He's a leader like no other,
commander of a formidable military,
president of a rising superpower.
This series tells the story
of Chinese President Xi Jinping's six-year rule.
He heads an economy that is now crucial to all of us.
Hundreds of millions of people have been lifted out of poverty.
China was clearly going to be the great source of growth
in the global economy, and we want a part of that.
For years, world leaders have sought to work with him
to solve some of the most pressing issues of our time.
When we work together,
it's good for the United States, it's good for China,
and it is good for the world.
But in the West, there's growing anxiety about how President Xi's
China is extending its power.
Now, media reports have suggested that the Chinese Communist Party
has been working covertly to interfere with the decisions
of elected representatives.
I think Australia is, in many ways, the canary in the coal mine.
We're exposing the faces and names behind the keyboards in Shanghai
used to steal from American businesses.
Inside China, his Communist government
has become increasingly intolerant of criticism and dissent.
Evidence is now emerging of monstrous crimes against humanity.
It's a message to the people.
We have power to finish you. We have power.
And in Hong Kong, he's now facing
the biggest-ever challenge to his authority.
We don't want Hong Kong to become China. We want our freedom.
Xi Jinping has transformed his country.
He could be president for the rest of his life.
So, what does that mean for China and the rest of the world?
Xi Jinping has taken China down a much more assertive route
and that, of course, is making the rest of the world wonder
what's in store.
If we don't speak out, if we don't condemn China
for that kind of behaviour, nobody else will.
The result of the vote is...
..the Games of the XXIX Olympiad in 2008
are awarded to the city of Beijing.
SHOUTING
Beijing! Welcome to Beijing!
Thank you! Thank you!
In 2001, after decades of isolation, the world's largest
communist country won the right to host the world's greatest games.
The Beijing Olympics was essentially the coming-out party for China.
That was the marker to show that China
really is now modern and rich and powerful.
The man put in charge was little-known in the West.
Xi Jinping was in the running to be China's next president.
Now, if the Beijing Olympics were to be a failure,
a spectacular embarrassment to the party state,
then it could raise the question
whether Xi Jinping was the right person to be the leader of China.
APPLAUSE
These are the Games where nothing is being left to chance,
where fortunes have been spent on chasing perfection.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
HUW EDWARDS: The stadium has erupted,
there's no other word for it,
and there are thousands upon thousands of red flags being waved
right up to the upper levels of this vast Bird's Nest.
CHEERING
A spectacular jet of flames lighting the torch tower -
that sight tells us that the Games of the XXIX Olympiad are open.
The Beijing Olympics was a tremendous success
as far as the Chinese government was concerned.
It projected China's image in the way that the party wanted.
Xi Jinping became the head of China's ruling Communist Party,
and, in 2013, he got the job he dreamed of.
Xi Jinping took the stage.
China's new president spoke of his Chinese dream.
The Chinese people were very excited because President Xi presented
to the country a strong, confident
man with vision about where China's going.
CAR HORNS HONK
President Xi took charge of an economy
that had grown faster than any other in history.
But, as the economy had boomed,
so had something else that Xi refused to tolerate.
Corruption in the Communist Party.
Yuan Dong was a securities trader in Beijing.
In 2001 to 2012, China's economy quadrupled,
so incredible rates of growth throughout those years,
and so I think Xi Jinping knew that this kind of enrichment
was also a sea of temptation,
and that party officials were losing sight of the fact
that they were part of a political organisation,
and started to believe that they were really businessmen.
If President Xi didn't fix the corruption issues,
there would have been no legitimacy
of the Communist Party going forward.
That was how important it was.
President Xi launched a crackdown.
By the end of 2013, more than 30,000 party officials were investigated
and punished for violating what's called the Eight Provisions
to ban extravagance and formalism.
The campaign was hugely popular.
But Dong thought the party should go further.
He joined a campaign group - the New Citizens' Movement.
INDISTINCT CHATTER
What Dong didn't know is that,
months earlier, journalists at Bloomberg in Beijing
had begun asking questions about Xi's family wealth.
We started investigating Xi's family in May 2012.
We thought that China's leaders need to be scrutinised.
Chinese reporters cannot write stories like this
because the Chinese media is very much controlled by the state.
And we found laid out in a report -
I think it was on page 61 -
all these assets owned by Xi Jinping's sister and brother-in-law,
and from there, we just built out that story.
It took weeks of painstaking work.
Some assets appeared to have been carefully hidden.
Powerful influential people will put the names of their holdings
in obscure people that are only marginally related to them.
This allows them to, you know, keep their distance from it.
They traced no assets to Xi personally, and found no evidence
he had intervened to advance his relatives' business transactions.
