Continuing with the last blog, now it’s the time to take a more detailed look at what is really on the so called Karakax List (named after a county in Xinjiang). Because it’s an (Excel) spreadsheet, let’s look the column headings first and then the table entries. In what follows I will put the Chinese words exactly as they appeared on the list to maintain objectivity and originality.
The Column Headings
On the first column is the Sequential # like 1, 2, 3, 4. The CNN report only listed the first four cases so their sequential numbers went from 1 to 4. The next column is the name of the particular training center the person was in. Notice the term in Chinese is 教育点 or Location of Education — not prisons, jails or detainment center. The four cases shown in the CNN report were all in the First Training Center (第一培训中心). There are two possibilities: The entire list may cover just one particular facility, or later entries covered other centers. This is not crucial either way, however.
The third column is Time of School Entry (入教时间), once again not Time of Entry but “school” or “education” entry. Column 4 is the trainee names (姓名). These names are all in Mandarin only, rather than their original Uyghur spelling. One could read this as a sign of a problem, as all names should be kept in both Mandarin and Uyghur. I certainly understand the reasoning behind. But is this an evidence of genocide for not maintaining the Uyghur cultural identity? My sense is that we should not go that far. After all, this list is for internal control, not a public document such as forms of trainee registration. The latter should definitely have two languages for the trainees to choose when they first arrived in the center, like we commonly see in the US.
The fifth column, all blacked out for privacy, contains the ID numbers of the trainees (身份证号). Columns 6 & 7 are the communities where the trainees came from, which could be a village or community (村(社区)) in the rural area, or a street block and township (乡镇(街道)) in the urban area. Column 8 is group number (组号) presumably within the training center. Notice although the column heading implies a number for each group, its entries were all names of groups. This actually gives us information on how the training centers were organized. It seems clear people from the same local community tend to be placed into the same group. I wonder what is the reason behind. Perhaps people from the same community feel more familiar or closer to each other and thus easier to open their minds during the training? Do these people tend to live in the same room or nearby rooms? Does each group elect a group leader among themselves or have a caseworker assigned to it? Anyway, we know for sure that prisoners will not be assigned into groups based on where they came from.
The next column, Column 9, is one of the key items. It gives the “precise” (精准) reasons or criteria for recruiting the persons (精准参训原因). Since this is supposedly an internally circulated document, we can rest assured that its contents are reliable and straightforward with little or no “window dressing” for PR (public relationship) management purpose, making it a godsent for peeking into the inside of Xinjiang government to learn the truth from the Chinese side.
Column 10 is Management Categories (管理分类) and for the first four cases they were all left empty. I don’t know if later entries would have categories listed, although this is not crucial.
Column 11 is another key item on the list. It can be literally translated as Trainees’ “Three Circles” (三圈情况). You can see from the table entries that the so called “Three Circles” refer to Family Circle (亲属圈), Friend or Social Circle (社交圈) and Religious Transition Circle (宗教传承圈). Together they offer a comprehensive profile of trainees’ immediate and primary social environment.
The last column, Column 12, listed the Opinions of Village and Township Evaluation (乡镇研判意见) for each trainee. I was surprised to find from this column that it was the leaders of the local communities — not the center — that determined whether the trainees should continue to stay or to graduate. It sounds like the center is only responsible for teaching activities, much like a school would do, while local leaders familiar with the trainees would presumably visit and interview the trainees and then offer evaluations on whether the trainee was ready to leave.
If this is the case, I would say it was a smart arrangement, because local leaders know the trainees before and after training and could arrive at a more reasonable assessment of changes than the center staff could. The center staff would be busy teaching in three categories anyway: Law, languages and career skills. How did I know the curriculum or the course catalog? Easy, from watching a video covering the training center, there are big signs on the wall of the big multilevel building, in both Chinese and Uyghur, that read: learning the law, learning the double language and learning career skills (学法律，学双语，学技术). The Chinese were not hiding it at all.
What We Can Learn From the Table Entries
Let’s now turn to the table entries for the four cases on the photographed clip in the CNN report.
The Face Covering Trainee
The first trainee was recruited for two reasons: 1. His wife used to cover her face (in public) (老婆曾蒙面); 2. His family has four extra children above the legal limits (超生四孩). The second reason is straightforward but sending people to the center just because they covered their faces? A textbook example of racial or ethnic profiling, or even genocide for suppressing the ethnic or cultural identities, right?
Before jumping to the conclusion, I want to share the following website for the difference between a burqa and a hijab. “A hijab is a headscarf worn over the head which covers the head and the hair. With a hijab, the face is seen.” “A burqa is a loose dress that covers the whole body from the head to the foot.” So when the leaked list entry talked about face covering (蒙面), it must be referring to a burqa, not a hijab. The above page also points out that “with the advent of modernization or westernization, most women prefer the hijab.” But “(s)ome hardcore Muslims want the burqa to be made compulsory as part of Sharia law. They believe that the face of a woman is a source of corruption and, hence, it should be covered.” Burqa is already compulsory in Iran, Saudi Arabia and the areas of Afghanistan controlled by the Taliban.
