No Accountability for China’s Uyghur Genocide
By Erk Altay
The Chinese government launched the “Strike Hard Campaign Against Violent Terrorism” in East Turkestan in May 2014. Earlier Strike Hard campaigns in the 1990s and 2000s had already targeted Uyghur religious expression, but the crackdown entered a new phase after Chen Quanguo became the regional Party Secretary in August 2016, bringing with him a security model developed during his tenure in Tibet. Under Chen, authorities rapidly expanded mass surveillance and arbitrary detention while intensifying birth suppression, forced labor, and restrictions on religious and cultural life. These policies formed the architecture of what has been recognized as genocide.
Beijing simultaneously built a legal and institutional framework around the campaign. China’s Counter-Terrorism Law took effect in January 2016 and by 2021 the Ministry of Public Security was citing more than four consecutive years without a violent incident in the region as evidence Strike Hard has succeeded. Yet the absence of incidents did not dismantle the security apparatus. Instead, the measures put into place increasingly became routine governance.
The decade since 2016 shows how a campaign ostensibly directed at terrorism evolved into a system controlling nearly every dimension of Uyghur life. Government documents, satellite imagery, leaked police records, official statistics, and survivor testimony document mass detention, pervasive surveillance, forced labor, religious persecution, demographic engineering, family separation, and cultural assimilation. The ten violations below demonstrate not only the scale of these abuses, but how they became interconnected parts of a permanent system of control in occupied East Turkestan.
1. Total Surveillance
Chinese authorities built extensive surveillance systems around Uyghur daily life. The groundwork preceded Chen Quanguo’s arrival. In 2014, the regional government dispatched some 200,000 officials in rotating teams to conduct home visits under the “Visit the People, Benefit the People, Unite Hearts” campaign. By 2016, authorities were feeding information from these programs into digital policing systems, including the Integrated Joint Operations Platform (IJOP), which aggregates personal data and flags residents for scrutiny over conduct as ordinary as praying, using certain applications, or maintaining contact with family abroad.
Physical policing expanded alongside digital surveillance. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) counted 7,629 “convenience police stations” across the region by 2022, while state media promoted the network as a “two-minute strike circle” designed to allow armed police to respond rapidly to alerts. Authorities also paid residents for information about suspected threats, turning neighbors into another source of state intelligence.
After 2016, the surveillance state evolved into a pervasive system of control that penetrated nearly every sphere of public and private life, targeting Uyghurs and other Turkic residents of East Turkestan. It sorted, flagged, and criminalized residents, generating lists for interrogation and detention. The surveillance apparatus thus became an operational pipeline into mass detention.
2. Mass Detention
Chinese authorities transformed East Turkestan into the site of what has been described as the largest mass internment of an ethnic and religious minority since World War II. From 2017 onward, Chinese authorities detained more than a million Uyghur and other Turkic people in camps, prisons, and other detention facilities across the region. The leaked Xinjiang Police Files reveal the scale at the local level; in Konasheher County alone, authorities interned more than 12 percent of the adult Uyghur population. Police records indicate residents were detained for conduct as ordinary as having relatives abroad or installing foreign messaging applications such as WhatsApp and Telegram.
The Xinjiang Police Files also document direct orders from senior officials. Chen Quanguo reportedly instructed officers to “shoot dead” anyone attempting to escape. Human Rights Watch documented detention without charge or trial, compulsory political indoctrination, and physical abuse inside the camp system. Those eventually released faced severe restrictions on communication and movement. In its 2022 assessment, the OHCHR concluded that arbitrary and discriminatory detention of Uyghurs and other Turkic groups may constitute crimes against humanity.
Mass detention separated more than a million Uyghurs and other Turkic peoples from their families and communities, but those who remained outside detention did not escape the security apparatus. Authorities extended the same logic of surveillance and ideological control into Uyghurs’ homes, transforming private family space into another site of state monitoring and coercion.
3. Home Invasion
The “Becoming Family” (结对认亲) program brought Party and state cadres directly into Uyghur homes beginning in October 2016. More than a million were assigned to stay regularly with Uyghur families, sometimes for weeks at a time. During these visits, cadres monitored what residents ate, who visited, whether they practiced religion, what they discussed, reporting their observations to local authorities. Refusal to host cadres could trigger official punishment ranging from a reprimand to referral for “re-education.”
