Every now and then, when credulous Western observers aren’t fawning over China’s high-speed rail network or calculating when its economy will become the world’s largest, a story breaks to remind us the People’s Republic remains what it has always been: a place of fear and cruelty. One such story, by the New York Times’ Chris Buckley, is worth the attention.

Writing from Hotan, a city in the western province of Xinjiang, Buckley describes a system of internment camps, brainwashing programs, and pervasive surveillance, all aimed at the region’s Muslim majority, mostly ethnic Uighurs. The overall approach, he writes, is “reminiscent of Mao’s draconian rule — mass rallies, public confessions and ‘work teams’ assigned to ferret out dissent.”

As with so much in China, the scale is vast.

Hundreds of thousands of Chinese Muslims have been hauled into re-education camps for weeks or months at a time, often indiscriminately, with no idea of when, or if, they’ll get out.

The city “feels as if under a siege by an invisible enemy,” with surveillance cameras, metal detectors, checkpoints, police outposts, biometric data collection, and locals assigned to spy on their neighbors.

As with so much else in China, the government lies about what it’s doing. It denies the use of detention, the targeting of an ethnic minority, or the existence of camps. These denials are contradicted by the government’s documents, some of them publicly available.

A more accurate explanation for Beijing’s behavior is that it fears ethnic separatism and Islamic radicalism. Those fears aren’t misplaced: China has been the victim of terrorism, notoriously when knife-wielding Uighur assailants killed 31 people and injured another 141 at a train station in Kunming in 2014. Uighur separatism has been a thorn in China’s side for decades.

China’s policy isn’t meant to curb Islamic radicalism or ethnic separatism. As Buckley notes in his article, the repressiveness of China’s methods does more to fuel than ease Uighur resentments.

Chinese Muslims can be detained by the authorities for praying, fasting, eating breakfast before sunrise, going to a mosque, not smoking or performing a traditional funeral.

None of this is evidence of extremism. It’s evidence of ordinary decency and modest religiosity. It is for the same reason Beijing has spent decades persecuting other religions or spiritual practices not typically associated with modern terrorism or separatism, like Protestantism and Falun Gong. The same was true of the Catholic Church, at least until the Vatican capitulated to Beijing by agreeing to allow the Communist Party to nominate bishops.

Put another way, what stokes Beijing’s fears and stirs its fury, isn’t political opposition. It’s the concept of conscience. It is the thought that good and bad fall beyond the scope of the regime’s rightful authority and are not things it gets to define for its subjects.

That’s not to say the regime can’t try, which is what it’s doing in Xinjiang, not to mention Tibet and everywhere else it exercises control.

Eventually, the regime will fail. In the list of what ails China, the regime’s war on the soul doesn’t usually rank high. But it matters most. It means the regime made an enemy of the one thing it cannot eradicate. At some point it will either have to abandon the struggle or destroy itself in the effort, much as the Soviet Union did.

I’ve written this column while making my way through The Atlantic’s superb October issue, with essays on the question, “Is Democracy Dying?”

It makes for bracing reading, much of it convincing. We should all be worried about the health of democracy. We should all work to repair the tattered fabric of liberal culture.

Then again, is there a Chinese equivalent to The Atlantic, offering equally bracing analyses of the shortcomings of authoritarianism? That the answer to that question is so obvious — and its implications so far-reaching — should give champions of open societies confidence for the future.

— Bret Stephens is a columnist for The New York Times.