Behind Beijing’s carefully crafted façade of “ethnic unity” and “social stability” lies a campaign of control masquerading as harmony. In Xinjiang, home to over 13 million Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims, China’s leadership has built an Orwellian system designed not to integrate a people, but to erase their very identity.
Slogans promising prosperity and inclusion echo through state media. Yet beneath the propaganda, independent investigations, UN assessments, and eyewitness accounts converge on one inescapable truth: what Beijing calls “integration” is, in fact, a calculated project of cultural destruction.
A Crime Hidden Behind Harmony
In August 2022, the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) released a landmark report concluding that “serious human rights violations” had been committed against predominantly Muslim minorities in Xinjiang. The assessment, the result of years of documentation and analysis, found that China’s policies “may constitute international crimes, in particular crimes against humanity.”
The report drew from 40 in-depth interviews with former detainees, as well as Chinese government laws, internal regulations, and statistical data. Two-thirds of those interviewed described torture or ill-treatment in so-called Vocational Education and Training Centres—the euphemism Beijing uses for internment camps. Women recounted sexual violence, invasive medical procedures, and forced confessions.
The scale of repression is staggering. The Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), using satellite imagery, mapped over 380 detention facilities, many expanding even as Beijing claimed to be closing them. The same research found that roughly 16,000 mosques—65 per cent of Xinjiang’s total—had been damaged or destroyed since 2017, alongside shrines, cemeteries, and pilgrimage routes. ASPI called it a “systematic and intentional campaign” to erase Uyghur cultural heritage.
Human Rights Watch corroborated these findings, documenting arbitrary detentions, family separations, reproductive coercion, and mass surveillance. In its 2024 report, the organisation concluded unequivocally that China “persists in committing crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims.”
What China promotes as “social harmony” is enforced through fear and deprivation—a totalising system where every act of faith becomes a crime of extremism, and every cultural expression a potential threat to the state.
Sinicisation as State Doctrine
The roots of the current campaign lie in Xi Jinping’s doctrine of Sinicisation—a state project to mould all religions, ethnicities, and traditions into the image of Han Chinese identity. Revised religious regulations under Xi’s tenure instruct that faith must “adhere to the direction of Sinicisation” and “reflect Chinese characteristics.”
In practice, this means coercive conformity. Mosques are stripped of Islamic architecture and replaced with domes and calligraphy in Chinese style. Sermons are vetted by the Communist Party. Imams must pledge allegiance to socialism and national unity.
Sinicisation extends beyond religion into language, art, and education. In 2017, authorities in Hotan prefecture banned the Uyghur language in schools entirely, mandating Mandarin instruction from preschool onwards. Teachers were warned not to use Uyghur even outside classrooms. A 2023 study by Cambridge University researchers found that “forced Chinese learning constitutes a major part of daily routine” in internment camps, where Uyghur was often banned outright.
Language policy, in this context, becomes an instrument of domination. When a people’s tongue is silenced, intergenerational transmission of culture collapses. Children are raised as strangers to their own heritage—a condition Beijing describes as integration.
The Machinery of Control
Sinicisation in Xinjiang is not ideological alone—it is institutionalised through pervasive surveillance and coercive social engineering.
The “Pair Up and Become Family” programme, initially launched as a “poverty alleviation” initiative, now embeds over one million Communist Party officials in Uyghur homes. Ostensibly to promote “ethnic unity,” these officials live alongside Uyghur families, monitoring behaviour, assessing political loyalty, and enforcing ideological conformity. Human Rights Watch has called it “the ultimate form of surveillance.”
Religious life has been systematically dismantled. Children under 18 are prohibited from entering mosques or fasting during Ramadan. Parents risk punishment for teaching religion at home. Government circulars describe “transforming” religious thought to produce “Islam with Chinese characteristics”—a euphemism for state-controlled faith stripped of meaning.
In Xinjiang, belief itself has become subversive. Activities as benign as growing a beard, wearing a hijab, or refusing alcohol can be classified as “signs of extremism.” Under China’s broad counter-terrorism laws, such acts are grounds for detention.
This conflation of religious observance with extremism is deliberate. By criminalising identity, the state ensures obedience not through persuasion, but through perpetual fear.
Integration by Isolation
Beijing’s claim that it seeks “integration through development” collapses under the weight of evidence. While the government touts economic gains and improved infrastructure, the human cost remains invisible in official data. The reality is not development, but dependency—an economic model designed to bind communities to the state while dismantling their autonomy.
Uyghurs who once owned land or small businesses now find themselves conscripted into forced labour programmes under the guise of “poverty alleviation.” Cotton production, solar panel manufacturing, and textiles—all industries central to Xinjiang’s economy—have been linked to coercive labour transfers.
Simultaneously, family structures have been fractured. Thousands of Uyghurs abroad remain unable to contact relatives in Xinjiang as Chinese authorities revoke passports and restrict travel. Mothers are separated from children sent to state-run boarding schools, where religious instruction is prohibited and cultural history erased.
The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child expressed “grave concern” in 2023 over the exponential rise of such institutions, warning that they “undermine the child’s ties to their cultural, religious, and linguistic identity.”
Through this fragmentation of family, culture, and faith, Beijing has perfected integration by isolation—displacing individuals from their roots until they no longer remember where they began.
Propaganda as Parallel Reality
China’s state media broadcasts a parallel universe. Slick documentaries showcase “happy dancing minorities,” “vocational training graduates,” and “modern villages.” Foreign delegations, hand-picked and escorted, are shown gleaming facilities and model classrooms where everyone smiles on cue.
These Potemkin tours serve a dual purpose: they project legitimacy abroad and sow doubt about the credibility of survivors’ testimonies. Meanwhile, journalists and researchers are barred from conducting independent fieldwork in the region. Those who attempt it face intimidation, surveillance, or expulsion.
The information environment is as controlled as the physical one. Online, Beijing floods social media with orchestrated disinformation campaigns, producing hundreds of articles and videos that “invert reality,” depicting victims as extremists and re-education as compassion.
The objective is not persuasion—it is exhaustion. By overwhelming global audiences with competing narratives, China blurs the line between truth and falsehood until both lose meaning.
The Reality Behind the Facade
Beneath the rhetoric of unity lies the systematic dismantling of a people’s cultural and spiritual existence. What Beijing calls “integration” is enforced conformity—achieved through detention, indoctrination, and fear.
The UN’s findings, corroborated by ASPI, Human Rights Watch, and other independent researchers, reveal a deliberate strategy: to eliminate difference in the name of stability, and to destroy identity in the name of unity.
This is not integration—it is erasure.
As the world debates diplomatic niceties and trade partnerships, millions of Uyghurs remain imprisoned by the state’s machinery of surveillance and coercion. Each demolished mosque, each silenced tongue, each vanished family tells the same story: that behind the slogans of harmony lies a state terrified of diversity, and behind every declaration of unity lies the echo of a culture being extinguished.