(1)

Your eyes open awake but it doesn’t feel like you’ve slept. The sleep was dreamless and restless. It’s morning, roughly two hours since you managed to pass out. Last night was your turn on the floor: you’ll have to sleep standing up — or not at all — for the next five nights until you get the floor again. It feels like you’ve wasted your go, like it always does.

Your nostrils fill with the stink of sweaty, unwashed bodies until your nose acclimatises once again. Your back aches. You mutter morning to those nearby.

You need to use the toilet so start edging through the bodies, nudging people passed like you’re in a packed nightclub. You reach the toilet and sit: it isn’t separated from the rest of the living quarters. One person’s leg hovers unintentionally touching yours as you lower your pants and squat and struggle to take a shit. The camera eyes you. But it is the other people, not the cameras, that makes you struggle — the quarters being gendered doesn’t help. There remains something wrong with sharing your sounds and smells and shit with everybody.

The paper is rationed and you use what’s allotted to you, unsure if it’s all clean down there when you’re done.

The bell rings. With it the sound of the gate being unlocked. It’s too crowded to see but you know there’s a guard at the front alerting the masses to start moving.

You mix into the herd until you’re all outside and line up neatly. Two on either side of you, rows forwards and backwards past eyesight’s limit. You and everyone else know what to do: you begin to chant. ‘Long live Xi Jinping. Glorious leader Xi Jinping. Long live Xi Jinping. Glorious leader Xi Jinping.’ Your tone of voice could be described as ‘controlled enthusiasm’ and you feel proud for finding the right pitch, a performance exemplary in the fact it doesn’t stand out at all. Each of your syllables harmonises with the hundreds of others yelled out to the sky.

Shout it and keep shouting. You repeat until the words lose all meaning; that they are gurgled sounds from an overly-evolved ape has never been so clear.

In the middle of shouting you sweat and your throat cackles and aches and you’ve been going for an immeasurable amount of time. (It’s months since you saw a clock — the small pleasures.) But you know better than to leave the body to run on autopilot: on the peripheries the guards pace checking everyone; it’s not dissent they’re looking for — no one would dare — it’s tiredness, stuttering, lack of enthusiasm.

‘Stop’ echoes from somewhere in front.

Everyone goes quiet. The voice says to sing the national anthem. Then come other songs, other chants. Ahead you see a body keel to the floor. No one helps it up. Two guards hurry towards it and rigidly prop it up before taking it away. You look at the body as it goes past, the skin pale and the eyes vacant — about the same age as your parents, if they are still aging. The guard looks at you and you look away hoping he didn’t catch you.

A shout tells you to stop, that it is time for food, and everyone heads in formation to the cafeteria. The hall is manky-brown with uncleaned food scraps smeared into the floor. It mushes on bare feet. The open shutters remind you of school lunchtimes, so do the sour-faced people serving the food.

You stand in line expectantly with tray and paper-plate. Gruel is poured on. You look for a friend but don’t see their face in the crowd and as the guard is eyeing you you take the nearest seat. No one on the table speaks.

You examine the food. There is pork in there, like always. Not as many bugs as usual. At the centre of the gruel is a rock, the sort you’d find out in the woods. Also on the tray is a small clinical-white cup with medicine inside. You have no idea what it is or what it does — there’s rumours it stops menstruation in women; maybe it’s what’s caused the blood in your shit lately, but it’s impossible to know — all you know is what will happen if you don’t drink it.

You no longer gag at the food. The drink to wash down the meal is an imported beer. A toast and many glugs to the Glorious Leader!

You finish and it’s time for the gymnasium for an hour-long session. Stood just apart from your neighbours as not to hit anyone you get on with star jumps, push ups, crunches, sit ups. Your body isn’t even merciful enough to give you a runner’s high.

And now into groups, sorted alphabetically: all head to their allotted classroom. The camp used to be a primary school and the playful colour of the walls and the small tables give this away. On the tables are books and pamphlets. Marx and Engels. Mao Zedong. Tourist guides and maps. It all must be learned; there are tests. Paper and pencils on the table to take notes. The teacher is annoyingly enthusiastic talking about the virtues of the state. If what the teacher is doing right now is an act then they surely long ago forgot they were performing.

