Those Who Should Be Seized Should be Seized: China’s Relentless Persecution of Uyghurs and Other Ethnic Minorities by John Beck
'Those Who Should Be Seized Should be Seized: China’s Relentless Persecution of Uyghurs and Other Ethnic Minorities' by John Beck
Since 2012, Mainland China has waged war against the Muslim minorities on the country’s western fringe, the Uyghurs and Kazakhs. Following the program set by their oppression of the Buddhist Tibetans, the Chinese Communist regime has installed a high-tech surveillance state as well as an old-fashioned police state. Cellphones are monitored, cameras and scanners are everywhere, along with the more traditional police checkpoints and network of informers. Troops are on the streets, “Body armor and helmets on. Sticks and shields ready.” And “at night they came to take people away.”
Writing with a novelist’s flair for psychology and local color, journalist-activist John Beck presents a frightening picture of China’s western provinces through the lives of four Uyghurs and Kazakhs. The Communist regime has settled thousands of ethnic Chinese in those provinces as a land grab, religious observation is as dangerous as it was in days of Mao, books and apps are banned. As one of Bank’s subjects witnessed, books don’t always burn easily, but the authorities have the time and appetite for destruction.
The Chinese regime speaks of “Stability Maintenance,” requiring mass arrests, disappearances, death. For Beck’s subjects, reasoning with thugs proves impossible. They are impervious to nuance and discussion dead-ends in accusations, confessions or torture. The totalitarian rather than merely authoritarian nature of the regime takes the form of “extra training” in “reeducation centers” whose goal is nothing less than “transforming” individuals into obedient cogs.
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