'Your God Is Xi Jinping Now'

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Ellen Bork, 'Your God Is Xi Jinping Now.' Beijing at first denied the existence of camps for Xinjiang's Muslims. Now the party calls them 'vocational education and training centers.' Wall Street Journal, June 11, 2025, at page A13
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/w ... secuted/ar-AA1GslSi
(book review on John Beck, Those Who Should Be Seized Should Be Seized. China's relentless persecution of Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities. Melville House, May 27, 2025)

Note:
(a)
(i) The REVIEW title comes from a sentence in the review: "One guard told [a Kazakh in Xinjiang named] Saira, 'your God is Xi Jinping now.' "
(ii)
(A) The BOOK title is translated from 该抓的抓 (该杀的杀).
(B) Melville House Publishing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melville_House_Publishing
(2001- ; based in Brooklyn; "The company is named after the author Herman Melville")
(b) "officials were deployed to monitor the population, some by living in their subjects' homes and sharing their beds as part of the 'Join Up and Become Family' program. * * * [One Chinese official] claimed that Xinjiang's Muslims were the 'happiest in the world [2017 新疆党委外宣办副主任艾力提·沙力: 世界上最幸福的穆斯林生活在新疆].' As shock and revulsion spread around the world, however, officials put forward another line: The camps were '[新疆职业技能教育培训中心 Xinjiang] vocational education and training centers' * * * Three Evils: 'separatism, religious extremism and terrorism.'* * * Mr Xi stressed 'ethnic mingling' "
(i) Civil Servant-Family Pair Up  结对认亲
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Servant-Family_Pair_Up
(ii) For Three Evils 三股势力, see 《新疆的若干历史问题》白皮书。  国务院新闻办公室, 2019年7月21日
https://www.gov.cn/zhengce/2019-07/21/content_5412300.htm

前言:
* * *
"中国是统一的多民族国家，新疆各民族是中华民族血脉相连的家庭成员。在漫长的历史发展进程中，新疆的命运始终与伟大祖国和中华民族的命运紧密相连。然而，一个时期以来，境内外敌对势力，特别是民族分裂势力、宗教极端势力、暴力恐怖势力（以下简称 '三股势力'），为了达到分裂、肢解中国的目的，蓄意歪曲历史、混淆是非。他们抹杀新疆是中国固有领土，否定新疆自古以来就是多民族聚居、多文化交流、多宗教并存等客观事实，妄称新疆为 '东突厥斯坦,' 鼓噪新疆 '独立,' 企图把新疆各民族和中华民族大家庭、新疆各民族文化和多元一体的中华文化割裂开来。

"历史不容篡改，事实不容否定。新疆是中国神圣领土不可分割的一部分，新疆从来都不是什么'东突厥斯坦;' 维吾尔族是经过长期迁徙融合形成的，是中华民族的组成部分；新疆是多文化多宗教并存的地区，新疆各民族文化是在中华文化怀抱中孕育发展的；伊斯兰教不是维吾尔族天生信仰且唯一信仰的宗教，与中华文化相融合的伊斯兰教扎根中华沃土并健康发展。
(2010- ; "also known as Pair Up and Become Family")
(iii) inter-ethnic mingling 民族(交往交流)交融

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In 2017, satellite images, leaked government documents, online tenders for prison construction and guards, as well as social-media posts of ribbon-cutting ceremonies revealed a network of prison camps used to detain, torture and politically indoctrinate Turkic Muslims in China’s far-western region of Xinjiang. The following year the U.S. State Department cited estimates that between 800,000 and 2 million people were interned in these camps.

Initially the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) denied the camps’ existence. One official insisted that China was the target of vicious lies and claimed that Xinjiang’s Muslims were the “happiest in the world.” As shock and revulsion spread around the world, however, officials put forward another line: The camps were “vocational education and training centers” providing instruction in Mandarin language, civic education and even hairdressing. Meanwhile, across Xinjiang, mosques were being razed and intensive surveillance imposed; officials were deployed to monitor the population, some by living in their subjects’ homes and sharing their beds as part of the “Join Up and Become Family” program.

