Communist China’s mass imprisonment of Uyghurs will have a severe effect on future generations of the ethnic group, according to a recent report from Yale University.
The report estimates that if Beijing continues its current repressive policies in Xinjiang, Uyghurs could suffer a combined total of 4.4 million years of imprisonment.
“Forcibly displacing hundreds of thousands of Uyghur individuals from the communities of the Uyghur people and stripping from them more than 4.4 million cumulative years will grossly undermine the integrity of their people to continue surviving as a group,” the report reads.
Researchers then multiplied 8.8 years with about 500,000 Uyghurs that the Xinjiang High People’s Procturate said it prosecuted from 2017 to 2021, which yielded the estimate of 4.4 million years.
The report emphasizes that the database “is not comprehensive” and the “actual numbers are far more significant.”
“Almost 90 [percent] of criminal records in Xinjiang are not public, even though legal records in other Chinese regions are, meaning that records of hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs who are known to be imprisoned were unavailable for the context of this particular analysis,” the report reads.
The researchers said Uyghurs face what they call “ethnic incapacitation,” meaning that individual Uyghurs may survive, but the “community will collapse, disperse, and lose all substance without a majority of its members to maintain it.”
“With every additional day of Uyghur incarceration, ethnic incapacitation progressively becomes more of a reality,“ the researchers wrote. ”If the Uyghur population continues to be barred from maintaining their communities, it is only a matter of time before full ethnic incapacitation is realized and the damage is irreversible.”
The report offers some recommendations to stop the CCP’s persecution of Uyghurs, including having member states of the United Nations “activate all accountability mechanisms to compel China.” Further, it calls on the U.N. Human Rights Council and the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights to “take a collective stance” against the persecution.