While we didn't find any assets for his immediate family,
we did find a lot of assets from his older sister, another sister,
and their husbands and their kids as well.
They found evidence that Xi's family had assets
worth more than $380 million.
A lot of these assets had the markings of assets
that were acquired through family influence.
Real estate, stakes in state-connected companies.
It quickly became obvious that, um,
this was going to be very serious.
Within minutes of publishing the story, Bloomberg's website
was blocked in China, and has never been opened again.
The party sent a very clear message.
"You are not to write about these stories.
"These stories are off limits."
The Chinese people saying this is very, very much politically biased
will have some other senior party member,
leaders or former leaders,
who have direct involvement into corruption.
Why Bloomberg or some Western medias do not expose those,
but why just focus on Xi Jinping?
In a police cell in Beijing, anti-corruption protester Yuan Dong
knew nothing about the Bloomberg investigation.
More than a dozen members of the New Citizens' Movement were arrested.
For some in the West, it was the first clear indication
of how President Xi was going to rule China.
This was a group of people who were
conducting very small-scale peaceful activism,
and literally were saying the same things on the streets
that party leaders were saying in closed-door meetings.
That was the moment when we knew that Xi Jinping
was going to be bad news for human rights.
CHEERING
But inside China, President Xi was more popular than ever.
The economy was doing well,
and Xi Jinping's leadership was riding high domestically.
If the Communist Party were to have genuine
free and open elections,
I would have very little doubt that Xi Jinping
would have been elected with a landslide.
The vehicle turns onto the pavement,
knocks down and kills two,
swerves through the crowd, before crashing in Tiananmen Square.
Then came Xi's first crisis as president -
a terror attack in the heart of Beijing
that left five dead and 38 injured.
To have the burning vehicle under that famous picture of Chairman Mao,
the flag of jihad flying in this square,
is really a failure of massive proportions
from Beijing's perspective.
But these weren't foreign jihadis.
They came from a province 1,500 miles away
in the far west of China.
Xinjiang is not a normal province in China.
Xinjiang is populated by the Uighurs,
but there are also other ethnic groups in there as well.
They are not Han Chinese, and they are Muslim,
so they are quite different.
A growing Han Chinese presence in Xinjiang, part of a government
drive to develop the region, had provoked separatist anger.
For years, there'd been sporadic violence.
A riot erupts. Protesters, mostly from the Muslim Uighur minority,
tore apart buses and cars with their bare hands.
Then they turned on local Han Chinese.
Few could believe the anger and violence directed towards them.
SPEAKING IN OWN LANGUAGE
Xinjiang's Uighurs say they've been colonised by the Chinese.
Many want to separate from China.
Where other leaders had failed,
President Xi was determined to succeed.
His first visit to Xinjiang was a show of strength.
A clear message to the Uighurs they were part of China.
SPEAKING IN OWN LANGUAGE
But Meripet wouldn't be able to ignore Xi Jinping for long.
On the final day of his visit,
there was another attack targeting Han Chinese.
Security forces moved quickly
to lock down what is a major railway station.
Attackers set off explosives,
and then slashed people with knives at a station exit.
President Xi ordered a crackdown,
and declared Xinjiang the front line in China's war on terror.
In the weeks that followed, hundreds of people were rounded up.
One month into the campaign, 13 had been sentenced to death.
It seems like we was an enemy of the Chinese government.
Its message to the people -
"We have power to finish you.
"We have power, so be careful."
But the attacks continued.
That has set up a public image that the Muslims,
most of them Uighurs,
they are kind of becoming religious extremists,
and who attack Han Chinese for whatever reason.
If you're a Han Chinese person,
and you see what's happening in Xinjiang,
and you see people being killed out there on the basis of
their ethnicity, which is your ethnicity, you will probably
support the government if the government has some sort
of a harsh crackdown on those people.
We were trying to tell the rest of the world that the writing
on the wall for Uighurs was not good,
and, no, it didn't get nearly enough attention.
In the West, President Xi was seen as a crucial partner for tackling
some of the biggest issues of our time, such as climate change.
China also had one of the fastest growing economies in the world.
We want the UK to be China's best partner in the West, and we think
there is an opportunity for a golden decade, where we work together
to increase investment in each other's countries.
SPEAKING IN OWN LANGUAGE
The British government wanted to boost trade,
but also hoped it could influence China on human rights.
Are you going to say, "We're not going to have any relationship
"with this country because we don't approve of its political system,"
or are you going to say, "These are a vital partner in the world
"on a whole range of things, and it's better we engage with them
"so that we can raise the concerns we have"?