These programs also served an ideological purpose. Cadres delivered “ethnic unity” messaging inside the household and assessed whether families demonstrated political loyalty and conformity with state expectations. The home, normally a refuge from state scrutiny, became another site of surveillance, political education, and coercive intervention.
This intrusion into private life formed part of a broader effort to reshape the social and cultural environment surrounding Uyghurs. And authorities did not stop with monitoring what people practiced inside their homes; they transformed mosques, shrines, cemeteries, and other physical spaces through which Uyghur religious and cultural life had long been expressed.
4. Destruction of the Sacred
Along with private life, authorities reshaped the physical landscape of Uyghur religion and culture. Satellite imagery analysis by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) estimated that authorities destroyed or damaged approximately 16,000 mosques across East Turkestan, about 65 percent of the total, primarily since 2017. In some cases, officials demolished mosques entirely; in others, they removed domes, minarets, gates, and other Islamic architectural features. Authorities tore down the original 22-meter gatehouse of Kargilik Town’s Grand Mosque, built in 1540 and formally protected under provincial heritage law, and rebuilt it at roughly a quarter its original size. Media reports have also documented mosques converted into cafes, bars, and public toilets.
The destruction extends to shrines and cemeteries. Authorities demolished the nearly thousand-year-old Ordam Mazar pilgrimage site around the same period that Dr. Rahile Dawut, an Uyghur ethnographer whose work focused on Uyghur mazar traditions, disappeared. By August 2018, state media reported the “rectification” of 235 cemeteries in Aksu prefecture alone, including the destruction and conversion of the 13-hectare Yengichimen Cemetery that houses 19th century poet Mulla Elem Shahyari’s tomb.
The campaign did more than remove buildings. It dismantled places through which Uyghurs practice religion, preserved collective memory, maintained community ties, and transmitted religious and cultural knowledge across generations. The same effort to erase Islamic space also moved into law and religious governance, where authorities increasingly criminalized ordinary expression of faith and redefined permissible Islamic practice around Party ideology.
5. Criminalization of Faith
Alongside the destruction of religious sites, authorities carried out a parallel “Sinicization of Religion” campaign to regulate belief and recast Islam around Party objectives. Internal Party directives targeted what officials called “Arabization” and “Saudization,” while the China Islamic Association’s 2019 Five-Year Plan called for an “Islamic theological system with Chinese characteristics.” A 2024 regional regulation further embedded these controls into law.
Authorities treated ordinary expressions of Muslim identity as potential signs of extremism. The 2017 Regulation on De-extremification criminalized practices such as wearing a hijab, growing a beard, choosing Islamic names, and possessing or studying the Quran. Courts imposed lengthy sentences for violations, including conduct that occurred years or even decades earlier. The Uyghur Human Rights Project’s analysis of leaked police records documented more than 1000 imprisoned imams, 96 percent of whom received sentences of five years or longer.
The objective is not simply tighter religious regulation, but the remaking of Islam around Party ideology and Chinese national identity. A May 2025 observation at Urumqi’s Dongkowruk Mosque captured this shift: an imam read directly from ethnic unity regulations from the pulpit in Mandarin, with only a brief Arabic recitation.
By criminalizing independent religious practice while promoting a Sinicized Islam, authorities transformed faith into another arena of ideological conformity. The same logic of coercive transformation also extended into labor, where “poverty alleviation” and employment programs became tools of surveillance, ideological transformation, and forced labor.
6. Forced Labor
Strike Hard also transformed labor policy into a more coercive instrument of control. China’s own 2019 white paper reported relocating an average of 2.76 million rural laborers a year through state “surplus labor” programs, while the UN identified clear links between labor transfers and detention facilities authorities called “Vocational Education and Training Centers.”
The labor transfer programs predate the campaign’s post-2016 escalation. Human Rights Watch documented labor transfers dating to 2006, a temporary decline following the 2014 Kunming train station attack, and renewed expansion from 2017 and onward under the banner of “poverty alleviation” and “Xinjiang Aid” programs. Authorities increasingly linked employment to ideological assessment and “re-education,” while detainees moved directly from camps to factory floors under conditions that Amnesty International found could meet the International Labor Organization’s definition of forced labor under Convention No. 29.
