Educating About the Muslims in Chinese Detainment Camps

Even as the social unrest continues to build in our own country, it is important to know and be educated on things going on outside of our US bubble.

Right now, there are over a million ethnic Uighurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz and Hui muslims being held in Chinese detainment camps.

These ethnic Muslims have occupied the region of Xinjiang, but in 1949, China annexed that region. While it is not a colony, The People's Republic of China have tried to force them to assimilate into their culture, trying to get them to speak Mandarin and change many of their ways to suit that of the Hans moving in. However, the Uighurs refused to do so, and many of them even began to speak out against the Chinese government.

As we know, because China is a communist state that tightly regulates the speech of its citizens. Such sentiments are not tolerated, so when the government started to crack down against the Uighurs and other ethnic Muslims, combined with the same government associating these groups with savages who live "backwards," this led to an increase of discrimination against them.

This increased discrimination made many of these groups flee to mainland China to escape such harassment. However, this sentiment spread there, and these people were subject to the same treatment.

Eventually, the sentiment against the Uighurs switched from being savages and terrorists. This switch allowed for the government to have its citizens and officials spy on Uighurs and to report on any Uighurs or Muslims who act "weird," such as refusing to watch the Chinese news, or even drinking alcohol.

Around 2017, the Chinese government started to take these "weird" Muslims to "vocational" camps without their consent. However, these camps have actually been seen to be more of internment camps than vocational camps, with these Uighurs being forced to do labor, extreme discrimination, and even deaths and executions occurring here. They aren't even being taught any vocational skills; instead, they are being drilled on communist ideologies to "re-align" them with the correct mindset, at least to the Chinese government. The UN has already condemned these acts to be crimes against humanity, but the Chinese government has barely slowed down in their attempt to control these people.

This may not directly concern the USA, but we cannot call ourselves human activists who fight for all, and turn a blind eye from human rights crises like this. While we cannot physically go there and help them, we can educate ourselves on the issue and donate to organizations who are committed in stopping this. Some organization include:

Uyghur Human Rights Project: https://uhrp.org/support

Save Uyghur: https://www.saveuighur.org/congress/

We can also talk to local officials to push our government to intervene in this crisis. This is more than just political lines, or economic issues. We cannot stand aside, acting blind, when human beings are being mistreated and abused.