In “Those Who Should Be Seized Should Be Seized,” John Beck illustrates the brutality of China’s repression through the experiences of four individuals. Saira is a Kazakh writer and entrepreneur; Tursunay is a Uyghur nurse. Both women survived the re-education camps. Adiljan, a Uyghur, fled Xinjiang after a brief detention and settled in Istanbul, where he sought out and confronted Chinese agents spying on the Uyghur exile community. Serikzhan, a Kazakh national based in Almaty, sounded the alarm about his fellow Kazakhs being persecuted in China; for this he earned the wrath of his own government.

Driven to recover territories lost at the fall of the Qing empire in 1911, China’s People’s Liberation Army took control of Xinjiang in 1949 and then Tibet, to Xinjiang’s south, during the 1950s. Together these two regions constitute an enormous swath of territory along China’s frontiers, sparsely populated by inhabitants with close cultural and religious ties with neighboring India and parts of the Soviet Union that would later become the independent Central Asian republics.

Deeply insecure, the CCP brought in troops and Chinese settlers, making the inhabitants of Xinjiang and Tibet minorities in their own lands. Manifestations of ethnic or religious identity were cast as the Three Evils: “separatism, religious extremism and terrorism.” Repression, in turn, stoked unrest; responses to actual terror attacks fell arbitrarily and disproportionately on the broader population.

Xinjiang’s Muslims were always persecuted, but China’s Xi Jinping has taken repression there to new heights. Mr. Beck’s title comes from a speech Mr. Xi gave to a 2014 party meeting. Coming only two years after he became the CCP’s general secretary, it marked a departure from party policy that, at least officially, embraced China as a multiethnic state. Instead, Mr. Xi stressed “ethnic mingling” in pursuit of the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese race.” In other words, not tolerance of diverse populations leading to a shared civic identity, but erasure.

Mr. Beck excerpts this speech and other party documents, as well as human-rights reports, as epigraphs to his chapters but otherwise lets the survivors tell their stories.

Mr. Xi’s agenda became horrifyingly concrete in the camps: physical abuse, rape, forced sterilization and indoctrination aimed at eradicating the ethnic and religious identity of Xinjiang’s Muslims. Saira tells of receiving mysterious injections. Tursunay describes being attacked by guards: “They took turns at first and then it was all of them at once. They used something metal and they used shock batons. . . . If Tursunay had known what awaited her in the camp . . . she would have killed herself.” Inmates had to study and regurgitate the tenets of “Xi Jinping Thought,” Mr. Beck tells us, and write essays against “harmful ideologies or influences,” including religions that were likened to “disease.” One guard told Saira, “your God is Xi Jinping now.”

Those fortunate to be released found their hometowns depleted, their former neighbors living under a pall of fear. When Tursunay asks about absent friends and relatives, she receives only hushed replies: “taken, taken.”

Even those who escape Xinjiang find they cannot escape the Chinese state. China is the world’s leader in transnational repression, reaching into other countries to harass, intimidate and assault critics and refugees—even in the U.S.—and training other autocracies to do the same.

In Virginia’s substantial Uyghur community, Mr. Beck tells us, talking publicly about what happened to them in Xinjiang carries with it “the near certainty of being contacted by Chinese authorities,” not only from police inside China but from embassy officials posted in the U.S. and Chinese overseas students engaged in the party’s united-front influence activities. Serikzhan feels threatened by both the Kazakh and Chinese governments; he receives intimidating phone calls and online attacks and suspects he is being surveilled.

America’s response has so far been creditable. Washington sanctioned some top Chinese officials, including, in 2020, Chen Quanguo, the former party chief of Tibet. (Mr. Chen’s transfer to party chief of Xinjiang inspired Serikzhan to send recorded warnings, via WhatsApp, to fellow ethnic Kazakhs, advising them to flee.) In 2021 Secretary of State Mike Pompeo determined that China’s campaign against the Muslims of Xinjiang constituted a genocide and crimes against humanity. And when he was a senator, Secretary of State Marco Rubio sponsored legislation to block the importation of products made with forced labor in Xinjiang; the law took effect in 2022. But China’s atrocities continue. According to a February 2025 report by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the number of Turkic Muslims currently detained in some form exceed 500,000.

Mr. Beck’s book reads at times like a tale of suspense as he recounts poignant stories of suffering, resilience and survival. He has added to the body of literature documenting the effects of Mr. Xi’s dystopian vision and its consequences, not only for the Muslims of Xinjiang but also for the rest of the world.

Ms. Bork writes about democracy and human rights in American foreign policy.