China’s Inhumane Persecution of the Uyghur Muslims: A Tragic Consequence of a Politically Corrupted Judiciary

By Luke Barbrick

The willfully destructive policies of the Chinese government against the Uyghur Muslims and their culture reveals the fundamentally flawed nature of the country’s legal system, especially with regard to its politically corrupted judiciary.

Like other nations, China has suffered from a series of terrorist attacks in several of its provinces and cities.[1] To curb such violence, the government has turned its attention to Xinjiang, a province in Western China, notorious for its terrorist activity.[2] Xinjiang is home to the Muslim Uyghurs who, according to Chinese officials, harbor growing ties with al-Qaeda terrorists in central Asia.[3] However, much of the violence stems from the anger of some Uyghurs against the mass “in-migration” of Han Chinese into Xinjiang.[4] The enormous influx of these majority Chinese citizens, which the Chinese government has encouraged for decades, has greatly strained the region’s natural resources at the expense of its native population.[5]

To curb the escalating violence in Xinjiang, the government launched its “Strike Hard Campaign Against Violent Terrorism.”[6] As part of this initiative, the government passed its “Anti-Terror Law” of 2016.[7] The law enables the government to target “anyone who organizes, plots, prepares to commit, or commits terrorist activities; or who advocates terrorism, incites to commit terrorist activities, organizes, leads, joins terrorist organizations, or aids terrorist activities.”[8] While the law’s purpose sounds reasonable, it contains a dangerously broad provision in Article 4.[9] “The state includes counter-terrorism in the national security strategy, comprehensive strategizing to address both the symptoms and root causes, strengthening the establishment of capacity to fight terrorism; and using political, economic, legal, cultural, educational, diplomatic and military means, to carry out counter-terrorism efforts.”[10] The government’s emphasis on “educational” means has proven especially traumatic for the Uyghur people in recent years.[11]

Police at a protest by Uyghurs in China's Xinjiang region in 2016. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Reports suggest that as many as one million of Xinjiang’s Turkic Muslims, many of them Uyghurs, have been “arbitrarily detained” in nearly 400 “political education” camps.[12] The number of detainees is staggering when one considers that there are only eleven million Uyghurs in Xinjiang.[13] Chinese courts have repeatedly sentenced Uyghurs to these camps for non-violent crimes such as sending Islamic religious recordings to family members or downloading e-books in the Uyghur language.[14] By their own admission, the government’s purpose for these camps is not merely to combat terrorism per the Anti-Terror Law.[15] Regarding the Uyghurs, the camps’ purpose is to “wash brains,” “cleanse hearts,” “break their lineage,” and “break their origins.”[16] Consequently, the Uyghurs, and other Turkic Muslim detainees at the camps, are “forced to learn Chinese” and are strictly forbidden from using their own language or partaking in any Islamic practices.[17] Former detainees have reported that they were not allowed to leave the camps unless they learned over 1,000 Chinese linguistic characters, spoke Chinese, or were committed to being loyal citizens of the state.[18]

This policy of cultural purge and assimilation, pursuant to the Anti-Terror Law, is one of many such policies which the Chinese government has pursued against ethnic minorities since Xi Jinping’s rise to power.[19] The policy should come as no surprise.[20] Since the days of Mao Zedong, China has faithfully pursued many teachings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the latter of whom advocated for the “disappearance . . . of entire reactionary peoples” as a means for social progress.[21] In the 1930s, the USSR also pursued policies of national repression against the people of Ukraine and Kazakhstan.[22]

The deplorable persecution of the Uyghurs begs the question of why Chinese courts and lawyers do not reign in the government from their ruthless and overly broad enforcement of the Anti-Terror Law. The reason is that Chinese courts possess no judicial independence from the Chinese Communist Party.[23]

In 2012, the government amended China’s criminal procedure laws in order to “increase the role of trials, judges, and lawyers” in judicial proceedings.[24] Chinese officials hoped the reforms would rid the courts of their reputation as mere “rubber stamps” for the state. [25] On paper, the reforms allow lawyers to “provide legal advice and other services” to their clients on an unprecedented scale.[26] Moreover, in 2015, the Supreme People’s Court (“SPC”) began the process of erecting circuit courts, separate from local governments and answerable directly to the SPC.[27] The stated purpose of this measure was to provide the courts with judicial independence from local authorities.[28]

Encouraged by these reforms, many civil rights lawyers became emboldened and pursued further reforms which may have contributed toward the government’s notorious “709 Crackdown.”[29] In July 2015, Chinese police conducted a “significant round-up and detention” of over 300 Chinese civil rights lawyers and activists.[30] This incident occurred on the heels of other crackdowns against individual lawyers such as Pu Zhiqiang, a civil rights lawyer from Beijing.[31] In May 2014, police detained Pu on the charge of “provoking troubles”  and “inciting ethnic hatred and ethnic discrimination.”[32] Regarding the latter charge, the only evidence against Pu were seven social media posts that he wrote, criticizing the government’s policies against the Uyghur Muslims of Xinjiang.[33]

In summary, despite the reforms, lawyers and judges of China continue to be “subject to [the] supervision of the State.”[34] In practical terms, the term “State” ultimately refers to the Chinese Communist Party and its leadership.[35] To this day, “judicial independence” in China simply means independence from local officials and from the personal interests of officials generally.[36] The courts remain rubber stamps of the Chinese Communist Party, rendering lawyers, like Pu, helpless to aid the Uyghurs.[37]

