China’s oppression of Muslim citizens has entered a new stage with news emerging about a system of re-education and detention camps aimed at isolating people the state identifies as Muslims to “cure” them of religion. The main targets are Uighurs and Kazakhs in Xinjiang – what they prefer to call “East Turkestan” – with Chinese officials claiming to defend their country against Islamic extremism. The facts instead indicate systematic persecution of religious and ethnic minorities.

Since China announced its Open Up the West campaign in 1999, the mechanics of crony capitalism, as described in a 2016 essay “Lucrative Chaos” by Thomas Cliff in Ethnic Conflict & Protest in Tibet & Xinjiang: Unrest in China’s West, have combined with China’s geo-economic strategy, rising nationalism and authoritarianism to produce an increasingly unequal society in Xinjiang, one marred by ethnic discrimination and managed by a surveillance regime of unprecedented sophistication......Read more

Source web page: Times of india