China builds a new village in Doklam, Yadong County, as part of poverty alleviation program in Tibet

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Swiftfarts

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House's look stunning though. India should do something this for its rural pop though to in my opinion.
 

Desi Aam

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Pleasae perm ban this 50 cent shill....already he has derailed the conversation which was about illegal occupation of Bhutanese land by the ccp....typical derailment tactics...!!
 

xizhimen

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Pleasae perm ban this 50 cent shill....already he has derailed the conversation which was about illegal occupation of Bhutanese land by the ccp....typical derailment tactics...!!
Please ban me permanently. I don't really care.
 

johnq

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The 'perfect Uighur': outgoing and hard working – but still not safe from China's camps

Beijing claims its re-education camps in Xinjiang are needed to combat Islamic terrorism, but Dilara’s experiences tell a different story

Eveline Chao in New York
Mon 20 Jul 2020 21.39 EDT Last modified on Tue 11 Aug 2020 03.47 EDT


Dilara at the beach with her daughter
Dilara at the beach with her daughter. Dilara’s mother was sent to a “re-education” camp in China after spending time with her daughter in Turkey. Photograph: Dilara

By the standards of Chinese officialdom, Dilara is surely the perfect minority. She doesn’t wear a headscarf. She drinks beer. Pretty and outgoing, she socialises often with Chinese friends.
If you closed your eyes and heard her speak Mandarin, you would never guess she had greenish eyes and brown hair, that she isn’t Han – the dominant ethnic group in China – but Uighur, a Muslim, Turkic-speaking people who call Xinjiang province, in the far west of China, their homeland.
In fact, Dilara’s entire family are model citizens. Her parents are also fluent Chinese speakers – slightly unusual for Uighurs of their generation. During the 1990s, they were among the only Uighurs working at a big, state-owned utility in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang. Her mother had landed the coveted position because she was the top student at her school, which was almost entirely Han. Dilara grew up amongst Han Chinese, in a modern apartment complex in a desirable part of town. Like her mother, she was the top student in school, and attended a prestigious university on China’s east coast.

But then Dilara made a mistake. She moved to Turkey with her husband in 2015. Her mother came to visit, staying a year to help care for their newborn baby. When her mother returned to China in early 2018, she was told she needed “education”. Her passport was confiscated and she was imprisoned in an internment camp for nearly a year.

“All of my Uighur friends in Turkey have family members in the camps,” Dilara said.

Since 2017, up to 1.8 million Uighurs and other Muslims have been held in what researcher Adrian Zenz calls “probably the largest incarceration of an ethno-religious minority since the Holocaust”. Many have been interned for reasons as trivial as wearing headscarves or long beards, declining to eat pork, or in the case of Dilara’s mother, having travelled abroad. Many of them, according to Dilara, have also had their assets seized.

The city of Hotan in Xinjiang in 2010
The city of Hotan in Xinjiang in 2010 Photograph: Eveline Chao
Human rights investigators say an outright genocide is taking place. As Uighur men have disappeared into prison or forced labor compounds while mosques and other religious sites have been demolished, Uighur women are being forcibly sterilised, given abortions and IUDs. Many Uighurs abroad fear that speaking out will incur retaliation against their family members back home. For that reason, Dilara asked to use only her first name.


Lawyers have filed evidence to the international criminal court calling on it to investigate senior Chinese officials, including Xi Jinping, for genocide and crimes against humanity. The US has placed sanctions on senior Chinese officials, prompting China to retaliate, while the UK has said it is clear the minority group has suffered “egregious human rights abuses”.


As international outcry has grown, the Chinese government has maintained the internment camps are language schools or vocational centres, bringing economic development to an impoverished area. It also claims its harsh policies in Xinjiang are necessary to combat Islamic terrorism, citing as justification several deadly incidents in years past that were carried out by Uighurs.


However, the experiences of Dilara’s family and friends undermine those claims. Like Dilara’s mother, many people who have been interned are educated, cosmopolitan Uighurs who had well-paying, white-collar jobs. Teachers, office clerks, doctors and lawyers, they are fluent in Chinese and in many cases, were only casually observant in their religious practice. They are the very ideal of the so-called well-assimilated minorities that the government claims it is creating. But they have not been spared.

‘We love China, we’re not bad people’

As 2018 dragged on with no word of her mother’s whereabouts, Dilara’s anxiety mounted. Her relatives deleted her from their phones and a Han Chinese stranger moved into her 85-year-old grandmother’s house, part of a surveillance campaign that has sent more than a million Chinese citizens to occupy Uighur households. Her grandmother, Dilara learned later, would curse the man every day in Uighur, a language he couldn’t understand. “She wasn’t afraid, because she’s so old,” Dilara said.