More trade, more collaborations between our businesses
and scientists and researchers,
more connections between the Chinese and the American people.
The one thing that was always clear,
talking with President Xi,
is that when it came to human rights
issues, when it came to problems with the Uighurs,
this was nobody else's business.
Nobody else's business.
China's economic boom continued to transform people's lives.
Hundreds of millions of people have been lifted out of poverty,
and, more importantly, we've seen China create a huge middle class.
And among that middle class,
Xi's continuing campaign against corrupt officials
remained hugely popular.
I strongly support President Xi's anti-corruption campaign.
My husband, Wilson Wang, was general manager of Wuhu Cigarette Factory.
I met him when I was 16,
and we fall in love with each other.
In 2015, Jean, Wilson, and their daughter, Felicia,
were enjoying the high life.
We have a good job,
we have a good career,
and we enjoy all our life,
until the things happen to him.
I got a phone call from vice manager of Wuhu Cigarette Factory.
She said my husband was being taken away.
Wilson had been accused of bribery.
He was about to enter the system
at the heart of Xi's anti-corruption campaign.
I thought my husband will come back on Saturday.
Sunday morning, I start to worry about it.
For three weeks, Jean waited for news.
Then she got a call asking her to come to a nondescript office
on the outskirts of the city.
That's the place.
This is the place, here.
One guy came out.
He's smiling, and he's very calm and friendly.
They take me to the first room of the right hand, and then
kind of like suddenly, their face totally changed,
and he's yelling at me.
He said, "You are the corruption guy's wife,
"and you are the guilty person".
And he smashed the table and he said,
"Tell me what bad things you have done".
I feel very scared, and I'm crying.
"Write it down, your house, how many houses you have,
"how much money you have in your bank account."
And I was, like, leaning on the table and crying,
and writing it down.
He said, "Stay forwards! Straight, straight!"
"Sit straight. Open your eyes."
Smashing the table.
I was there from nine in the morning till nine in the evening.
Later on, I found out they taped a video of me,
and played that video over and over to show Wilson,
and Wilson truly believed I was being arrested.
Wilson was being held in a special system
for investigating Communist Party members.
Shuanggui operates outside normal Chinese law,
and since Xi launched his anti-corruption campaign,
over half a million people had been put through it.
We've documented within that system
the arbitrary detention and torture of party members
being physically ill-treated, being psychologically tortured.
Shuanggui is, I think, a very powerful indicator of the impunity
that the party gives itself...
..you know, to just sidestep
the Chinese government's own legal system.
I think the Shuanggui, of course, number one to make sure that
this person is under investigation,
but more importantly, to isolate him entirely from the outside world
so the investigation can go thoroughly and we can expose,
reveal the entirety of corruption by just now one person.
If you do not isolate this person, then the entire group
can work together to stonewall the investigation.
You're going to end up a failure.
The Chinese government says
the anti-corruption campaign remains popular.
He only had one or two hours a day to sleep.
He was tortured very hard, and they beat him.
Sometimes they turn off the power and beat him.
Sometimes they put him to the washroom to beat him.
And so he tried to bite this
in order to commit suicide.
They show Wilson my daughter's pictures.
They said, you know, "If you do not say you are guilty,
"the next step, we will arrest your daughter".
He decided to cooperate with them, and so he said,
"Whatever you want me to say,
"I just follow you guys - whatever you want me to say".
Jean blames Wilson's mistreatment on local party officials.
In July 2015, he signed a confession saying he'd taken bribes
worth more than £140,000.
At his trial, he insisted he was innocent,
but was sentenced to six years in prison.
I did not cry.
I feel painful.
So I make my mind, I will try my best to save him.
Jean began a campaign to prove his innocence.
She was sent footage of a prosecutor's interview
with one of the men who said he'd bribed Wilson.
But her campaign has made little difference.
Wilson remains in jail.
President Xi's campaign was catching some of the most
powerful officials in China.
But, as more and more were jailed, some noticed a disturbing trend.
The people who have gone down have been the ones
that were opposed, or looked to have been opposing, Xi Jinping.
That's a very clear pattern at the high levels.
Xi Jinping has used the anti-corruption apparatus
as a potent political weapon
to eliminate his opponents,
to intimidate his opponents.
Others dispute that.
Those who've been caught in the corruptions always want to say,
you know, "This is politically oriented," but there are also cases
that people who are perceived, who are seen as a lawyer
for Xi Jinping, who are also prosecuted by corruption cases.
This broad brush accusation does not help, in my view.
The West often interprets it as a form of political purge,
and this is just wrong. It's just not even factually true.