The tragic story of the Uyghurs proves the injustices inherent in a legal system subservient to a one-party state.[38] Without an independent judiciary to restrain a government from abusing its laws for perverted ends, human rights remain nothing more than meaningless scribblings on paper.[39] Only when China emancipates its courts from the reigning Communist Party’s desperate grasp will the government’s statutory promise of respect for the Uyghurs’ “freedom of religious belief and ethnic customs” be honored.[40]

[1] Jerome Doyon, ‘Counter-Extremism’ in Xinjiang: Understanding China’s Community-Focused Counter-Terrorism Tactics, Counter Extremism in Xinjiang, War on the Rocks (Jan. 14, 2019), https://warontherocks.com/2019/01/counter-extremism-in-xinjiang-understanding-chinas-community-focused-counter-terrorism-tactics/. 

[2] Id.

[3] Xun Cao, et al., Digging the “Ethnic Violence in China” Database: The Effects of Inter-Ethnic Inequality and Natural Resources Exploitation in Xinjiang, 18 Chinese U. Press 121, 122 (2018).

[4] Id.

[5] Id.

[6] “Break Their Lineage, Break Their Roots” China’s Crimes Against Humanity Targeting Uyghurs and Other Turkic Muslims, Hum. Rts. Watch 1 (Apr. 19, 2021), https://www.hrw.org/report/2021/04/19/break-their-lineage-break-their-roots/chinas-crimes-against-humanity-targeting.

[7] Doyon, supra note 1.

[8] Unofficial Translation of the Counter-Terrorism Law of the people’s Republic of China (Passed by the 18th Session of the Standing Committee of the 12th National People's Congress on December 27, 2015), art. 8, USCBC, https://www.uschina.org/china-hub/unofficial-translation-counter-terrorism-law-peoples-republic-china#:~:text=Article%2011%3A%20The%20People%27s%20Republic%20of%20China%20exercises,or%20joined%20by%20the%20People%27s%20Republic%20of%20China (last visited Aug. 26, 2022).

[9] Id.

[10] Id., art. 4 (emphasis added).

[11] “Break Their Lineage, Break Their Roots,” supra note 6, at 2.

[12] Id. at 2.

[13] Id. at 2., n.1.

[14] Id.

[15] Id. at 25.

[16] Id. at 1, 25 (citing Adrian Zenz, “Wash Brains, Cleanse Hearts”: Evidence from Chinese Government Documents about the Nature and Extent of Xinjiang’s Extrajudicial Internment Campaign, J. of Pol. Risk (Nov. 24, 2019), https://www.jpolrisk.com/wash-brains-cleanse-hearts/).

[17] Id. at 25-26.

[18] Id.

[19] Id. at 10; Doyon, supra note 1.

[20] See Roland Boer, How to Understand China: Study Marxism, Pol. Theology Network (July 13, 2015),  https://politicaltheology.com/how-to-understand-china-study-marxism/.

[21] Id.; Friedrich Engels, The Magyar Struggle, 8 MECW 227, https://marxists.architexturez.net/archive/marx/works/1849/01/13.htm (last visited July 9, 2022).

[22] Andrea Graziosi, The Soviet 1931-1933 Famines and the Ukrainian Holodomor: Is a New Interpretation Possible, and What Would Its Consequences Be?, 27 Harvard Ukrainian Stud. 97, 102 (2004) (“Out of the six to seven million victims . . . 3.5 to 3.8 million died in Ukraine; 1.3 to 1.5 million in Kazakhstan (where deaths reached their peak in relation to the population size, exterminating 33 to 38 percent of the Kazakhs[)] . . . .”).

[23] James Moliterno & Lan Rongjie, The New-Breed, "Die-Hard" Chinese Lawyer: A Comparison with American Civil Rights Cause Lawyers, 25 Wash. & Lee J. Civil Rts. & Soc. Just. 99, 115 (2018).

[24] Id. at 110.

[25] Id. at 112.

[26] Id. at 112; Decision of the National People's Congress on Amending the Criminal Procedure Law (Decision on Amending the Criminal Procedure Law of the People's Republic of China adopted at the 5th Session of the Eleventh National People's Congress on March 14, 2012), art 36, ILO, https://www.ilo.org/dyn/natlex/natlex4.detail?p_lang=en&p_isn=89810 (last visited Aug. 26, 2022).

[27] Id. at 114.

[28] Id.

[29] Id. at 109.

[30] Id. at 144.

[31] Id. at 140.

[32] Id. at 140-42.

[33] Id. at 142.

[34] Id. at 105; Lawyer’s Law of the People’s Republic of China (issued by the Standing Comm. Nat’l People’s Cong., passed May 15, 1996), Ch. VIII, art. 3, Cong.-Exec. Comm’n on China,  https://www.cecc.gov/resources/legal-provisions/law-of-the-peoples-republic-of-china-on-lawyers (last visited Aug. 25, 2022).

[35] Id. at 115.

[36] Id.

[37] Id.

[38] See Jeffrey S. Sutton, Who Decides? 3 (Oxford U. Press ed., 2022).

[39] Id.  

[40] Unofficial Translation of the Counter-Terrorism Law of the people’s Republic of China, supra note 8, art. 6.