What the Chinese Communist Party is doing to Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang has a name. It’s called as treatment. Since 2017, over a million individuals have been detained without trial in institutions known as “Vocational Education and Training Centers.” Islamic religious practice is referred to in state documents as a “ideological virus,” a “mental illness,” and a “extremist thought infection” that calls for “correction,” “transformation,” and “cure.” The language is medical. Carceral architecture is used. For those inside, the repercussions are the same.
Vocational Education and Training Centers
At CripJustice, we name what systems do to bodies. What China is doing to Uyghur Muslims is one of the most systematic and sustained examples of medical incarceration in the world today, and it has been almost entirely absent from disability justice discourse.
What is happening in Xinjiang
Since 2017, China has imprisoned over one million Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and other Turkic Muslims in what it refers to as “reeducation camps” in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. According to a February 2025 study from the Simon-Skjodt Center for the Prevention of Genocide at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, more over half a million Uyghurs remain in jails or detention camps as of 2024, with another three million forced to work. The United States has formally stated that these activities constitute genocide. The UN Human Rights Office has determined that these may constitute crimes against humanity.
In January 2026, UN experts said that China’s five-year plan for Xinjiang envisaged roughly 14 million occurrences of compulsory ideological instruction between 2021 and 2025. That strategy uses medical and psychiatric terms like transformation, correction, education, and training. The people inside aren’t criminals on trial. They are patients hoping for a cure. The illness is Islam.
This is the medical incarceration framework
CripJustice describes medical incarceration as involuntary or non-consensual detention. Psychiatric hospitalization is explicitly stated in that definition. What China is doing in Xinjiang perfectly fits that definition: people are detained without trial, held until officials believe they have been sufficiently “transformed,” and then released when the state decides the treatment is complete.
The Chinese government presents the camps as places where people go freely to learn. Former prisoners describe a system in which officials determine who is detained and when they are released, and resistance is punished with verbal abuse, food deprivation, solitary confinement, and beatings.
China’s use of psychiatric facilities as detention centers extends beyond Xinjiang. The government has a history of institutionalizing dissidents, activists, and religious minorities in psychiatric facilities, diagnosing them with fabricated conditions such “political psychosis,” and subjecting them to forced medication, electric shocks, and isolation. The use of medical terminology to legitimize political incarceration is not a new tactic. It is a documented Chinese state practice carried out on a scale unprecedented in the world.
Every one of the 55 former detainees who spoke with with Amnesty International for their comprehensive 2021 report claimed torture or inhumane treatment while imprisoned in the Xinjiang facilities. The report detailed sleep deprivation, stress positions, forced political recitation, a prohibition on prayer, and physical beatings. These are not the conditions for education. They are the circumstances of a system intended to break individuals.
The disability produced by this system
Prolonged arbitrary detention, torture, sleep deprivation, forced separation from family, and the systematic erasure of religious and cultural identity impact more than just immediate pain. They produce long-term disability. Research on torture survivors shows PTSD rates of 30.6% and depression rates of 30.8%, with physical symptoms occurring twice as frequently as psychological symptoms among torture survivors as compared to non-tortured asylum seekers. Those who have fled Xinjiang and are now refugees in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan bear the scars of their injuries.
HRW documented that people are detained in the camps despite having serious illnesses or being elderly, and that there are children in their teens, pregnant and nursing mothers, and people with disabilities inside. The creation of disability through incarceration is exacerbated by the denial of care to persons who were already disabled when they were taken.
The destruction of houses of worship
The assault on Uyghur Muslim identity extends beyond the detention camps. China has systematically bulldozed mosques, shrines, and Islamic architecture throughout Xinjiang. Satellite data collected by researchers at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute revealed the destruction of nearly 16,000 mosques between 2017 and 2020, accounting for roughly 65% of the total. The dome-shaped roofs and minarets have been removed. Cemeteries have been cleared to make way for parking lots and public squares.
This is the physical destruction of the foundations of communal and spiritual life. When a mosque is demolished, the community that congregated there loses more than just a structure, but also a network of mutual support, care, and connections. For disabled community members who relied on the network, the destruction is not abstract. It is the removal of the community care system that CripJustice advocates for building. China isn’t just imprisoning Uyghur Muslims. It is undermining community structures that keep them going.
The connection to our existing coverage
We’ve previously written on Israeli military courts prosecuting Palestinian children for religious and political expression, such as Ahmad Manasra, who was detained at the age of 13 and held in solitary confinement until developing schizophrenia. We previously wrote about the Indonesian Hospital in Gaza, when Israeli soldiers raided a medical facility serving the civilian population and held its medical director for 897 days without trial. We have reported on the 10,000 Palestinians now detained in Israel, including 3,498 who are kept without trial under administrative detention orders.
What connects these cases is not geography. It is the use of institutional power, whether medical, legal, or military, on the bodies and identities of Muslim communities. China’s framing of Islam as a mental illness that requires treatment is the most blatant example of this pattern anywhere in the world. It explicitly states what the others imply: that Muslim identity is the problem to be solved, and that the remedy is institutionalized physical and mental rehabilitation.
What accountability looks like
In 2021, the US declared that China’s actions in Xinjiang constituted genocide. The UN ruled that these may be crimes against humanity. No meaningful international accountability system has been triggered. China is a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council. It has the authority to veto any resolution that refers the matter to the International Criminal Court.
UN experts stated in January 2026 that persecution in Xinjiang continues despite China’s assurances that the camps have been closed, with the system changing from mass detention to labor transfers and community-level surveillance. The form has changed. The function hasn’t.
CripJustice recognizes that the medicalization of religious and political identities is a disability justice issue. When a state declares faith an illness and establishes institutions to treat it, it is using medical authority to do what every carceral system we have examined does: take bodily autonomy from people it has determined do not deserve it, resulting in incapacity and death.
The Uyghurs did not ask to be treated. They want to be left alone to practice their religion, speak their language, and live in their communities. Concentration camps, forced medicine, razed mosques, and a five-year plan for 14 million instances of compulsory reeducation have all been used to meet this request.
That is not treatment. That is torture. And it deserves to be named as such.
Sources
China’s Repression of Uyghurs in Xinjiang — Council on Foreign Relations
China — Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, March 2026
For China, Islam is a mental illness that needs to be cured — Al Jazeera, November 28, 2018
China’s Uighur Muslims: the truth behind the headlines — Amnesty International UK
Chronic pain in refugee torture survivors — PMC/National Library of Medicine
Border of Tears: Interviewing Victims of China’s Xinjiang Prison Camps — GIJN, 2024
