: Uyghur Drama is a remarkable documentary, in its revelations and scope, about Xi Jinping’s undertaking of forced assimilation and sinicization of the inhabitants of this former Qin imperial colony.
“training centre”
Independent several times between 1911 and 1949, it was incorporated into Communist China in 1955 as the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region as a neighboring Soviet republic.
In March 2017, the first signs of raids that emptied entire neighborhoods were evidence of this, obtained by an exiled Uighur journalist through conversations with Xinjiang residents and officials. Then, Adrien Zenz, a German researcher specializing in Chinese ethnic policy, discovered a tender for a “training center” equipped with watchtowers.
When China acknowledged the existence of these centers in 2018, an anti-American Albanian historian, ready to believe in the relevance of the Chinese approach, was invited on the spot and treated as a guest of honor.Like hundreds of celebrities or journalists who are “friends of China”, he realizes that the model prisoners shown to him in the barbed wire camps are for “Praying to Allah, wearing the veil, reading the Quran, is not considered a crime anywhere else in the world”, He was outraged. Those who passed through the camps or taught there brought back horrific testimonies about abuse, torture, the camp universe…
The documentary sheds light on the origins of this policy of mass internment through the work of CCP theorists who claim to favor “ethnic integration” of the majority Han Chinese, as well as secret party documents leaked from China in 2019. We found Xi Jinping and his Xinjiang confidant Chen Quanguo.
This state terror against minorities would facilitate a range of Orwellian measures, including forced labor, the dispatch of Chinese cadres to Uyghur families, re-education of children of detainees held in orphanages, and forced sterilization . Listen to Hu Angang, one of the theorists of ethnic integration, or Shen Dingli, a researcher close to power, all of these measures are proven in making China a project. “Great Country”.
In this 21st century genocide, nothing is more cynicismand Than the centuries-old history of these Uyghur cemeteries being razed to the ground during “urban transformation”: the remains were moved into brick tombs, lined up, and the names of the deceased were replaced by… a number.
China: Uyghur Drama French documentary by Francois Reinhardt and Roman Franklin, 2022, 1 hour 45 minutes) Arte. Available on arte.tv until June 7, 2022