There have been 1.8 million officials indicted,
and many of them charged, so the highest level of officials
that were charged clearly had serious major corruption scandals.
President Xi was consolidating his power.
He now looked stronger than ever.
Xi Jinping was beginning to be known as the chairman of everything,
because he was taking up leadership positions
in many different key offices.
Xi Jinping used some of the tactics
that were practised under Mao Zedong.
The most important part was the installation
of a cult of personality.
It is possible still for people to speak in private
and say that, "I don't like Xi Jinping"
If it's public and challenging or disrespecting Xi Jinping,
then you will be in trouble.
But there was one part of China where things were different.
Hong Kong was one of the few places
where there had been mass protests
against Beijing's rule.
Lam Wing-kee ran a book shop that specialised
in books banned on the mainland.
Books in particular about one man.
The book shop was owned by a publisher called Gui Minhai.
These are the last known images of him as a free man.
In October 2015, he disappeared.
Britain was targeting President Xi with a huge charm offensive.
It wanted deeper trade ties with China.
State visits are a moment to cement a relationship with a country.
We wanted to make the Xi visit special,
and the way to make it special was,
not just to do the events at Buckingham Palace and all of that,
but also try and show something of the country to him.
I think the whole Chinese delegation, including the president,
were really impressed that we had come up with something
that was a bit more original.
I think they came away with a strong impression
that Britain wanted to make this relationship last.
While Xi was in the UK, two more of Wing-kee's colleagues
had disappeared in China.
Wing-kee had no idea.
He was taken to a detention centre.
THEY CHANT
When a fifth book-seller went missing in Hong Kong,
thousands of people took to the streets,
demanding to know where the missing men were.
After five months in solitary confinement,
Wing-kee was forced to confess to selling books illegally.
The authorities secretly sent him back to Hong Kong on bail
to collect his computer.
He was ordered not to tell anyone what had happened to him,
and to return to China the following day.
AUDIO OF PROTESTS
Now the world knew that China was behind the disappearances.
Wing-kee's colleague Gui Minhai remains in detention.
China says he violated Chinese law.
His book shop is now closed.
The book-sellers joined a growing list of groups locked up
in Xi's China, including human rights lawyers, NGO leaders,
and religious figures.
APPLAUSE
But there was little public discussion of this
because the state media was now tightly controlled.
SPEAKING IN OWN LANGUAGE
ALL: Good morning, President Xi.
The media was under control of party state even before Xi Jinping
became leader, and Xi Jinping simply tightened up that control,
and made it much more effective.
Official media is filled with unending appeals to safeguard
Jinping's authority, to support him, to rally behind him.
The personality cult has already exceeded that
for Mao Zedong during the Cultural Revolution.
So we can say without doubt that Xi Jinping is a...
..dictator of the highest degree.
I do not believe
that they will have any realistic environment in which Xi Jinping
can become a Mao Zedong-like dictator.
We passed that period.
But there was still one part of China where the president wanted
to exert even more control.
CARRIE GRACIE: Xinjiang - the front line in China's war on terror.
They call it an all-out offensive,
a new great wall of iron.
Thousands of troops pledging to lay down their lives.
I think it's absolutely accurate to describe Xinjiang in 2017
as a police state.
Uighurs were subjected to extraordinary surveillance
and scrutiny.
Much tougher restrictions on religion -
where people could worship, how they could worship.
China's intrusion into the lives of Uighurs appeared to know few bounds.
Up to two million Han Chinese officers
sent to the Uighur families.
They're watching every step of the regular life.
You sleep together, you eat together, you work together.
Having party officials walk into your house, sleep in your beds,
eat at your tables, take notes about everything you're doing...
You know, it's a very effective way of intimidating people,
and making them aware that their every move will be tracked.
Anyone who travelled abroad now fell under suspicion, and risked arrest.
But when Meripet's father fell ill in Turkey,
she had to go and look after him.
Her children didn't have passports,
so they stayed behind with her mother-in-law.
Meripet had left Xinjiang at the worst possible moment.
She now faced a terrible choice -
stay in Turkey without her children,
or return home and risk arrest.
For now, she decided to stay.
Photos of the children were sent to Meripet in Turkey by a friend.
By now, tens of thousands of people had been arrested,
their children left with relatives.
The authorities took advantage of this to round up more children.
Any child not living with a parent was now meant to be
put in an orphanage or in some kind of state-run institution
so even if kids were living with aunts or uncles or grandparents
who were perfectly happy to have them, it's now policy
that they're meant to be institutionalised.
It's a massive violation of international human rights law.
Thousands of parents like Meripet are stranded in Turkey.
No-one knows how many Uighur children
have been put into orphanages,
but evidence is emerging about how they are treated inside.
