China is repressing an ethnic Muslim minority on an unprecedented scale - here are their excuses for imprisoning people

Thomas Peter/Reuters

A police officer checks a Uighur man's ID documents in Kashgar, Xinjiang, in March 2017.




The Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking Muslim ethnic minority in China, are subject to some of the most severe surveillance and repression in the country's history.

Around 1 million are reportedly imprisoned in detention centers or re-education camps in the western region of Xinjiang, where many of them live. Uighurs refer to the region as East Turkistan.

The detentions are part of China's "Strike Hard" campaign in Xinjiang, an anti-terrorism policy introduced in 2014 purporting to clamp down on militant terrorism. Beijing has repeatedly accused Uighurs of starting terrorist attacks across the country since at least the mid-1990s.

As part of this crackdown, China has used a slew of bogus and draconian reasons to lock Uighurs up - from having a beard to talking to people in foreign countries.

Scroll down to see some of the most bogus excuses China has allegedly used to imprison Uighurs.