Witness testimony demonstrates how this coercion operates in practice. One former detainee, prohibited from returning home after his release, received 200 RMB (approximately 30 USD) for his first month of work in a garment factory. Another worked in a linen factory where many workers were relatives of detainees who had been coerced into labor as a condition of securing their family members’ eventual release. The Xinjiang Victims Database has documented 96 cases of camp-to-factory transfers involving facilities across the region.
Under Chen, labor transfer became intertwined with detention, displacement, ideological transformation, and state-directed development. The system extended beyond East Turkestan into multiple Chinese provinces as authorities displaced Uyghurs from their communities and transferred them to factories embedded in global supply chains.
7. Global Exploitation
The labor transfer system connected repression in East Turkestan directly to factories and supply chains across China. ASPI identified 27 factories in nine Chinese provinces that received Uyghur workers and supplied goods or components to at least 82 global brands, including Nike, BYD, Siemens, Jaguar Land Rover, and Esquel. Researchers traced workers moved thousands of kilometers from their home, housed in segregated dormitories, and subjected to ideological monitoring and control similar to that imposed inside East Turkestan.
Subsequent investigations show how deeply these risks penetrated major industries. A 2022 Sheffield Hallam University study of automotive supply chains identified 96 companies operating within the region’s automotive mining, processing, or manufacturing sectors. Of these, 38 had documented involvement in labor transfer programs. Sheffield’s findings implicated nearly every major global automaker, including Volkswagen, BMW, Honda, Ford, General Motors, Mercedes-Benz, Toyota, Tesla, and the Stellantis brands like Fiat, Chrysler, Dodge, and Jeep. An earlier investigation by Sheffield traced cotton from East Turkestan to 53 contract garment suppliers across ten countries and flagged more than 100 global retail brands.
These investigations demonstrate how Beijing embedded forced labor into global supply chains by exploiting Uyghur workers and resources from East Turkestan and channeling them through national production lines into global markets. Labor transfers displaced Uyghurs from their communities and reorganized where and how they worked. Demographic policy went further.
8. Demographic Engineering
Beijing’s demographic reengineering campaign altered the composition of Uyghur communities through suppression of Uyghur births and state-sponsored Han migration. According to the OHCHR, birth rates across the region fell 48.7 percent between 2017 and 2019, while natural population growth in Kashgar and Hotan declined by approximately 84 percent over a similar period. Researcher Adrian Zenz found that some counties budgeted to sterilize between 14 and 34 percent of married women of childbearing age in a single year, while the region accounted for 80 percent of China’s net-added IUD placements in 2018 despite holding under 2 percent of the national population. The Uyghur Tribunal reviewed this evidence and concluded that measures intended to prevent births within the Uyghur population satisfied Article II(d) of the 1948 Genocide Convention.
At the same time, Beijing promoted Han migration into the region. Uyghur Rights Monitor research found that China’s 2020 census recorded 2.174 million additional Han residents over the previous decade, with nearly 90 percent of that growth driven by migration rather than births. Natural growth accounted for roughly 70 percent of the region’s total population increase in 2016; by 2019 that share had collapsed to about 25 percent. The Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, the state apparatus and paramilitary settler institution controlling 20 percent of the region’s cultivated land, facilitated much of this shift by linking recruitment to hukou transfer, housing subsidies, land access, and family relocation support.
Birth suppression and state-sponsored migration worked in parallel, altering the size and composition of Uyghur communities. These demographic policies also fractured families, separating parents and children and giving the Party greater control over how the next generation was raised.
9. Family Separation
Strike Hard also weaponized family separation, using detention, passport restrictions, and boarding schools to fracture Uyghur families and extend state control across generations and borders. Beginning in 2016, Chinese authorities broadly confiscated Uyghur passports, preventing relatives in East Turkestan from traveling and families abroad separated indefinitely. As mass detention expanded, the rupture deepened. Parents and other caregivers disappeared into camps, prisons, and forced labor programs, leaving children vulnerable to transfer into state orphanages and boarding schools.
