China’s Hard Edge: The
Leader of Beijing’s Muslim Crackdown Gains Influence
By Chun Han Wong (WSJ)
April 7, 2019 12:51 p.m. ET
Chen Quanguo’s social-control methods in Xinjiang are spreading
to other parts of China
Chen Quanguo, the official
directing China’s clampdown in its restive Xinjiang region, has emerged as a
pioneer of aggressive policing techniques—setting the tone for the country’s
shift toward harsher, technology-driven authoritarian rule.
As Communist Party chief for Xinjiang for the past 2½ years,
Mr. Chen has created a policing regime unmatched in scale and sophistication.
He brought some of his techniques from earlier provincial posts, including in
Tibet, and expanded them with new technology and tactics.
He installed thousands of high-tech police stations
throughout Xinjiang and tapped big data to enforce order and monitor citizens.
Police use hand-held devices to scan photos, messages and other data in
residents’ mobile phones, searching for sensitive material. Many ethnic Uighurs
and other Muslims are forced into camps to undergo political indoctrination,
aimed at assimilating them with the country’s Han Chinese majority.
China’s treatment of Uighurs has drawn an international
outcry. At the same time, some of Mr. Chen’s methods have filtered to other
parts of the country, amid President Xi Jinping’s efforts to reassert Communist
Party dominance over Chinese society.
In recent decades, China’s focus on breakneck economic
growth unleashed new social forces and kicked up unrest. That drove China’s
leaders to become obsessed with stability and demand that officials assert
greater control while promoting development.
Mr. Chen, 63 years old, thrived under those requirements,
becoming one of China’s most prominent hard-liners. His efforts won him
promotion to the 25-member Politburo in 2017. He is in contention to join the
party’s top leadership body, the Politburo Standing Committee, which currently
has seven members, in 2022.
“Chen Quanguo represents the hard
edge of Xi’s authoritarian management style,” said Darren Byler, a University
of Washington anthropologist who studies ethnic issues in China’s Central Asian
frontier. “Xinjiang has become the ideal space to experiment with technologies
of control, which can then be adapted for other purposes elsewhere.”
Mr. Chen didn’t respond to queries posed to him through the
Xinjiang government and China’s national legislature, of which he is a member.
Chinese officials, including Mr. Chen’s Uighur deputy, have defended their
Xinjiang policies as benign efforts to eradicate extremist and separatist
violence, and to ensure ethnic harmony.
U.S. lawmakers from both parties have asked President
Trump’s administration to place Mr. Chen on a sanctions list, most recently on
Wednesday.
“We want to send a message to those people who are
responsible for designing and implementing policies of repression,” said Rep.
Jim McGovern (D., Mass.), who is among those lawmakers. “People who are guilty
of human-rights abuses should be held to account.”
A swath of desert and mountains abutting Central Asia,
Xinjiang has long simmered with separatist sentiment among its roughly 12
million Uighurs, a mostly Muslim Turkic people who see the region as their
homeland. Beijing’s goal of pacifying Xinjiang has gained urgency under Mr. Xi,
who wants to revive Silk Road trading routes across the region as part of his
Belt and Road Initiative, a plan to build infrastructure across Eurasia and
elsewhere.
Mr. Chen’s methods, on one level, echo the “community
policing” trend in U.S. cities, in which authorities deploy more officers and
embed themselves locally. In Xinjiang, thousands of new police stations are
about 1,000 feet to 1,600 feet apart in urban areas, with amenities for
residents including wireless internet, phone chargers and first-aid kits. Many
of these typically one- to two-floor stations host lawyers providing legal
services.
That’s where the comparisons end. In an aggressive attempt
at social engineering, Xinjiang authorities have run more than a million
people—chiefly Uighurs—through re-education camps, according to academics and
activists. Former detainees say they were forced to watch videos about Mr. Xi
and the Communist Party, sing patriotic songs and denounce Islam.
Chinese officials have called these camps
vocational-training centers that boost local employment and combat extremism,
while denying alleged rights abuses in these facilities.