You fill the empty pages with writing on how your culture and your religion were brainwashing you, how your people were destroying you, how your way of life, your beliefs were, without you knowing it, like a parasite eating away at your brain, making you live an irrational, hurtful life, contrasted with the improvements you’ve seen since letting it all go and letting the Chinese way of life direct you.

After the hour is over it’s back to the living quarters. You take a slim volume with you to revise — and surely anything can be a cure for boredom if you try hard enough.

You are standing again in the living quarters. Someone approaches you, a face you’ve seen before but never spoken to, who tells you your friend, the one you looked for earlier, is dead. Suicide, you are told. Hung from the ceiling of the living quarters with a noose fashioned out of clothes.

You feel tears but not many. You always preferred to be alone to process new developments, to mourn; caught up in it all it’s hard to know what you feel.

You know there is something you must do. A compulsion. But how? You ask the people around you if they will guard you from the cameras, you don’t need long. They seem to have been listening to what you were told and so agree. It is four people, they stand chatting, reading pamphlets, trying to look relaxed and natural, while you bend your body, head facing the floor and address Allah. You ask for forgiveness for it is so long since you prayed to Him last and you incite that He forgive the soul of your friend despite committing the sin of suicide. The friend was not free, was still pure underneath, had been driven to act by the actions of others.

You whisper to the others that you are done. One extends a hand and helps you up. They smile at you: they must have heard your words, as quietly as you spoke them, and seem happy to have been in the presence of communion with Allah even if it wasn’t them speaking.

You all disperse and you find a (relatively) comfortable spot where there is space to lean one hand on a wall to take some weight from your legs. You think about what you said, about your friend’s soul being clean even if his Earthly actions betrayed it. That is the rationale you’ve been using on yourself. The belief that no matter what the hands or mouth do there is a deeper place that no guard with a baton, no ruler of any Party, can ever get to. But is this true? You get so tired sometimes you acquiesce to everything your body is doing and in those moments there ceases to be a pure, uncontaminated You that transcends it all.

You hear commotion by the gates. Two guards have entered and are shoving people out of the way. It is your direction they’re coming in. Your mind tells you it can’t be for you, they are here for anybody else but you, but they are approaching and you make eye contact and know it is you they’re here for.

They grab you, their hands clutching at clothes and skin, hurting you. You don’t protest or ask what you’ve done. You wonder how they knew about the praying. A camera you hadn’t spotted? Microphones recording all speech? Someone ratting for some slim reward? It doesn’t matter now. You’ve never been to the interrogation rooms but you’ve heard the stories, handcuffed for hours, beaten, waterboarded, electrocuted, stripped naked and humiliated, forced to curse Allah. And these are only the things that have come from those who survived.

(2)

The above is a fictionalised account of a day in the life of someone in a ‘Re-Education Camp’ in Xinjiang, China which currently imprison much of the Muslim population of the Uighur people. It is fictionalised in the sense that it is a fluent narrative, which doesn’t currently exist on life in the camps (and may never do) but there is nothing above that has not been reported as fact.

While writing this piece the majority of people I asked had never heard of the camps, and those that had seemed only minimally interested. I am not an investigative journalist hence nothing written here is new; my intention is to gather the available information and attempt making some sense of it.

The brief. Xinjiang — officially the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region — is the North Western-most region of China, also its largest, which borders areas of the Middle East (e.g. Kazakhstan), India and Russia. It is a land marked by conflict. It went through many periods of being colonised, and of independence, up until it became ruled by the Communist Party of China in 1949. But most people say it is still closer culturally to the Middle East, specifically Turkey, than to mainland China. Much of the Uighur population are Turkic Muslims or are descendants of them. Beyond the large land mass and potential workers China’s main interest in Xinjiang is that the land is rich in gas and oil; Uighurs have complained for years that China hasn’t fairly shared the profits of resources mined in their own land.

