The Uyghur Archipelago

“They had a quota. This is common knowledge in Xinjiang.” These words struck a chilling resonance with me, when I was speaking this morning to someone close to one of the young men in the Uyghur labor camps. I had asked how he had been taken.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote about the Communist Party’s system of quotas in Russia, in which political prisoners would be arrested by the numbers.

“Send 200!” — meant make 200 arrests. “Ship 240 boxes of soap” referred to a requirement of 240 prisoners to be sent. Sometimes neighbors would be taken instead of the original person targeted, what mattered was filling the requirement from the top.

In Xinjiang, it seems to be the same story — a requirement was handed down to arrest a certain number of Uyghur young men, between the ages of maybe 15 to 35. And regardless of whether the man was educated or not, had a business or not, had a family or not, they filled the camps and the factories.

And don’t think, that this fails to involve you, dear reader. I’m sure there is some object in hands reach that reads “Made in China” on the bottom. Made in a new thriving business, or made in a slave labor factory? It would be good to know. It is on all of us to push back.

If you reach out and take a step, it becomes easier. Comment here, message this author, do your own research — it is not hard to become involved, or to become part of the story. I wrote a bit about how we do that for Impakter, here: Digital Outreach: Be the Story

And here, if you like, is the page from the Gulag Archipelago: