China is pursuing an extraordinary and outrageous policy in its far western province of Xinjiang. Beijing has been cracking down on the nation's Uighur population there, a mostly Muslim group that until recently constituted a majority of people living in the province. It is estimated that as many as 1 million Uighurs have been relocated to camps where they receive "anti-extremist ideological education." This program is Orwellian in its design and scope. The world must protest and demand that Beijing end this horrific practice.
China's west has long been restive. Xinjiang province, a sprawling area that stretches 1.6 million square kilometers, is China's largest administrative region and one of its least populated, with nearly 22 million residents, about 10 million of them Uighurs. It borders Central Asia and its residents share a religious and ethnic background foreign to that of the Han ethnic group that makes up an overwhelming majority of Chinese citizens elsewhere in the country. That difference and the distance from the capital have prompted fears of ethnic separatism in the region — a concern that was briefly made real during the Japanese occupation of China over 70 years ago.
There has been unrest in the region — riots in 2009 and sporadic outbreaks of violence since — but Chinese authorities have confused cause and effect. If the Muslim community is aggrieved, it is because of assimilation policies pushed by the government in Beijing and its local representatives, along with programs to resettle "reliable" Han in the region, which has fueled complaints as they displace native residents in the local economy.