From 1994 to 2010 the Communist Party Secretary for Xinjiang was Wang Lequan. His mission: to ‘modernise’ the region. This included industrialising through building roads, railways, factories and pipelines, but the core modernising mission was in getting Xinjiang to conform to Chinese culture. Local language was replaced by Mandarin and workers employed by the government — and China being Communist means this was most people — lost their right to wear religious clothes or pray at work.

This attempt at disappearing a culture is nothing new for China. In 1999 the Party began persecuting Falun Gong, a religious sect mixing elements of Buddhism, Taoism and moral philosophy. Members gathering or protesting peacefully were arrested without reason, sometimes tortured, even killed, or sent to work in forced labour camps.

In 2009 two Uighur factory workers in Shoagun (on the other side of China) were accused of sexually assaulting a Han Chinese woman. There was uproar by other workers and the public, who killed the two men and injured another 117 (most Uighurs). Weeks later citizens in Xinjiang protested, demanding China persecute the killers of the two men. (Still no one has been arrested.) The protests lasted five days and began peacefully. It’s unclear what sparked them into violent rioting but soon disobedience filled the streets. 197 people were killed, most Han Chinese, and over 1,700 injured. Armed police were sent in and China turned off electricity and cell phone signal and closed local mosques.

The riots changed nothing and — with China continuing to implement mechanisms of control on Uighurs — civil unrest grew, crime rates rose and separatist groups formed demanding independence.

In 2014 in Yunnan in the South of China a group of individuals dressed in black appeared in the lobby of the Kunming train station armed with knives and cleavers attacking anyone in proximity. They killed 31 people and injured 143. Chinese officials compared the event to 9/11. The attackers are believed to have been Uighur Muslims — although some doubt exists — hailing from Hotan, a town in Xinjiang where the year before a demonstration to prevent the closure of a mosque had been violently shut down by police leaving 15 dead.

China immediately announced measures to fight terrorism by cracking down on Xinjiang. The police force was expanded and knives and scissors became rare in shops — knives in restaurant kitchens remain chained to the walls.

Months later echoing Western countries China declared a People’s War on Terror. Veils were burned in public. It became illegal to name a baby Mohammad or Fatima. Arrests and detention became more common as the first re-education camps were opened.

The story of the Xinjiang Re-Education Camps is a story of technology. In the years before the first camp opened modern smart technology became widespread in the region for the first time. Local culture exploded. Uighur comedians and musicians gathered large followings online. Social media flourished. Chinese culture was pushed away as Uighurs returned to the roots of their beliefs. They abstained from alcohol, cigarettes and pork, prayed five times a day and banded together in celebration of Islam. Demonstrations and protests, including calls for Xinjiang independence and the rioting in 2009, were organised — likely made possible — by social media.

Yet as if to show the dualities of our technology side-by-side, offering emancipation and social connection and being inherently democratic on one hand, China played the other hand, using the same technology to trap the Uighur people. China clearly understood the threat technology posed: immediately following the riots internet in the region was cut off for 10 months and Facebook and Twitter remain banned (China condones its own social media site).

All through China surveillance has become part of daily life. When news spread of the country’s public camera surveillance system — which works through facial recognition, allocating or reducing one’s ‘social points’ depending on one’s actions — people worried it represented a ‘real life Black Mirror’. But in Xinjiang the technology was pushed even further to turn the region into a police state.

The police force was expanded so much that local Uighurs were recruited en masse, being saved from the camps by doing so. (I thought of Thatcher here, breaking up the English working class by giving so much power to the police.) If you were to walk through Xinjiang now you’d find a police station roughly every 300 metres. ‘Convenience Police Stations’ they’re called. Their prevalence is so officers can be summoned quickly to anywhere, and people can quickly be taken into interrogation in the stations’ grey-walled, windowless rooms.

