The total list of “Forty-Eight Suspicious Signs of Extremist Tendencies”—compiled by analyst Tanner Greer and later published in the Australian National University’s 2018 China Story Yearbook—is based on interviews that Human Rights Watch researchers conducted with 58 ethnic Uyghurs and Kazakhs, all of whom successfully fled from Xinjiang at some point over the last three years.
In 2014, the Communist Party of China launched what it called the “Strike Hard Campaign Against Violent Terrorism”: a state-sanctioned attempt to combat religious extremism by effectively punishing and controlling Muslim Uyghurs based on their faith. The United Nations estimates that between one and two million members of China’s Uyghur ethnic minority have disappeared during that period—thought to be imprisoned in concentration camps for the purposes of re-education and indoctrination.
