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…