The scale of institutionalization became substantial. The New York Times reported in 2019 that authorities had placed nearly half a million Uyghur and other Turkic children in state boarding schools to separate them from their families, language, religion, and culture. The Georgetown Journal of International Affairs later situated these schools within a wider system of family separation and social engineering, noting that state orphanages and boarding schools immersed Uyghur children in Chinese language education and Party ideology. It also documented reports of children being taught to praise Xi Jinping and the CCP, report on relatives’ religious practice, and in some cases view detained or exiled parents as enemies of the state.
Even as mass detention has become less visible, family separation persisted and took on new forms. The Uyghur Human Rights Project’s 2026 Fading Ties report documented how authorities continued to sever contact between Uyghurs abroad and relatives in East Turkestan through surveillance, intimidation, and detention, using family separation as a tool of transnational repression. At the same time, the state boarding school system continues to expand. UN experts warned of an “exponential increase” in boarding schools that separate Uyghur children from families and communities, weakening the relationships through which language, culture and identity are transmitted across generations. These assimilationist policies are increasingly being codified and entrenched through formal law and state policy.
10. Legalized Assimilation
Strike Hard’s most enduring legacy may be the codification of the coercive practices that defined the decade since Chen’s arrival in East Turkestan into permanent structures of law and governance. China’s Ethnic Unity and Progress Law, in force since July 2026, codifies measures aimed at forging a common Chinese national identity across language, education, culture, religion and social life. It makes forced assimilation of Uyghurs the law.
The new law formalizes policies that were already reshaping Uyghur life, including Mandarin-centered education, boarding school expansion, restrictions on religion, and ideological indoctrination framed around “ethnic unity” and Zhonghua minzu consciousness. In this sense, the law legalizes, normalizes, and promotes practices developed and intensified during the past decade of Strike Hard, giving them a more permanent institutional foundation.
Repression no longer depends on the visibility of camps or the language of counterterrorism. It increasingly operates through education, religious regulation, labor policy, cultural governance, and routine administration, now increasingly aligned under the Ethnic Unity and Progress Law to weaken distinct Uyghur identity and society and replace them with Xi’s project of forging a common Chinese national consciousness.
The Campaign Fades, the System Remains
The Strike Hard Campaign Chen Quanguo escalated a decade ago reached nearly every Uyghur, inside East Turkestan, across China, and throughout the diaspora. It tore apart families and communities, criminalized faith, invaded private homes, destroyed cultural works and spaces that transmitted knowledge and belonging, and extended fear and control beyond the region.
Beijing now frames this period through the language of stability, development, and “successful practice,” reinforced by a curated tourism campaign that rebuilt roughly 85 percent of Kashgar’s historic Old City into a ‘Disneyland-like’ visitor attraction while keeping independent monitors out of the region. But that narrative obscures the human cost documented over the past decade and the repression that still continues. Surveillance has become routine governance, detention fed into prison and labor systems, family separation persists across borders and generations, and forced assimilation is the law of the land.
Strike Hard’s most consequential legacy is not the campaign itself, but the permanent system of control it helped build, one capable of continuing repression without the visibility of mass internment or language of emergency counterterrorism. The question now is whether governments and institutions around the world will treat its consequences as a closed chapter, or recognize them for what they remain: an ongoing human rights crisis.
Recommendations:
- Treat the crisis as ongoing. Governments should reject narratives that frame repression in East Turkestan as a closed chapter and continue pressing for independent, unfettered access for UN experts, journalists, researchers, and separated family members. Curated state visits should not substitute for independent monitoring.
- Strengthen forced labor enforcement. Governments should expand import controls and mandatory supply chain due diligence to cover labor transfers, raw materials, intermediate goods, and suppliers linked to East Turkestan and Uyghur workers, shifting the burden onto companies to demonstrate that their supply chains are free from forced labor.
- Protect Uyghurs from refoulement and transnational repression. Governments should rigorously enforce non-refoulement obligations, strengthen asylum protections, and account for family harassment, surveillance, and retaliation when assessing protection claims.
- Expand coordinated accountability. Governments should impose and enforce targeted sanctions against officials, security organs, state entities, and companies implicated in arbitrary detention, forced labor, demographic engineering, family separation, and other serious abuses documented over the past decade.
- Track how repression evolves. Researchers, journalists, and civil society should continue using satellite imagery, leaked documents, procurement records, supply chain tracing, survivor testimony and open-source investigations to identify how Strike Hard’s methods are being repackaged through law, development, education, and routine governance.
