Knowledge of China’s gulag owes much to American-backed radio

IN 2017 WORD started to emerge from China’s far west that thousands of people were being sent to a new gulag of “re-education” camps for no reason other than their Muslim religion and their Uighur ethnicity. The government kept denying that such camps existed, even as accounts of the horrors became more dramatic and estimates of the gulag’s population surged to over 1m. When it at last acknowledged that it had indeed built the facilities, it said that they were merely vocational-training centres that would help turn Uighurs away from religious extremism. Rarely since the enormities unleashed by Mao Zedong has China seen so egregious an attempt to whitewash an abuse of human rights.

Alongside academics and human-rights groups, Radio Free Asia (RFA), a station funded by the American government, played a vital role in exposing Xinjiang’s horrors (see article). By employing Uighur-speaking journalists, RFA has gained something that cash-strapped commercial media would find hard to replicate: a reporting team that is able to penetrate China’s wall of secrecy in Xinjiang by pumping local sources for information, using their own language. This has put RFA at the forefront of newsgathering in the region. Western foreign correspondents have often taken their cues from its coverage of the camps, where inmates are sent without any judicial process and spend weeks, months or even longer periods undergoing what official documents, uncovered by Western academics, describe as an attempt to “wash clean” the Uighurs’ brains.