Since the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) came to power in 1949, it has continued suppressing citizens and spiritual groups to maintain power. Recently, reports have confirmed that the communist regime is using sexual abuse as a tool for re-educating and transforming prisoners of faith, regardless of their age.
The CCP has been persecuting Uyghur Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, and Falun Gong practitioners for years, to coerce them to renounce their faith. Those who refuse to comply are detained in “re-education camps” where they are subjected to unimaginable abuses, including gang rape and electrocution.
Sexual Abuse of Uyghurs
To condemn the CCP’s grave human rights violations, the Trump-era administration said on Jan. 19, 2021, that the communist regime has committed “genocide” and “crimes against humanity” in its repression of the Uyghurs Muslims.“After careful examination of the available facts, I have determined that the PRC [People’s Republic of China], under the direction and control of the CCP, has committed genocide against the predominantly Muslim Uyghurs and other ethnic and religious minority groups in Xinjiang,” Pompeo said. He added, “I believe this genocide is ongoing, and that we are witnessing the systematic attempt to destroy Uyghurs by the Chinese party-state.”
Tursunay Ziawudun, 42, who fled to the United States after escaping from Xinjiang following her release, recounted to the BBC the sexual abuses she underwent and witnessed while detained for nine months in China’s secretive camps in Xinjiang.
Ziawudun, who is married to a Kazakh and had returned to Xinjiang for work in 2016 after staying in Kazakhstan for five years, detailed how she was shocked with an electric baton and “gang-raped on three occasions,” the BBC reported.
“The woman took me to the room next to where the other girl had been taken in,” Ziawudun told the BBC. “They had an electric stick, I didn’t know what it was, and it was pushed inside my genital tract, torturing me with an electric shock.”
“They don’t only rape but also bite all over your body, you don’t know if they are human or animal,” she said. “They didn’t spare any part of the body, they bit everywhere leaving horrible marks. It was disgusting to look at ... And it is not just one person who torments you, not just one predator. Each time they were two or three men.”
The BBC report said that even the elderly women detainees were not spared. Ziawudun recalled seeing an elderly Uyghur woman being humiliated.
“They stripped everything off the elderly lady, leaving her with just her underwear. She was so embarrassed that she tried to cover herself with her arms,” Ziawudun told BBC. “I cried so much watching the way they treated her. Her tears fell like rain.”
Ziawuden’s claims were backed by Qelbinur Sedik, an Uzbek woman from Xinjiang who was coerced to teach the Chinese language to the internment-camp detainees. Sedik told the BBC that a camp policewoman confirmed, after Sedik once secretly asked her, that sexual abuse is indeed happening in the camps.
“Yes, the rape has become a culture. It is gang rape and the Chinese police not only rape them but also electrocute them. They are subject to horrific torture,” Sedik recalled the policewoman’s words.
Gulzira Auelkhan, another Kazakh woman from Xinjiang who was forced to help the camp guards by stripping women, also confirmed to the BBC that gang rape is common in the camps.
“They forced me to take off those women’s clothes and to restrain their hands and leave the room,” Auelkhan said. “You can’t tell anyone what happened ... It is designed to destroy everyone’s spirit.”
In the recent past, several previously detained Uyghurs had also described similar harrowing tales of torture and rape from the Xinjiang camps.
“While they were raping her they checked to see how we were reacting,” Sauytbay told Haaretz. “People who turned their head or closed their eyes, and those who looked angry or shocked, were taken away and we never saw them again. It was awful.
Sexual Abuse of Other Spiritual Believers
Apart from targeting Uyghur Muslims, the CCP also employs such horrendous torture methods on Falun Gong practitioners, Buddhists, and Christians.At the notorious Masanjia Forced Labor Camp in Shenyang, Liaoning Province, 18 female practitioners were thrown into the men’s cells and the guards encouraged the inmates to rape the spiritual adherents, according to the report. The elderly or young, no one was exempted from these abuses.
In 2001, Zou Jin, 70, of Changsha City, Hunan Province, was gang-raped at the Changsha City First Detention Center and sentenced to nine years before she passed away. A 9-year-old girl, who was the orphan child of a Falun Gong practitioner, was gang-raped at the Changping Mental Hospital in Beijing in 2002. “Her screams and cries were heart-wrenching,” Minghui.org reported.
The report said the authorities also forced pregnant practitioners to abort their unborn babies, beating and shocking them with electric batons which eventually lead to miscarriage.
The CCP hasn’t shown any leniency in abusing Buddhist nuns or Christians either.
The Tibetan Center for Human Rights and Democracy has reported on the personal account of an anonymous Tibetan monk who was detained for four months in a re-education center, in Sog County, Tibet Autonomous Region, in 2017. The monk recounted seeing nuns being sexually abused after participating in military drills.
“Who knows what else they did to the nuns?” the monk wrote.