More than anything, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) fears separatism and unrest, and when it comes to Xinjiang, the leadership has been uneasy for the last decade. “July 5, 2009, is a date that forever changed the course of Xinjiang history,” SupChina’s Xinjiang columnist, Darren Byler, wrote last year. On that day, Uyghurs and Han Chinese clashed on the streets of the provincial capital, Urumqi, leading to 129 deaths and more than 800 casualties, according to Chinese state media (likely the most conservative estimates). That event, Byler writes, “is often evoked as a key moment that precipitated the current mass internment of Turkic Muslims across the region.”

But the detention and thought reform program only began some years later, after Xí Jìnpíng 习近平 had firmly established his leadership of the Party, the state, and the military. As Millward points out, the classified documents leaked to the New York Times in November 2019 show that “three terrorist events in 2014 seemed to have pushed Xi to adopt a whole new approach” in Xinjiang, and to accelerate the CCP’s “strike hard” campaign (严厉打击暴力恐怖活动专项行动 yánlì dǎjí bàolì kǒngbù huódòng zhuānxiàng xíngdòng) initiated in May of that year.

Those three incidents:

March 1, Kunming: Thirty-one killed and 141 wounded at a train station by eight knife-wielding assailants.

April 30, Urumqi: Three killed and 79 wounded at a train station in a knife and bomb attack, coinciding with Xi’s first visit to Xinjiang as president.

May 22, Urumqi: Thirty-nine killed and more than 90 wounded in a morning market attack via explosives.

From the government’s perspective, there was a problem that needed to be addressed. But as the vast majority of outside observers would argue, the CCP’s response was out of proportion to the threat. The acceleration of Xi’s “people’s war on terror” has resulted in nothing less than cultural genocide.

Millward continues: “If you actually look at the kinds of acts which we would recognize as terrorism — that is, with a religious inspiration and targeting random civilians — there aren’t that many… The idea of locking up one and a half million people is absolutely crazy when you have a handful, literally a small handful, of perpetrators of terrorist acts.”

Context: Chinese state media’s 50-minute documentary on “fighting terrorism in Xinjiang,” released last month.