An imprisoned people

The Chinese government has sentenced Uyghur people to a cumulative 4.4 million years in prison, according to the report published this week. The Genocide Studies Program at the Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International & Area Studies at Yale examined over 62,000 entries in the Xinjiang Victims Database, estimating about half a million people were sentenced to an average term of nearly 9 years in prison.

China’s decades-long oppression of Uyghur people intensified in 2014’s Strike Hard Campaign that the government claimed was a war on terror, according to the report. Later regulations directly linked religious practice to extremism and terrorism and allowed the government to further target the ethnic group, which is mostly Muslim. The Yale study claimed that China’s actions amount to not only a crime against humanity and genocide, but also the use of laws to persecute an entire people group.

How has China responded to claims about its treatment of Uyghurs? China in 2022 denounced a United Nations report accusing the government of crimes against humanity in its oppression of Uyghur people. The Beijing government, which is dominated by the Chinese Communist Party, said the assessment was false and published a 122-page rebuttal in which it claimed that the arrests are necessary to fight against terrorism. In 2023, more than 50 nations joined a declaration condemning China’s treatment of Uyghur people.

What actions did the authors of the Yale report recommend? In the report, the Yale researchers called on international governments and the United Nations to hold China accountable to the release of unfairly incarcerated individuals. The authors also called on China to release documentation to prove they have treated Uyghurs fairly, as it has claimed to do.

What else did the study find? Though Uyghurs and other non-Han people make up less than one percent of China’s population, they accounted for about 34 percent of the country’s estimated prison population from 2017-2022. The Xinjiang region has the largest Uyghur population. The vast majority of criminal records in the Xinjiang region are not public, unlike the records in other provinces, according to the report. There is often no reason for arrest listed for Uyghur people and no information about their sentencing, the report’s authors said. Some prisoners were arrested for praying or having a large beard. The authors called on the Chinese government to release criminal records for increased transparency.

The report also found that Uyghur people were often deprived of due process and are subject to disproportionately harsh punishments. Researchers found evidence of individuals who were arrested and sentenced to long prison terms in a matter of days without legal representation. Others were coerced into confessing to alleged crimes, according to the study.

Dig deeper: Read Erica Kwong’s book review of a Uyghur’s account of his experience of Chinese repression.