Demolition and Eviction: Part 4

The next day, I approached Aygul’s shop. I saw Aygul’s husband outside the shop with their son, and they were piling household goods—a water boiler, a fan, a lamp, blankets—into the back of a tricycle mo-ped. I chose not to stop and say hello, too nervous about being seen and not wanting to draw attention to her husband or the situation or me. By the end of the first week of May, the entire neighborhood was completely demolished.  

This is the where those shops with the green shutters from the previous post used to stand. Source: Photo by author, May 2017.

Later, in mid-May 2017, I met up with Aygul and she told me:

“I tried delaying going back to Kashgar as long as I could. But the situation is just out of control,” she explained, shaking her head. They are cracking down like never before. I have to leave. I have to go back to Kashgar now, or else I’ll get arrested. They might arrest me or send me to ‘re-education’ training school.” She shook her head and raised her eyebrows while pursing her lips.

That was the last time I saw or heard from her.

This story illustrates the way that poor, rural migrants were evicted from the city through a slow escalation and tightening of rules. The evictions were carried out as targeted neighborhood policing action that profiled rural Uyghurs and used demolition, for the purpose of re-development, as a pretext to force Uyghurs economically and politically from the city and into internment camps.

Aygul’s experience was a common one I observed during the spring of 2017. 

At the time, nobody knew what was going on. The rules kept changing and escalating. It was confusing and scary. We didn’t realize it at the time, but the purpose of demolishing Uyghur homes and shops, and eventually forcefully evicting Uyghur migrants from the city, was to force poor Uyghurs to go back to the countryside where they would be met with forced internment, held without trial or criminal conviction, never to return.

After Aygul, many of my friends started disappearing. The confusion and fear was palpable in the whispers and looks exchanged when people made eye contact and just shook their heads. Words did not need to be exchanged to know that a relative or friend had been sent to internment for “re-education.”

Now, a year later, we have satellite images of large internment camps and analysis of government documents that tell us the Chinese government holds more than 1 million Uyghurs without trial.

The end.