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The HanSupremacyBEIJING’S OMINOUS CAMPAIGN TO DEFINE WHAT IT
MEANS TO BE CHINESE BY CHARLIE CAMPBELL/SHANGHAI
WorldIn July 2017, GulzIra auelkhan’s
father fell ill. So she made the short
hop from her village in the windswept
Kazakh stan countryside into her native
China to care for him. Upon arrival in
the western province of Xinjiang, how
ever, she was arrested, for no given rea
son. No charges were ever brought, but
she spent the next 15 months being fer
ried between five different prison camps
with barbed wire and watchtowers, dur
ing which she was interrogated 19 times
and tortured with electric batons. Her
interrogators had no clear explanation
for her detention. “Once they asked me,
‘Do you have a TV in Kazakhstan?’” says
Auelkhan, 42. “ ‘In which case your ide
ology has been corrupted.’ ”
Auelkhan, an ethnic Kazakh Muslim
who grew up speaking a Turkic dialect,
was forced to learn Mandarin Chinese, sa
lute the Chinese flag and sing songs exult
ing the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)
beneath photos of President Xi Jinping.
“We all had to eat pork, and I was forced
to burn a Koran and a prayer mat,” she
says. “There was to be no more praying.”
Afterward, she was sent to a labor camp
for two months, where she sewed gloves
until she says her neck ached and her eyes
turned bloodshot.
Auelkhan was told she would be paid
6,000 yuan ($930) but received only
220 yuan ($33). Camp guards told de
tainees that “from now, all ethnicities will
be as one and must share the same lan
guage and food,” she says. At one point,
Auelkhan was given what she was told
was a flu shot, and afterward her periods
became infrequent and irregular. “I be
came lethargic and today can’t even knead
bread without feeling tired,” she says.
China says allegations of mass deten
tion, rapes and forced sterilization in Xin
jiang province are “lies and absurd alle
gations.” Yet seemingly everybody there
knows a friend or family member who
has been disappeared. The new rulesgoverning the province are clear: men can
no longer sport beards, nor women head
scarves. Fasting during Ramadan is forbid
den, as is the Islamic greeting “A s - salaamu
ʻAlaikum,” or “Peace be upon you.”
CCP officials are assigned to live with
minorities in their own homes, while
AI powered facial recognition cameras
enable predictive policing in what Am
nesty International calls a “dystopian
hell scape.” Wearing a slightly longer
dress, or forgetting to shave, is enough to
flag the surveillance algorithm, accord
ing to recently leaked internal files, pos
sibly resulting in detention. “They want
to destroy [nonHan] language and cul
ture,” says Auelkhan, who is now based
in the U.S. “To brainwash the people.”
Life for Xinjiang’s Muslim minorities—
mostly Uighurs but also Kyrgyz, Uzbeks
and Kazakhs like Auelkhan—is a daily
grind of surveillance, indoctrination and
detention. The U.N. estimates over 1 mil
lion have been placed in “reeducationPHOTOGRAPH BY KHADIJA FARAH FOR TIME