China suggests its camps for Uighurs are just vocational schools

DURING the past year campaigners, academics and journalists have been shedding light on the detention for “re-education” of vast numbers of ethnic-Uighur Muslims in China’s far-western province of Xinjiang. On August 13th the topic was raised at the UN, when experts undertaking an audit of China’s policies towards ethnic minorities said they had heard that as many as 1m Uighurs are being locked away. Hu Lianhe, a Communist Party official flown in for the hearing, said allegations that the party was sending Uighurs to indoctrination camps were “completely untrue”. He explained that some petty criminals in Xinjiang were being assigned to “vocational education” facilities for “rehabilitation and reintegration”, but did not say how many.

The party appears to think that obligatory periods of forced instruction, sometimes lasting weeks or months, are a good way to tackle the Islamic extremism and secessionist thinking that it says threaten Xinjiang’s stability. People who have worked or been detained in the centres say that inmates have had to sing Communist Party songs. According to the Washington Post, a few have been made to consume pork and alcohol. In some cases they have been subjected to physical abuse. But Mr Hu’s rebuttal nonetheless provided slightly more detail than has previously been volunteered by officials. In May China’s foreign ministry told reporters who had visited Xinjiang that it simply “had not heard” of the situation they described.