Policing East Turkistan: Mapping Police and Security Forces in the Uyghur Region

Police in East Turkistan have been instrumental in effectively criminalizing the estimated 1.8 million people – close to one in six of the region’s Uyghur and other Turkic people – arbitrarily held in the region’s large network of detention centers since 2016, many of whom are now either formally sentenced to prison, transferred to forced labor programs, or released under intense police surveillance. According to official statistics, despite East Turkistan’s population constituting only 1.5 percent of the PRC’s total, 20 percent of all police arrests in the PRC in 2017 were in East Turkistan.2 Another prominent feature of policing in the region is the ubiquitous and highly invasive surveillance systems, which for the time being at least are not seen on a comparable scale anywhere else in the PRC.3
According to one conservative estimate, as of 2017, there were 2.3 times more People’s Police (Ch. 人民警察, Renmin jingcha) including Assistant Police and other “security-related positions” in East Turkistan than elsewhere in the PRC: 478 per 100,000 population compared to 212 nationally.4 However, these figures neither include the unknown number of centrally-commanded People’s Armed Police (Ch. 人民武装警察部队, Renmin wuzhuang jingcha budui – see below) in the region, nor include police and paramilitary forces within the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps (see below), and nor do they factor in the far-ranging involvement of ordinary local government departments in supporting the police.
The purpose of this explainer is to outline policing structures as they are currently understood with a view to providing a broad overview of the roles that the various forms of police play in the ongoing genocide in East Turkistan.
https://uhrp.org/report/policing-east-turkistan-mapping-police-and-security-forces-in-the-uyghur-region/