Extensive data is collected on all citizens in what is the ultimate fulfilment of what Foucault called the ‘discipline society’, where each person becomes recorded and defined by controlling institutions. A person is categorised rigidly into identity markers like gender, race, age and sexuality and also by their income, criminal past, education, owned property, future prospects etc. The weirdness of the human, the parts of us in constant flux, and the parts indefinable, are ignored or simply dulled and boxed in by the detailing of a bureaucratic system (or by the systems of social media). People can be easily identified, tracked, detained, deleted. The sum total of what a person is becomes little more than the personal outline they can create out of what is made available by the people controlling the surveillance. Foucault recorded a world much tamer than what the people of Xinjiang experience: all are required by law to give their DNA, finger prints, blood type, along with a voice recording and a facial scan, to the state; Foucault’s prediction of a society-as-panopticon has been given a hyper-repressive makeover using modern technology.

Police officers have machines that scan all the data on a person’s phone and know whether that person has visited any pages to do with Muslim culture, sent messages with words in that raise a red flag, or communicated with anybody outside the country. All will get a person sent to a camp.

Travel is restricted. When the camps began to appear all Uighurs were ordered to hand over their passports to the police for ‘safe keeping’. (This is actually something that happens in Naomi Alderman’s dystopian novel The Power which is a pulpy, fantastical book but which — and this has become very common in the last few years — has been caught up by reality. The absurdities imagined by our fictions are being outdone by the real world, and yet for some reason they seem troublingly normal when they’re real.) China’s surveillance is run by an AI system that improves itself over time and allows for the profile of each individual to be added up to measure whether that person is ‘unsafe’ or not; unsafe meaning she could commit an act of terror in the future, China using technology to stop terrorist acts before they happen. Aside from the immediate flaws of this system (see: Minority Report) the Chinese AI is programmed to immediately rate Uighurs and Muslims as more unsafe than others. This is racial profiling without the internal conflict of a conscious profiler. Possessing pictures of a Muslim family member or friend, not speaking Mandarin fluently enough, or not attending a satisfactory number of ‘flag waving’ events are just some of the things that are enough to get a person arrested.

A statistical hint that Xinjiang is a police state is the fact that despite Xinjiang containing only 1.5% of China’s population, in 2017 the region was the setting of 21% of arrests in China.

Another part of the assessment process is a program in which the state assigned 1.1 million Han Chinese to move in with Uighur families — they had no choice in the matter — to monitor their behaviour. These house guests would insist Uighurs drank, smoked, ate pork, all things forbidden in Islamic law, and doing these with a lack of enthusiasm was enough to get a family referred to a camp. The Han visitors were known as Big Brothers and Big Sisters, a name obviously meant to conjure up familial comfort but the overt reference therein to George Orwell’s 1984 is depressingly obvious.

In 2016 Chen Quanguo became Secretary of Xinjiang. This is a sinister development when one knows Quanguo was previously the Communist Secretary in Tibet and during his rule had similar re-education camps built to subjugate Tibetan monks. It would take too long to explain the wider context of the Tibetan camps since that isn’t our focus here, but as an outline: Tibet, in India, was invaded by China in the 1950s, although Tibetan activists still fight for freedom claiming China’s occupation is unlawful. Over the last few decades China has encouraged its citizens to move to Tibet, so much that Tibetans became a minority population in their own country. Buddhists in the region played a big part in challenging Chinese occupation, hence their rebellion was framed as a problem of religious fanaticism, leading to crackdown and a regime of re-education. Quanguo clearly brought his experience from Tibet to Xinjiang as the majority of the latter’s camps have been built since his leadership began.

Information online describing the Tibetan camps gives clues as to what it’s like in Xinjiang. Buddhist nuns were often raped by guards, sometimes while unconscious after collapsing from exhaustion during daily forced chanting and exercise. Cafeteria food contained dust and rocks. Inmates wore military uniforms. Disobedience led a person to be beaten by guards or have food rations taken away not only for the offender but for everyone in their living block.

China denied the existence of the Xinjiang camps for years before publicly acknowledging them: since then they’ve maintained that the ‘trainees’ living there are happy and well looked after and that the camps’ sole mission is to teach ‘correct thought’ in an effort to fight terrorism and extremism. Still, China declined to allow the UN to send delegates to inspect conditions and journalists from the BBC and Guardian have been turned away by the police when travelling too close to the camps.

