"Had a Uighur host just greeted a neighbor in Arabic with the words “Assalamu Alaykum”? That would need to go in the notebook. Was that a copy of the Quran in the home? Was anyone praying on Friday or fasting during Ramadan? Was a little sister’s dress too long or a little brother’s beard irregular? And why was no one playing cards or watching movies?
Of course it was possible they were doing their home visit in a “healthy” secular family. Perhaps there were posters of Xi Jinping or Chinese flags on their walls. Maybe the children spoke Mandarin even when they hadn’t been prompted.
Not all the most important evidence would be immediately visible. So the visitors were instructed to ask questions. Did their hosts have any relatives living in “sensitive regions?” Did anyone they knew live abroad? Did they have any knowledge of Arabic or Turkish? Had they attended a mosque outside of their village? If the adult little brothers and sisters’ answers felt incomplete, or if they seemed to be hiding anything, the children should be questioned next...
The manual instructs the relatives to tell their “little brothers and sisters” that they have been monitoring all Internet and cell phone communication that is coming from the family, so they should not even think about lying when it comes to their knowledge of Islam and religious extremism.
The manual also instructed them to help the villagers alleviate their poverty by giving them business advice and helping out around the household. They were told to report any resistance to “poverty-alleviation activities.”...
Two civil servant “relatives” and two friends and family members of “relatives,” the four of whom identified as “locals” (bendi ren) or “Old Xinjiang People” who had grown up in the region, expressed reservations about their participation in the “United as One Family” project. They complained about having to adjust to conditions in Uighur and Kazakh villages; that the work was boring and they missed the excitement of city life. They repeatedly mentioned that it was inconvenient to be apart from their families. One of the relatives who was sent in the first wave of long-term relatives, and was tasked with living full time in Muslim villages for a year or more, said he was only permitted a 10-day leave every 90 days.
They told me, repeatedly, that they felt they were being asked to sacrifice significant portions of their lives to this effort. They wanted to get back to their work as bureaucrats in state-owned enterprises and government bureaus, or their work as doctors and editors in state-run institutions. Two of those I interviewed told me that they, or their friends who had been asked to go down to the villages, would have lost their jobs if they had refused to participate in the monitoring program, but they also said that by participating they had been guaranteed promotions upon the completion of their tour of duty...
The main focus of all of this training, she told me, was to introduce secular values into Uighur society. To her mind, this was an unquestioned good. She said the main problem in Xinjiang was that people did not communicate effectively. Education in both Chinese language and Han secular values would change this. She told me, “Xinjiang could be another Yunnan, where people from outside the province are attracted to the province and those from the province are assimilated.”...
Sent-down workers who identified as “Old Xinjiang” locals had a less sanguine view of the camps. They said that when Uighurs were sent to a “reeducation center,” it was probably because there was no one to protect them. This was how the system worked. And it was also why “locals” like them had to participate. “There is nothing we can do to protect Uighurs,” a middle-aged Han woman who grew up with Uighur classmates in Urumchi told me, “so we have to try to protect ourselves.”
Several Han workers said that politics in Xinjiang were polarized to a degree that recalled the Cultural Revolution. Everyone had to agree with the Party line or be ostracized and face time in prison. Of course, they said the primary target of the current human engineering project was Uighurs and Kazakhs. If they, as Han, kept their heads down, they thought they would be fine."
FB: "Many Uighurs told me that perhaps the most painful part of the “United as One Family” program was the way it undermined the authority of Uighur parents and destroyed families. They described the “relatives” as trying to take away their future. Families and their faith, many explained, were the last space of refuge and security in Uighur society. The same middle-aged Uighur man said, “Now they are taking our families and our faith. We have nothing left.”"
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