The High-Tech Gulag

‘Lock up everyone who needs to be locked up,’ ordered Party Secretary Chen Quanguo when he moved from Tibet to Xinjiang. ‘Break their roots!’ It is estimated that around a tenth of the Uighur population was subsequently interned in overcrowded ‘re-education’ camps. Omnipresent facial recognition cameras and spy apps monitor the population’s every move – a high-tech gulag. Mathias Bölinger has interviewed a number of eyewitnesses, and by drawing on their stories and on the latest leaks, he shows how the constant fear, arrests, trials and physical and psychological torture are wearing people down. He explains how China’s mistrust of the Muslim Turkic peoples in the west has been radicalised in waves, from the age of empire to the Cultural Revolution to the Xi Jinping era, and which political constellations and ideologies are fuelling the oppression. The West is quick to pass judgement, but very reluctant to follow through with consequences. This profound book, based on years’ worth of research in China and beyond, is a harrowing reminder not to let this issue slip down the agenda.

‘The images from Xinjiang are disturbing. They reinforce what we have long known: that there are serious human rights abuses going on in Xinjiang.’ German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, 24 May 2022

*A shocking report on the situation in Xinjiang

*Based on the author’s own research on the ground, on interviews with Uighurs living in exile, and on analysis of explosive leaks

*German companies situated next to ‘re-education camps’: the background to dubious choices of location

*The author is a sinologist and journalist who reported from China until the end of 2021