The camps are all cloaked in the dull dressing of administrative normality: The Luopu County №1 Vocational Skills Training Centre one is called. And the facilities are certainly using eccentric tools for educating: barbed-wire fences, guards on watchtowers, prison-style walls, a robust surveillance system and nearby facilities for armed police. The procedure that sees a person end up in a camp is separate from the legal system: often people are sent for minor infractions, like possessing a Quran, visiting a mosque, even something unrelated to religious practice like not paying one’s water bill, sometimes for nothing at all. There are no trials and although early prisoners were released after a few months people currently imprisoned are held indefinitely with no chance of release. Even those early prisoners who were released were ‘blacklisted’ on surveillance systems putting them at sensitive risk of being detained again and barring them from using government buildings such as hospitals, banks or post offices.

How many people are in the camps? Of course no official numbers exist. Estimates are varied but average at a few hundred thousand being held in the camps at any one time, having housed a few million in total (the US estimates 3 million). And increasing all the time. BBC News published images taken by satellites that show how quickly existing camps are being expanded, doubling or tripling in size in the space of a year or so. Some Uighur areas have become so deserted that pictures reveal them to be ghost towns, padlocks on the doors, silence on the streets. Children left parentless due to their parents being taken to camps are orphaned into state-run care facilities. No news travels between the inside of the camps and outside meaning countless people don’t know the location of their family members or whether they are alive or dead.

Information on the camps remains mostly unreported. (It’s hard not to see the endless news loops of Brexit and Trump as a laugh in the face of urgent atrocities like this.) Most European countries have stayed silent on the matter. Saudi Arabia even praised China for using the camps to prevent terrorism. The UN declared the camps represent a major abuse of human rights. Turkey condemned the regime, to no affect, and a Uighur leader said the camps are ‘precursors to genocide’. The best source of information has been a non-profit called Radio Free Asia who’ve interviewed ex-prisoners and the families of current prisoners. As a sad follow up to this fact, family members of many RFA members have been sent to camps without any given reason.

The biggest opposition so far has come from the US who’ve even given protection and citizenship to some ex-prisoners.

But all actions taken so far are far too little.

(3)

The Xinjiang Re-Education camps are concentration camps. People don’t like to call them — or anything, other than the Nazi concentration camps of the past — concentration camps, highlighted by recent controversy over people referring to America’s Mexico border facilities by that name. It is a squeamishness that comes from the belief that comparing anything to the Nazi holocaust is sacrilege to its memory. But exact comparisons to the holocaust are rare, and concentration camp is a descriptive term that matches up perfectly with what the camps in Xinjiang are — and those on the US-Mexico border. (The definition of concentration camp, like the definition of all things, rages on, and will rage on forever, in academia, but here I’m invoking the most common-sense definition implied by the term.)

How can the proclamation to ‘never forget’ be upheld if the thing we should never forget is considered too sacred to remember? In his book Ethics the philosopher Alain Badiou writes that we base modern systems of ethics like human rights on what we consider evil, rather than good — i.e. what we don’t want to have done to us — and for this to work our image of evil needs a ‘lowest point’, which is the image of the Nazi holocaust, of Auschwitz. Which was so bad that nothing compares to it, and so everything seems defendable once a comparison to it has been made. The centre of our ethics is thus a blind spot: a point by which all is measured to, but which must never be measured to. Our prerogative seems to be to never remember.

Many holocaust survivors advocated against similar concentration camps in other countries for the remainder of their lives. In the 1950s the International Commission Against the Concentration Camp Regime was set up for this reason. Louis Martin-Chauffier, a survivor and Commission member, writes that we must look for detention conditions ‘in the capitalist societies… without forgetting our own.’ This isn’t mere rhetoric: totalitarian states aren’t the only ones who have produced concentration camps. A comparable example are the camps operational in America during World War 2 used to detain the US’s Japanese population, which are unsurprisingly less well-known than other state-run atrocities of the era.

If we cannot criticise something for being a concentration camp when that’s obviously what it is then the horrors of the past truly were committed in vain. There is no reason to talk in subtleties about the Xinjiang camps: they are a vile abuse on the people therein, and a scary attempt at erasing an entire culture.

