The Reeducation Camps of Xinjiang

The dispatches on the Rohingya have dried up as the repatriation deal between Myanmar and Bangladesh, set to begin last month, stalled out.

Filling the void have been stories of Uighur Muslim internment camps in the restive western Chinese region of Xinjiang. Chris Buckley got things rolling in early September with "China Is Detaining Muslims in Vast Numbers. The Goal: ‘Transformation.’" The story's bombshell two-sentence paragraph was

The number of Uighurs, as well as Kazakhs and other Muslim minorities, who have been detained in the camps is unclear. Estimates range from several hundred thousand to perhaps a million, with exile Uighur groups saying the number is even higher.

All qualification was quickly lost and the number of Uighurs detained for reeducation became 1 million. I was walking home from work one night right after the midterm elections and I ran into a guy, an Amazon worker, coming from an anti-Trump rally. We got to talking, and it turned out he was Iranian. I said most people in the United States have not a clue how devastating the Iran-Iraq War was. He said one of Saddam's Scud missiles blew up down the street from his house. While we agreed on a lot, he said he was more frightened of China than an errant U.S. hyper power. He mentioned the 1 million in internment camps in Xinjiang.

Chris Buckley, along with co-author Austin Ramzy, was back at it yesterday with "China’s Detention Camps for Muslims Turn to Forced Labor." The Xinjiang reeducation camps, come to find out, have a forced labor component. Residents graduate from indoctrination to jobs in textile mills, sometimes housed right there at the internment camp.

China is a nation run by the central planning of the Communist Party. The Communist Party has a problem with poverty and underdevelopment in Xinjiang. Xinjiang is also the focus of foreign powers attempting to create separatist problems for China by means of Islam. It is an established pattern for Western intelligence services: Afghanistan, the First and Second Chechen Wars, Libya, Syria, etc. So the Chinese are being proactive. Training and jobs. The refugees fleeing Guatemala and Honduras might very well favor such internment camps in Arizona, California and Texas if it meant permanent residency and stable employment. And what about the opioid killing fields of West Virginia and Ohio?

These stories about the Uighur internment camps of Xinjiang are a good illustration of how the news works a la the Integrity Initiative. Intelligence agencies fronting as NGOs develop and work with "clusters" to spread misinformation.