Mr. Chen has also sent more than a million party members and
government workers—mostly ethnic Han Chinese—to live with Uighurs and other
minorities for weeklong stays in homes, where they monitor families and
recommend whom to detain.
Xinjiang authorities have pursued the collection of
biometric data, including blood samples, from all residents between the ages of
12 and 65, turning the region of 24 million people into a leader in nationwide
efforts to build DNA databases.
Mr. Chen’s security strategies aren’t likely to be
replicated in full across China, where officials aren’t similarly confronted
with acute religious and ethnic strife. Even so, police have traveled to
Xinjiang for study tours and 90-day training exchanges. Other regions have
adopted the upgraded police stations and picked up the use of devices that
extract data from mobile phones.
Decades ago, in the era of Mao Zedong, maintaining order was
simpler. The party reached into every corner of Chinese life, with centrally
planned work units monitoring every worker, and many ordinary Chinese spying on
each other.
This totalitarian grip fell away as China embraced
pro-market policies and rapid urbanization over the past four decades. Private
businesses flourished and living standards rose, and the party’s presence in
private lives eroded. Ethnic minorities had some degree of liberty to preserve
their cultures and languages.
The era also spawned bigger wealth gaps, along with higher
rates of crime, corruption and unrest.
To counter these threats, party theorists including Wang Huning, now a member of the party leadership and an adviser
to Mr. Xi, called for a stronger centralized state. As ethnic strife flared in
Xinjiang and Tibet in the late 2000s, experts advocating forced assimilation
and ideological indoctrination gained influence.
“Radicalized attitudes can be changed through
counter-brainwashing,” wrote Zhu Zhijie, director of
Xinjiang’s Institute of Prison Work Research, in a 2016 book titled
“Deradicalization Principles.” Mr. Zhu declined an interview.
Born in 1955 into a peasant family, Mr. Chen served in an
army artillery unit before embarking on a career as a bureaucrat. In the late
1980s, he became the youngest county chief in his native Henan, one of China’s
most populous provinces, where rural poverty and the spread of Christian and
other groups there tore at Communist Party control.
After the government outlawed the Falun Gong spiritual group
in 1999, Mr. Chen participated in the crackdown as a senior Henan official,
with responsibilities over the destruction of the group’s pamphlets, books and
CDs. He later oversaw efforts to cleanse Henan party ranks of Falun Gong by
re-educating and expelling offenders, according to provincial histories.
In 2009, Mr. Chen was named deputy party chief of Hebei, the
province that surrounds Beijing, where he encountered a new grid-style policing
method that the provincial capital, Shijiazhuang, was testing. It segmented communities into defined areas and set up
comprehensive police service stations to help organize surveillance and
security. Police departments from dozens of other areas would later send teams
to study Shijiazhuang’s example.
Mr. Chen took grid-style policing to Tibet when he became
its party chief in 2011, three years after anti-Chinese riots hit the Himalayan
region.
He installed roughly 700 “convenience police stations” to
corral the population. Operating around the clock, they doubled as mini-community
centers, with household tools and cold medications. State television produced a
20-episode drama series to glamorize them.
“Convenience police stations are the people’s guardian
angels,” Mr. Chen told a storekeeper in 2012 while touring the Tibetan capital
of Lhasa, according to a state media account.
Mr. Chen also sought to dilute the Tibetans’ sense of ethnic
identity. He promoted education in Chinese instead of in Tibetan,
and offered financial and other incentives to encourage interracial marriages.
He stationed tens of thousands of party members in villages and temples under
an outreach program that doubled as a surveillance service.
Many Tibetans had their passports confiscated, and thousands
of people deemed influenced by the Dalai Lama, whom Beijing denounced as a
separatist, were forced into re-education classes.
Tibet had “become the world’s largest prison,” blanketed
with checkpoints and security cameras, said Dhondup Wangchen, a Tibetan filmmaker, describing the changes he
saw after completing in 2014 a six-year sentence in a Chinese prison. He had
been charged with subversion and is now exiled in the U.S.