What can historical knowledge of the Nazi holocaust tell us about the Xinjiang camps? The Nazis didn’t originally plan or intend to kill the Jews or other captives. The Jews were used as a scapegoat for the failings of Germany after its defeat in the first world war and over many years were segregated from the rest of society into ghettos. This made it easier for Germans to feel less sympathy for what came to happen to the Jews because by this time the Jewish people were an invisible neighbour. The decision to initiate the mass killings was not, as it is often presented, the outward unleashing of Hitler’s pathological hatred of the Jews. It was a ‘rational’ bureaucratic decision slowly coming into action on multiple levels of authority that aimed to answer the question of how to most efficiently and cheaply deal with the ‘Jewish problem’. And so the warning that the Xinjiang camps are ‘precursors to genocide’ has much historical basis: if one continually allows administrative systems to make decisions then history has already shown us where it will lead.

A different comparison is that both regimes present(ed) themselves on the surface of things as a defence against the threat a specific religion posed to the nation. But Hitler seems to have had no more personal hatred for Jews than Donald Trump does for Mexicans. Both play to the crowd, and the crowds they performed for had already decided on which groups they were opposing. How does this apply to China? Communism is, and has been right back to Marx, vehemently against religion of any kind. Marx viewed religion (the ‘opium of the masses’) as creating a ‘false consciousness’ that stops people from seeing that they are oppressed and working towards revolution. So it might seem possible that China’s stated mission of fostering ‘correct thought’ is a legitimate fulfilment of this, Communism having a belief system that, at least in theory, offers no room for others. But China has never acted this out: the country’s constitution guarantees ‘Freedom of worship’ to all citizens. And other religions happily exist there: there is a large Christian population in China, the Bible commonly sold in shops, and the Pope has even made multiple state visits. China’s problem isn’t with religion — why would it be? — it is with groups that pose a political threat. Tibetan Buddhists provided the core platform for Tibetan nationalism; Turkic Muslims in Xinjiang provided a space where Uighur Muslims could feel connected through identity and organise actions of dissent to the state. (An analogous use of the law is most countries’ prohibition on drugs, sex work and immigration on moral, protective grounds, when really they exist as catalysts for social control. Their perceived dangers aren’t of concern to legislators, only the opportunity they provide to control populations they would deem ‘unsafe’.) Not to mention that following Islamic law downgrades one’s spending as a consumer, which in a market economy immediately makes one ‘unsafe’.

If China’s goal really is to prevent future violence they have surely gone about it the wrong way: one doesn’t need to be a psychologist to know that forcing someone to go in one direction creates a need in them to push back in the other.

When I began writing this essay I thought it would be a given to any sane person that China’s aim to remove Muslims from their culture was an immoral one. But sat with friends one day I mentioned the camps and one responded, ‘I get that China is going about it the wrong way but it’s something that needs to be done.’ The ‘something’ referring to the removal of religion from the world. The man who said this fits the profile of the Militant Atheist perfectly, meaning his isn’t a fringe way of looking at things. The atheist community is a large one around the world, and especially online, taking their cue from the ‘New Atheist’ intellectuals and backed up by modern science, they view religion as society’s main woe and seem to imagine that a religionless world would be a peaceful, rationalist, scientific utopia. These are people who if asked would say they’d never support the Nazi holocaust (at least I hope — I obviously can’t speak for them). But they are already primed to support another one, on the condition that this future atrocity is presented in the right way. It’s a danger for anyone to think that the ‘clan’ they identify with automatically makes them the ‘good guy’; here it has meant that a person I know and consider to be intelligent can honestly believe that the forced imprisonment and abuse of a race of people can be viewed as a ‘necessary evil’ due to the need to eradicate religion.

