Early in my journalism career, a veteran investigative reporter gave me a piece of advice I have never forgotten: The hotter the story, the more you want a document of some kind that you can verify and then show readers. This will build trust.
You can see this principal at work in the blockbuster religion story of the weekend — that New York Times foreign desk report about ongoing and even expanding efforts to lock up and, if need be, brainwash or execute a million or more Uighur Muslims in what can only be called reeducation or concentration camps.
The dramatic double-decker headline includes a nod to the document stash at the heart of it all:
‘Absolutely No Mercy’: Leaked Files Expose How China Organized Mass Detentions of Muslims
More than 400 pages of internal Chinese documents provide an unprecedented inside look at the crackdown on ethnic minorities in the Xinjiang region.
As always, it’s good to tell readers as much as you can tell them about the sourcing, to hang on to as much trust as possible; Thus:
Though it is unclear how the documents were gathered and selected, the leak suggests greater discontent inside the party apparatus over the crackdown than previously known. The papers were brought to light by a member of the Chinese political establishment who requested anonymity and expressed hope that their disclosure would prevent party leaders, including [President Xi Jinping], from escaping culpability for the mass detentions.
This is a stunning, must-read story and it deserves the acclaim that it is getting.
However, I would like to note one religion-shaped hole. A theme running through the report is that Chinese officials are divided over whether or not they will be able to produce a safe, compromised, easy-to-control version of Islam — similar to their own state-sanctioned Christian churches.
The bottom line: It would have required only an extra line or two in this report to note that Chinese officials have also unleashed attacks on independent, underground churches, as well as the crusade against Uighur Muslims. As a rule “conservative” reports on persecuted Christians in China mention the horrors being inflicted on Muslims. Why not take a similar approach in this Times blockbuster?
But back to the crucial documents at the heart of this report. Readers are told that, at several points, Chinese leaders are instructed to, “Round up everyone who should be rounded up.” That says it all.
Here is the crucial Times summary describing the origin and contents of the leaked stash of documents. As you would expect, these actions come in response to violence by Islamic radicals. Chinese officials are determined not to be repeat British errors, in which — in the eyes of Chinese officials — the Brits were too worried about protecting “human rights.”
The directive was among 403 pages of internal documents that have been shared with The New York Times in one of the most significant leaks of government papers from inside China’s ruling Communist Party in decades. They provide an unprecedented inside view of the continuing clampdown in Xinjiang, in which the authorities have corralled as many as a million ethnic Uighurs, Kazakhs and others into internment camps and prisons over the past three years.
The party has rejected international criticism of the camps and described them as job-training centers that use mild methods to fight Islamic extremism. But the documents confirm the coercive nature of the crackdown in the words and orders of the very officials who conceived and orchestrated it. …
Children saw their parents taken away, students wondered who would pay their tuition and crops could not be planted or harvested for lack of manpower, the reports noted. Yet officials were directed to tell people who complained to be grateful for the Communist Party’s help and stay quiet.
The leaked papers offer a striking picture of how the hidden machinery of the Chinese state carried out the country’s most far-reaching internment campaign since the Mao era.
There are too many strong passages in this piece to cite them all.
I thought — as a parent and grandparent — that this section was absolutely haunting. This is from a document informing police and other officials how to respond to questions about missing parents and other family members:
The line that stands out most in the script, however, may be the model answer for how to respond to students who ask of their detained relatives, “Did they commit a crime?”
The document instructed officials to acknowledge that they had not. “It is just that their thinking has been infected by unhealthy thoughts,” the script said. “Freedom is only possible when this ‘virus’ in their thinking is eradicated and they are in good health.”
Also, readers may wonder why leaders in majority-Muslim nations are not responding to these outrages in a more public manner. Let me recommend this recent “Global Wire” piece by our own Ira Rifkin: “For Russia's Jehovah's Witnesses and China's Uighur Muslims, politics trump religious freedom.”