Keeping In Mind This Was A Watchlist
Once again we need to take into consideration the context here. The first big contextual factor or fact is that this is a document for internal control, the fact that it was leaked does not change its nature. The notion of watchlist may be unfamiliar to many, but every government knows them. We just need to ask ourselves a simple question: Of all the countries fighting terrorism, which one does not have a watchlist of potential trouble makers? I am willing to go further to say that for any country not having a watchlist, its government is not doing the job protecting its people. The US certainly has many such lists, with generally higher accuracy from FBI on domestic than from CIA on overseas. The problem for the US is that its government or governments often ignore or did not pay sufficient attention to those warning messages and did not do enough in time to prevent — until the attacks occurred that cost human lives and shocked the world. Just read this historical report on the 9/11 to find out how terrorist trackers before 9/11 had failed to grab attention from the higher-ups.
I was listening Google News the other day and the police chief in Oakland was interviewed by a reporter, who pointed out that in 2012 and 2007 the murder rates in Oakland dropped significantly because the cops adopted a targeted approach (now the rate of Oakland homicide surged by more than 300% in 2021). Keeping a list of potential trouble makers is perfectly legitimate and efficient way of fighting terrorism and extremism and protecting innocent citizens.
International Bans of Burqa
Of course, one can argue or assume that most democratic countries would not list people with beard or burqa, or reading Quran. You are right, except again the key is keeping track of the historical contexts. From the blog by Mr. Li, a Han Chinese and a gentleman lived in Xinjiang for a long time and now in California, I learned that in the past it was extremely rare (凤毛麟角 in his own words) to see burqa in Xinjiang, only occasionally in its South. But this time on a trip back to Xinjiang started on May 29, 2014, right after the biggest or deadliest terrorist attack in Urumqi, capital of Xinjiang, he found burqa rather frequently (比较多).
It turns out that burqa is not popular among western countries, as Mr. Li pointed out. Thanks for his blog, I Googled and found today that the France was the first EU country banning burqa in 2010. According to this NPR report in 2020, the law remains effective and “punishable with a fine and citizenship course.” The French government claims the ban was “to promote gender equality.” Mr. Li was also right that Denmark as well as Belgium passed laws to ban burqa. Furthermore, European Court of Human Rights upheld the Belgium ban in 2017.
Compared with these EU countries, China is actually more modest in the sense that it has had no national ban on burqa. The only place with a local ban is the city of Urumqi.
Burqa Is Not Muslim Uniform By Quran
Perhaps more importantly, burqa is not a required dress by Quran. I educated myself by reading this website with details on what the Quran said about dress code. “The Quran does not specifically mention the burqa or tell women to wear such extremely confining clothes. Instead, it instructs men and women to dress and behave modestly in society (24:31).”
It also showed what the Quran says related to burqa:
‘[33:52] No women are lawful for you beyond this, nor for you to replace them with other wives even if you are attracted by their beauty, with the exception of what your right hand possesses. You must be content with those already made lawful to you. God is watchful over all things.’“
The authors went on by asking “If the Burqa was a command from God, as some claim, then how can any man be attracted to a woman’s beauty (as in 33:52)? Naturally the woman’s beauty, which God is speaking about, is the beauty of her face. If the Burqa was a command from God then the words in 33:52 would become meaningless and obsolete.”
To sum up, it is safe to say that to require wearing burqa is a hard-core, fundamentalist or extremist interpretation of the Quran. To protect the citizens rather than to be carried away by extremists, the government has the right to keep tabs on signs of hard-core Muslim, including burqa — especially when the dress was locally very rare before but recently surged. This is not much different from Joe Biden targeting at the so called the “ghost guns” without serial numbers. The key difference is that Beijing has effectively acted upon its watchlist, demonstrating the leaders took their trackers’ message seriously.
Tracking International Trips To Sensitive Countries
The second trainee on the leaked list got himself in because he (1) travelled to, and overstayed in, one of the 26 sensitive countries and (2) has one child above the legal limit. I do not know what are the 26 sensitive countries on China’s watch. What we do know is Saudi Arabia is one of them, because the entry in the last column said the first trainee travelled to Saudi Arabia and stayed there for 128 days (from May 10, 2016 to September 16, 2016).
I do not want to spend too much on this precise reason because everything I said about face covering applies here. I do want to notice a false statement from this Wikipedia page called Xinjiang Internment Camps: “In general, the subjects on the Karakax list all have relatives living abroad, a category that reportedly leads to ‘almost certain internment.'” I wish the author(s) had been more careful with the data. One only needs to read Trainee #1 to find out he did not have anyone listed as living abroad. In fact, reading through the Trainees’ Three Circles (Column 11) of all the four cases found nobody falling in that category.
This is an irony because Xinjiang has casted a wider net than just those with “foreign living relatives.” Before you jump to the conclusion that Xinjiang has committed a bigger crime than you previously thought, I suggest another way to read it: The huge number of people entering the centers actually tells us something else: That the centers are not prisons and trainees are not criminals. How do I know, because Trainees’ Three Circles (Column 11) on the Karakax List already pointed out who had relative in prisons, for how long a sentence and with what crime. Of the four cases on the list shown by the CNN report, three trainees each had one relative in prison. The trainees themselves were not seen or treated as criminals or prisoners.
