Page 209 - Communist Chinas Policy of Oppression in East Turkestan

205

framework of the program, the Xinjiang Production and Construction
Corps (XPCC), known as the Bin tuan, was set up in the 1950s with the

alleged purpose of developing East Turkestan. The so-called civilian
members of that force were supposed to reconstruct this backward area
of China. As a result, ethnic Chinese were brought in from all parts of
the country and began working in the camps that had been set up.
As the military units that had been brought in to quell the Muslim
uprising against the Chinese administration found they had less to do,
the unit set up to support agricultural development programs was dis-
solved in 1975. In 1981, the Bin tuan was reformed under the peculiar

name "Xth Agricultural Division," and is still active today. It consists of
some 2.28 million people, 1 million of whom are workers. Its responsi-
bilities include ruthlessly suppressing Muslim independence move-
ments, running the laogai labor camps, and bringing in hundreds of
thousands of Chinese criminals and settling them in East Turkestan.
As many academics have revealed, the Bin tuan's real purpose is
the colonialization of East Turkestan. In his book New Ghosts Old Ghosts
– Prisons and Labor Reform Camps in China, for instance, James D.
Seymour of Columbia University's East Asian Institute and Richard
Anderson provide considerable detail about the Bin tuan, and unravel
the links between the organization and the prisons and labor camps.

Bin tuan is established along the border separating the north and south
of East Turkestan. It has jurisdiction over several million hectares of
land and is largely made up of ethnic Chinese. It is independent of the
Uighur Autonomous Administration and has its own security forces,
courts, and agricultural and industrial enterprises. It also runs a large
network of labor camps and prisons. 60
More surprisingly, these so-called "production units" of Red China
that violate human rights are financed by the World Bank. China set out

a number of programs under the Great Leap Forward and secured

Harun Yahya - Adnan Oktar