It seems to me from everything that I've seen so far,
as well as from the Chinese justifications for these actions,
that right at the heart of it lies the notion that Islam
as practised by the Uighur community for centuries is considered
by Han Chinese authorities
to be some form of security threat in itself.
In other words, the aim is to eliminate
the Uighur Muslim community as, if you like, a distinct
and separate cultural religious identity. That is a gross affront
on any view to the fundamental standards of international law.
I don't think there's any question that there are crimes
against humanity going on in China.
I guess the real question is going to be whether the world
ultimately holds China accountable.
Censorship in Xinjiang was now incredibly tight.
TAPPING ON GLASS
But images from space revealed the authorities had built
a vast network of what looked like prison camps.
Some managed to snatch footage from inside.
Sayragul Sauytbay was sent to work inside the detention system.
She taught Chinese to the detainees as part of their re-education.
MUSIC PLAYS LOUDLY
Mihrigul Tursun, a mother with young children,
claims she was tortured while in detention.
She's one of a small but growing number of former detainees
who have managed to leave China and claim they were mistreated.
It's impossible for us to independently verify her story,
but others have made similar claims, including Sayragul Sauytbay,
who says she was told that women in her camp were given injections
that had the same effect.
One million people are estimated to be locked up in Xinjiang.
For months, the Chinese government
claimed that the camps did not exist.
It eventually changed its story,
and said they are vocational training institutions.
The government allowed journalists
to film what it claims goes on in the camps.
DANCE MUSIC PLAYS
Officials say that re-education is voluntary, and that there hasn't
been a terrorist attack in Xinjiang for almost three years.
# If you're happy and you know it, say, "Yes, sir"
ALL: Yes, sir!
# If you're happy and you know it, say, "Yes, sir"
ALL: Yes, sir!
# If you're happy and you know it, and you really want to show it
# If you're happy and you know it, say, "Yes, sir"
ALL: Yes, sir!
Today, in China, Xi Jinping looks stronger than ever.
The constitution has been changed so he can be president for life.
On the world stage,
only a handful of governments have spoken out about his country's
record on human rights in Xinjiang and the rest of China.
What the Chinese government is doing in Xinjiang is wrong,
and is indefensible.
It is something that should not be allowed to happen unchallenged
in the 21st century.
We do not accept that happening in any other country.
Has anyone yet imposed a consequence on Beijing
that would cause it to change gears? No.
And that is a shocking failure on the part of governments of the UN...
You know, any entity that says it cares about human rights.
And I think it is a powerful and terrifying statement
about China's power in the world today.
Nice to see you. Very nice to see you. How are you?
I'm good. Good. How was Tibet?
INDISTINCT
The British government continues
to pursue deeper trade ties with China.
When we look at what's happened to the Uighurs in Xinjiang,
this is obviously completely against our values.
We raise these issues with the Chinese government when we see them,
and we also understand that if we talk too loudly
and too publicly about our human rights concerns, we will just
lose access to senior people in the Chinese government,
and then we won't be able to do any good at all.
I think very few countries have any leverage at all
when it comes to what happens inside China.
I think the Chinese government is absolutely clear that this is not
a matter for outside countries, outside governments.
The Chinese are not stupid about this.
They basically have figured out that, because of their
economic presence and their economic influence,
that the rest of the world is now backing away from criticising them
with regards to human rights.
The greatest concern I have now
is abdication from our responsibilities to speak out.
If we don't speak out,
if we don't condemn China for that kind of behaviour,
nobody else will.
The crackdown in Xinjiang goes on.
Very often, one sees historically that it's only after the crisis
is over that everybody in the international community
is prepared to call a genocide out as what it is.
There's a widely-held misunderstanding
that genocide is a question of the scale
of extermination of human beings.
That's not so.
The question is, is there an intention to,
if you like, wipe off the face of the Earth
a distinct group, a nation of people?
This is a calculated social policy
designed to eliminate the separate cultural, religious
and ethnic identity of the Uighurs.
That's a genocidal policy.
The Chinese government told us it has taken necessary and justified
counter-terrorism and de-radicalization measures
in Xinjiang.
These include setting up vocational education and training centres
which it said are essentially boarding schools offering language,
law, and professional skills courses.
It said the rights of the trainees are protected by law.
Ethnic customs and traditions
and the right to use ethnic language are respected.
Halal food is provided,
and insults and cruelties are strictly prohibited.
The government said that, if a couple are in one of the centres,
it will care for their children,
adding, "without timely intervention, those affected
"by extremist ideas could spread the wrong thinking to their children."
The government said China has made significant progress
on human rights.