Birth Control Law & Trainees
The Karakax List did tell us on Column 9 that violation of birth control law alone was enough a reason to be sent to the center. Case #3 had only this listed as the precise reason of being recruited: Two extra babies above the birth limit. Of course, selective birth control is the most serious offense to be legitimately charged as genocide. This explains why Adrian Zenz spent a whole separate report for the Jamestown Foundation on this topic.
The bad news for Zenz (and likeminded anyone else) is that China never really singled out the Uyghurs for birth control. Lately Beijing did tighten the grip on extra babies born out of the legal limits, but that is only because it was very generous with the Uyghurs before, effectively letting them have as many babies as they see fit, especially in the rural areas. Once you understand this contextual fact, no genocide accusation based on selected birth control can stand the legal test.
Is “Big Brother” Always Watching Everything?
If you read Column 11 of the Karakax List on Trainees’ Three Circles, even just for the four cases, you can’t help but noticing that the “big brother” is watching for everything all the time. As this CNN report pointed out, based on the translation of the Karakax List just like I did, “One case study reads: ‘It is found that before (the detainee) was sent to the training center, she did namaz (daily prayers) every day in 2014, prayed after meals and prayed at the family graves during festivals. Her religious knowledge came from her grandmother.’”
The same CNN report continued with another case “recorded as having refused to take off her face veil for years. ‘She went to Saudi Arabia with her husband twice, she insisted on wearing a face veil … with the excuse of rhinitis (allergies), despite committee cadres asking her (not) to do so several times,’ the report says. The woman took off her veil in 2016, but was still sent to a detention center for being a ‘potential threat‘.”
Finally, the report offered a big picture view: “about 114 of the detainees in the leaked records were sent to the camps for having too many children, 25 for having a passport without having traveled internationally and 13 for having ‘strong religious traditions’ in their family.”
My simple response to the above is that these are exactly what a surveillance report should look like. The whole idea is to keep track of past and ongoing activities before the subjects do anything more dangerous in the future.
The Surveillance List Has A Clear Target
In addition, although I can not see the whole list, I am willing to challenge anyone with access to the entire list to show me from Column 11 anything that is unrelated to terrorism, extremism and separationism, directly or indirectly. Let me list a few examples what those things look like: Whether the trainee’s daughter or wife was pretty; how frequent the couple had fought last year and this year (and for what reason(s)); how many surgeries the family members underwent last year, or how many English songs anybody in the family could sing.
My point is that although the listed details seem to be shocking, they are targeted or focused, always related to the three evil forces of terrorism, extremism and separationism. In other words, the “big brother” is not watching everything, only things other citizens would be interested to know for their own safety concerns.
Local Reporters Did The Job
The other point I want to bring up is that most likely it was the local leaders in villages and townships who did the surveillance reports. This would go well with the spirit of having a “People’s War on Terror” that Beijing declared. If you have local reporters, none of the details listed by CNN would be difficult to get. Neighbors know who prays and when, who is most religious and who went out of the country for how long. Simply put, privacy mostly stops at the neighborhood level, especially privacies that are observable.
Lighten Up The Pressure of Trainees
CNN report also listed various reasons for entering the training, and I will simply copy them below: Violation of family planning law, potential threats, having a criminal record or ex-prisoner, holding a passport without visiting a foreign country, visiting one of the 26 sensitive countries, illegal preaching, attending or allowing rooms for illegal preaching, prone to be radicalized due to family tradition, wearing a face veil, having a long beard, wife wearing face veil, and making an unauthorized pilgrimage.
My view of these is that having a hodgepodge of people with minor issues helps make the recruitment easier, because the government can always assure the trainees that they were not criminals and did not commit any crime. This helps lighten the mental pressure on the trainees so they can learn better. The idea is similar to running an Alcoholics Anonymous session in the sense of feeling “we are all the same” among the attendees.
Watch This Video On Xinjiang Attacks
My final point is that if you watched this almost one hour long video made by CTGN (China Global TV Network), which revealed highly graphic footages for the first time since the attacks occurred, it will be much easier for you to understand why having strong surveillance is a must. To be honest, any responsive government in the world, regardless of polities, will — and should — respond similarly as China did if its country had experienced so many attacks that brought so severe human casualties. This is not about ideology, as terrorism sees no difference between democracy or non-democracy, east or west, and big or small. Terrorism is the common enemy of human kind, there is no excuse not to be united to fight against it, just like we work together for climate changes.
Zenz and I barely see anything in common but I agree with him on the following assessments reported by CNN: “The document clearly shows … that the re-education camps are not for people who have been convicted of anything at all. They are simply for people who fall into some kind of general category of general suspicion or who have simply practiced their own religion.” The only change I would make is the ending part to read “or who have simply practiced their own religion that may be evolved into troublesome behaviors deemed dangerous for the public.”
More to come in another blog on the Karakax List later.