China’s Uyghur crackdown has not ended — it has gone underground

On Aug. 3, Kaisar Abduqeyum Hoja, a Uyghur translator, died suddenly in his home in Urumqi. His sister, Gulchehra Hoja, a journalist with Radio Free Asia living in the U.S., did not learn of his death until a week later — and then only through intermediaries.

In an age of instant global communication, that week of silence offers a window into how China’s repression of Uyghurs has evolved.

I first met Hoja in 2018, when I was working for Amnesty International in Hong Kong. More than 20 members of her family had been detained, including her elderly parents and her brother Kaisar. Amnesty International launched urgent actions and media campaigns to try to save her family.

At the time, the world was beginning to understand the enormous scale of China’s campaign in the Uyghur region. Beijing had constructed hundreds of so-called vocational and education training centers, which it claimed were designed to combat terrorism. In reality, these re-education camps became part of one of the largest campaigns of mass detention and social engineering of the 21st century.

The camps eventually became the defining image of the crackdown. Under immense international scrutiny, Beijing largely closed the camps in 2019-2020, although many people in the camps were simply sent to prisons .

As attention from the camp system has faded, a dangerous illusion has set in that the repression itself has ended. It has not. The system has evolved.

Hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs who were not sent to the camps were instead imprisoned. The precise number remains unknowable because Beijing does not publish figures, but Chinese authorities reported that more than 540,000 people have been prosecuted in the region since 2017. A comprehensive database documenting individual cases found that roughly 37 percent received sentences of 10 years or more — meaning that enormous numbers remain behind bars.

A United Nations body has offered a glimpse into what happens behind this supposedly legal process. In nine opinions concerning 21 Uyghur individuals since 2016, it found no evidence that they had access to legal counsel.

A similar lawfare strategy is evident in the Uyghur region’s forced labor system. Uyghurs have been transferred in large numbers from their hometowns to factories and farms where they are heavily surveilled. These transfers affect industries ranging from cotton and textiles to automobiles, solar panels and critical minerals.

The United States responded in 2021 with the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act , which created a rebuttable presumption that goods tied to the region were produced with forced labor unless companies could prove otherwise. But Beijing has raided auditing firms investigating forced labor allegations.

Most recently, the Chinese government issued orders that restrict information gathering in its supply chains. It sanctioned six U.S. organizations involved in supply-chain risk assessment after Washington added Chinese entities to its forced labor enforcement list.

Beijing has also used the insidious tool of isolation.

The Uyghur region has become one of the world’s most sophisticated surveillance environments. Families separated across borders therefore cannot communicate normally. As research from the Uyghur Human Rights Project has shown , Uyghur “families are prevented from normal communications both directly, through intimidation and monitored calls, and indirectly, through fear of reprisals for attempting to maintain contact.”

Even family visits can become instruments of control. The Uyghur Transitional Justice Database found that returning overseas Uyghurs were interrogated by police before being allowed to visit their relatives and were incentivized to provide information on ideologically “misaligned” Uyghurs abroad. Similarly, Human Rights Watch recently found that overseas Uyghurs were compelled by Chinese agents to gather information about Uyghur language schools in the diaspora.

In effect, China is turning family ties into leverage.

The dismantling of the camps therefore does not mean the end of repression. It has become more diffuse, more legally disguised and harder for the world to see. The Chinese government wants to convince the world that speaking up against repression is useless. It is not. Hoja learned years later that the 2018 urgent action campaign helped ensure that her family received extra milk and eggs while in the camps.

Actions taken now can have similarly profound ripple effects.

But facing an authoritarian superpower, Uyghurs can’t achieve justice alone. Uyghur friends repeatedly emphasize commonsense points of action for the international community. Those are vigorously tackling transnational repression, demanding the release of unjustly imprisoned Uyghurs, such as entrepreneur Ekpar Asat and retired physician Gulshan Abbas , ensuring American allies enact forced labor import bans based on the U.S. model and holding the Chinese government accountable for its crimes against humanity.

None of this is easy. But silence will ensure that repression wins out.

William Nee is the senior program manager for East Asia at the National Endowment for Democracy.