Mr. Chen’s strategies appeared to bring down violence and
public dissent. They also won him favor in Beijing, which was looking for a
harder-edged approach in Xinjiang as ethnic tensions escalated there, including
a 2014 bomb-and-knife attack just hours after Mr. Xi toured the region.
Mr. Chen took charge of Xinjiang in 2016. In his first major
policy address, he ordered officials to ensure “social stability and
long-lasting peace and stability” in Xinjiang—a phrase he used 40 times in the
speech.
He doubled down on grid-style policing, installing more than
4,900 convenience police stations—the most advanced and multifunctional he had
built to date—in his first four months to create what he called a robust
“system of preventive social control.”
To test its efficacy, Mr. Chen stopped his motorcade on a
city street one spring morning in 2017 and ordered aides to call the police.
Heavily armed officers arrived 54 seconds later from a nearby station,
according to state media accounts of the drill in Urumqi, Xinjiang’s capital.
Mr. Chen praised the officers but demanded better. He told
them that if security forces “arrive one second earlier, the safety of the
general public increases by one bit.”
At least 7,700 convenience police stations were operating by
last summer, with many more being built, according to a Journal review of
government notices, procurement documents and state-media reports.
“You are the bridges and bonds the party and government use
to communicate with the public,” Mr. Chen told officers at a police station in
2017, according to state media. Local musicians penned a song in tribute, with
lines such as, “Little convenience police stations, speaking of them makes
hearts feel warmth.”
Mr. Chen scaled up networks of security cameras linked with
police databases. His government tapped big-data analytics, collecting and
sifting through vast pools of personal information—such as individuals’
movements, as well as banking, health and legal records—to identify potential
security threats. He expanded his security forces, advertising some 100,000
policing-related jobs his first year in charge and ordering officers to “fight
till the terrorists are stricken with fear.”
Xinjiang’s annual security spending nearly doubled in 2017
from the previous year, to 58 billion yuan ($8.6 billion), according to
government data.
Mr. Chen also expanded a re-education program—initially
targeting religious extremists—into a mass-detention campaign from the spring
of 2017. The detention centers resembled China’s defunct laojiao, or
“re-education through labor,” system that herded criminals and dissidents into
work camps before it was abolished in 2013.
Some within the party worried that Mr. Chen’s campaign had
grown too quickly. In a June 2017 article, a party academic in Xinjiang wrote
that re-education programs were plagued by a lack of qualified personnel and by
inconsistent processes for selecting rehabilitation subjects, some of whom were
wrongly targeted by officials bearing grudges or trying to meet quotas.
The re-education process should be made “more precise,”
wrote Qiu Yuanyuan of the Xinjiang Party School.
“Firmly ensure that those who need medication are medicated,
and are given the right medicine.”
Senior leaders in Beijing have cheered Mr. Chen’s policies
for bringing stability to Xinjiang, which hasn’t reported any terrorist attacks
in more than two years. Nearby areas with large Muslim populations, such as
Qinghai province and the region of Ningxia, are replicating some of Xinjiang’s
security strategies and religious restrictions.
A senior Chinese official told foreign diplomats at a
Beijing briefing in February that Xinjiang’s re-education camps—which he calls
vocational-training centers—may accept foreigners for classes, attendees say.
Days later, in Urumqi, Mr. Chen hosted more than 200 politicians from nearly 30 countries, including Russia, Egypt and Turkey, for a symposium on Xinjiang’s ethnic policies.
Appeared in the April
8, 2019, print edition as 'From Falun Gong to Xinjiang: China’s Repression
Maestro.'
—Eva Dou contributed
to this article.
Write to Chun Han Wong
at chunhan.wong@wsj.com
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Xinjiang's Divide
Nearly half of the region's population of about24 million is
Uighur.
Xinjiang’s ethnic makeup in 2017
Source: Xinjiang Statistical Bureau
*Mostly Muslim
11.66 million
7.90
1.58
1.02
0.21
2.08
Uighur*
Han Chinese
Kazakh*
Hui*
Kyrgyz*
Others