What solutions, as in ways to close down the camps and release the inmates, present themselves to us? There is something about viewing the world from behind a keyboard, or a phone screen, that ignites in one the confidence to push for a naïve response, like demanding our government to stop this, no matter what. Which is a nice thought: that whenever it becomes clear terrible things are happening out there in the world our government sends over troops, diplomates, anything, to sort things out. But this will not happen. China is one of the wealthiest countries in the world and is likely to become the wealthiest in the next decade and thus is a key part of the global market. It is often repeated that Capitalism makes the world a more peaceful place because unlike for most of history in which a state or sovereignty saw all others as potential conquests for invasion and pillage, under global Capitalism they now see others as potential buyers and traders and markets. This mutual use of one another for monetary gain has surely prevented many wars and conflicts (without making the world quite as peaceful as its adherents believe) but the flipside of this appears to be that when another country within this global market is doing something bad we are unable, or at least very unwilling, to do anything about it, to even broadcast a negative judgement. We are all locked into place. Behind this is the implication that if Hitler had been a Capitalist and was profitable to other countries rather than aiming for global domination then it’s likely the Nazi holocaust would have been left to play itself out unchallenged, with the Allied Forces remembered in reality as altruistic heroes sitting back allowing the holocaust to take place as long as it didn’t directly affect them. From this we are left to wonder what further atrocities will be committed in the future, not fought against and lost but simply ignored, on the condition that the cogs of the market keep turning.

If, then, direct conflict isn’t an option the next most obvious answer is to stop trading with China. To use the market to pressure China into discontinuing the camps. The problem is that this would have to be a global effort. If one country refused to trade with them this would be no problem for China, but only for this dissenting country; all other countries would benefit by filling the gap now left in China’s market. (The UK certainly wouldn’t even consider opposing China since post-Brexit it needs all the trading ties it can get.) The only successful way to succeed using this method would be if all countries in the UN, or the EU, agree to stop trading — or to place embargoes and sanctions on their trade — with China. This too seems very improbable, but the UN was created following World War 2, and it and the EU represent the only successful multi-nation projects so far: if they were ever to have a bigger purpose then surely this is it?

There is, too, a problematic question that arises for those who would demand their country take action against China: why only China? If we are to enforce humanitarian action on all nations of the world we deem in need then there is no way one could stop at China. What about the horrific abuses happening in the Democratic Republic of Congo? If the UK opposed China does that mean it would stop doing arms deals with Saudi Arabia? Or take the US to account for its border conditions? But going down this trail of thought isn’t helpful: you become swamped by so many opposing thoughts that you decide the easiest option is to stand still. To stand up against abuse, even if doing so opens up contradictions, is a commendable goal, especially in situations in need of urgent change. America represents the best hope for the Xinjiang camps. America’s condemnation of them so far doesn’t likely spring from altruism but as a byproduct of the ongoing US-China ‘trade war’. Trump’s administration has worked to harm the rights of Muslims in the US but are advocating humanitarian freedom for those in Xinjiang, seemingly following the principle that ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’. But if the US can be pushed to act on this then their ulterior motives don’t matter much in the face of saved lives.

The stalemate preventing the world from stopping China run concentration camps cannot be escaped through the administrative model of societal change — i.e. the belief that politicians’ slight policy changes will eventually accumulate into a vastly better world — but must change in a much more radical way. It is no surprise that the scope of what needs changing pushes people into political passivity. But the surprising height of a mountain doesn’t mean one should not attempt climbing it.

Even as someone who supports radical change, when I see a call for change presented as the only way out of a political bind I immediately presume that the person writing put no thought into other alternatives, or I picture an aging man who calls himself a Communist because thirty years ago he read Das Kapital and hung a Soviet flag on his bedroom wall, using the call for a revolution he doesn’t believe in as a defence protecting him from having to examine more viable, immediate political options. But the more I look into any one subject, in this case the concentration camps in Xinjiang, the more I see that if we want atrocities like this to stop, we need major political change, the world having boxed us in and offered us no alternatives that are good enough. If you want the camps to stop but don’t believe in a major political shift — a move to Socialism, for instance — then you need to ask whether the world you are gambling on will work itself out. Do I believe this change will come? Yes, but not without work, likely not before many more bad things happen. Do I believe this change will come in time to save those currently detained in Xinjiang? I doubt it. The world was aware of similar things happening in Tibet and didn’t prevent them. Should we blame the world or ourselves for this? Both, I think. I want change but have so far played no part in it, all I’ve done here is write about things, I’ve not helped anybody, and acknowledging this in no way absolves me of it.