The Chinese Communist Party is locking up and terrorizing millions of its Muslim citizens in detention camps and targeting the Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and other Muslim minorities. These peoples are considered native to the Xinjiang region where the camps are located, speak Turkish, and have their own religious practices and beliefs not shared by the Chinese Communist Party and the majority of China. 

Xinjiang, China is roughly the size of Alaska and has a population of 25 million people. BuzzFeed News analysis has found 206 million square feet meant to detain Muslims. The camps are believed to have been started in 2016 as an experiment and were reported to have contained around 1 million Muslims. However, they are reported to have only grown since then in the past five years. The numbers are now estimated to be more than 10 million citizens imprisoned. According to Radio Free Asia News, Mihrigul Tursun (a Muslim women) in 2018 said, “I was abused, persecuted, and tortured in my own homeland. I was about to die, and then I was brought here (the United States).” Tursun later explains how in 2015, once she returned home with triplets to Xinjiang, she was randomly questioned for 4 hours. At the end of the questioning she was black bagged and taken to the detention camp.

Chinese officials have denied civil, political rights, and freedom to the minorities living in Xinjiang, through genocide, torture, and arbitrary arrest. These detention camps are under heavy surveillance. Forced labor, sterilization, and sexual abuses have all been reported by free Muslims in the area. 

Another practice reported in the detention camps include Muslims being forced to go to political indoctrination sessions. Is the camp really “re-educating” Muslims to think more in line with the Chinese Communist Party? Or are Muslims being forced against their own will to convert their way of thinking to how the Chinese Communist Party wants them to think? Unlike the United States, China does not have a guaranteed freedom of speech which has enabled the continued practice of Chinese Communism. BBC News has wrote about the subject in June, declaring that “China has also been accused of targeting Muslim religious figures and banning religious practices in the region, as well as destroying mosques and tombs.”  

Chinese citizens that do talk about it on the internet are removed immediately and face consequences for speaking out. Many Chinese also confuse the detention camps and prisons meant for their criminals. These detention camps, however, are not normal criminal prisons. BuzzFeed News states in 2021 that many Chinese citizens still have no idea that this is even happening in their own country. The Chinese Communist Party has kept this news secret from the public for 6 years and those that do know are too scared to elaborate upon the subject. 

Even the Walt Disney Company has ignored these reports of abuse. The movie Mulan (2020) was filmed in Xinjiang, only minutes away from the towering walls of the camps, which Disney has been criticized for since 2020. Disney even includes thanks for the Turpan Municipal Bureau of Public Security in the credits, the organization in charge of the camps in the area. Walt Disney is known for being a big, happy company, and then completely disregarding the reports and walls of the camps is causing wariness for the future of Disney.       

Xinjiang, China has been compared to those of Nazi Germany during the second World War, locking up people of different ethnicity, ever since the first reports of abuse were written about in 2016, the first reports of abuse was rape. BBC News interviewed Tursunay Ziawudun and she claimed, “Sometime after midnight, they came to the cells to select the women they wanted and took them down the corridor to a “black room”, where there were no surveillance cameras.” The Uyhgers, Kazahks and other Muslim minorities are being discriminated against, imprisoned, and possibly worse. Like the National Socialists in Germany during World War II, the Chinese Communist Party is targeting Muslim minorities for the crime of being different.