China framed Uyghur ethnic and Muslim identity itself as an illness to be cured

Evidence

These imposed disciplines were designed to treat the “illness” and systematically “wash [the captives’] brains clean” of it. Their ailment? The very ethnic and Muslim identity that defines who Jelilova and 15 million other Uyghurs in China’s Xinjiang are, and what, in a surveillance society designed to subjugate them, they struggle to remain. — Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamophobia and the…, 533

Categorization

• STORYSTEM: The framing of an entire people’s identity as a treatable disease — identity-as-illness — is a powerful dystopian worldbuilding device for a state-surveillance novel.