Become Family in Kashgar, the Party Cadres Who Move Into Uyghur Homes to Watch Them

Since 2016, more than a million Chinese officials have been assigned a Uyghur family each. They're called relatives. They arrive with gifts, stay for days, eat at the table, sleep in the house, and fill in forms about what they see. The programme's name is "Pair Up and Become Family", and Beijing is proud of it.

By its own count, more than 1.1 million cadres were paired with more than 1.6 million households by 2022, and the visits have become routine. State media tell warm stories about it. One, from Kashgar's Shufu county, is about a 13-year-old girl whose cadre relatives helped her get a kidney transplant.

Families aren't asked whether they want a relative. There's no sign that anyone can say no.

What the relatives write down

Human Rights Watch got hold of the programme's rules in 2018. Cadres collect household data, check each person's political views, assess how religious they are, and look for "problems", from hygiene and drinking to religious practice, which they then set out to "rectify". They teach Mandarin and party slogans. Families are graded trustworthy, average or untrustworthy, and a relative abroad counts against you. Handbooks for cadres, including one used near Kashgar, teach them to work on the parents through the children.

The minimum rule since late 2017 is five days every two months. Some places set more. In Wensu, in Aksu, it was at least eight days a month. During Ramadan 2017 in Hotan, officials stayed in Uyghur homes for up to two weeks to watch for anyone fasting.

Beside it runs an older programme with an unwieldy name, Visit the People, Benefit the People, Get Together the Hearts of the People, known in Chinese as fanghuiju. It started in 2014. About 200,000 officials were posted to Xinjiang villages to live there, a model Chen Quanguo first used in Tibet. The teams still rotate. A new round went out in 2025.

Men in the house, husbands in the camps

The visits peaked while the camps were full. In southern Xinjiang, many of the families getting relatives had a husband, father or son taken away. The visitor who arrived with a bag of rice was often a man from the same system that took him.

In 2019 Radio Free Asia spoke to an official supervising a township in Yengisar county, south of Kashgar. Of the 70 or 80 families there with assigned relatives, he said, most of the cadres were men, staying up to six days at a time, often in homes where the men of the household were away in the camps. Asked about sleeping arrangements, he said one or two people normally share a bed and when it's cold three sleep together. A neighbourhood committee head said they all sleep on the same platform, and that a metre apart was acceptable. Both said they knew of no complaints.

Those are two anonymous local officials. Nobody has documented a pattern of abuse from it, and no family in Yengisar could safely complain if there were one. Put it the other way round. A Uyghur woman whose husband is in a camp, with a male party official sleeping in her home for a week every two months, has nobody she can say no to.

Kinship with a checklist

Beijing presents Become Family as warmth and poverty relief, Han and Uyghur as one household. Some cadres surely did help with medicine, paperwork and school fees. The kidney transplant was real.

The rules were real too. What the cadre brings to the table is a form, and what the form decides is whether someone in the family ends up in a camp. Real relatives don't file reports. This is surveillance that knocks, comes in and stays the night.

The state didn't just watch Uyghur homes. It moved in.