Finally, after close to a year, Dilara received a message from an aunt: “She’s out.” Dilara and her husband worked for Chinese companies in Turkey who had sent letters on the family’s behalf, “telling them we love China, we’re not bad people, and we’re not terrorists”.

Dilara holding a photograph of her mother


Dilara holds a photograph of her mother Photograph: Dilara
Since the release, Dilara and her mother communicate regularly through WeChat. Life feels oddly normal, full of chit-chat about grandchildren and food - her mother lost 10kg in the camp – and yet, it is not. Her mother’s passport has been confiscated, and Dilara does not dare return to China.


For months after being released, her mother had to attend weekly flag-raising ceremonies at the camp, standing silently alongside rows of other Uighurs. Each time, she would post a video of it to WeChat. “Every fucking Monday,” Dilara said, pulling out her phone and loading up her mother’s account, “she posts, ‘Flag-raising ceremony.’” She scrolled down to the next several posts. “Flag-raising ceremony,” she repeated.

An image of the flag raising ceremony
An image of the flag raising ceremony Photograph: Eveline Chao
Dilara is aware there are large subject areas her mother avoids, because their calls are probably monitored. Her mother only feels safe mentioning the camps when saying something positive. She has bragged that she was the best student there, getting high marks in the monthly tests on “Xi Jinping thought” and Communist party doctrine.

‘They don’t believe me’

What is most upsetting to Dilara – and what compels her to speak out – is that none of her Han Chinese friends know what is happening. During the year her mother was interned, she tried to tell her colleagues about the camps, but “they would always say, ‘No you must be wrong, that can’t be.’”. Her company paid for return trips to China every few months, and each time, her colleagues would ask why she wasn’t coming home too. “I kept telling them, we can’t go back, but they don’t believe me,” she said.


To this day, Dilara thinks of herself as both Uighur and Chinese; the identities are not mutually exclusive. In casual conversation, she refers to herself as Chinese. She and her other Uighur friends seek out Chinese restaurants, and she is especially fond of rice noodles. She dreams of being able to live in Shanghai, her favourite city in the world.


But looking back, she realises the Chinese government doesn’t consider her an equal. She learned this when she was 19, on a trip to Shanghai with a university friend.


When they tried to check into their hotel, the clerk told them, “I’m sorry, we can’t allow people from Xinjiang to stay here.” At the time, Dilara did not know about a policy barring Uighurs and Tibetans from hotels. They tried three more places, and were turned away from each.


Past 1am, exhausted and desperate, they found a police officer. He made several calls, and found an expensive, foreign-owned hotel that agreed to take them for one night.


In their room, she and her friend cried. “It hurt so much,” she recalled. “They made us feel like criminals.” As for the officer, “He told us: ‘You should leave this place.’”
 

xizhimen

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Kashgar Old Town Night Market Xinjiang,Night Walk 4K. Oct 22, 2020 . So many people, almost all of them are Uighurs, Aren't they supposed to be in concentration camps?
 

johnq

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'Virtually entire' fashion industry complicit in Uighur forced labour, say rights groups

Human rights coalition says cotton produced in camps in Xinjiang region finds its wayinto one in five cotton products worldwide




In this undated video footage run by China’s CCTV, Muslim trainees work in a garment factory at the Hotan Vocational Education and Training Center in Hotan, Xinjiang.
In this undated video footage run by China’s CCTV, Muslim trainees work in a garment factory at the Hotan Vocational Education and Training Centre in Hotan, Xinjiang. Photograph: AP Video

Many of the world’s biggest fashion brands and retailers are complicit in the forced labour and human rights violations being perpetrated on millions of Uighur people in the Xinjiang region of northwestern China, says a coalition of more than 180 human rights groups.
There is mounting global outrage over the atrocities being committed against the Uighur population in the region, including torture, forced separation and the compulsory sterilisation of Uighur women.
Despite these abuses, the coalition of human rights groups says many of the world’s leading clothing brands continue to source cotton and yarn produced through a vast state-sponsored system of detention and forced labour involving up to 1.8m Uighur and other Turkic and Muslim people in prison camps, factories, farms and internment camps in Xinjiang. It says that the forced labour system across the region is the largest internment of an ethnic and religious minority since the second world war.



Global fashion brands source so extensively from Xinjiang that the coalition estimates it is “virtually certain” that as many as one in five cotton products sold across the world are tainted with forced labour and human rights violations occurring there.


China is the largest cotton producer in the world, with 84% of its cotton coming from the Xinjiang region. Cotton and yarn produced in Xinjiang are used extensively in other key garment-producing countries such as Bangladesh, Cambodia and Vietnam. Xinjiang cotton and yarn are also used in textiles and home furnishings. This week the New York Times reported that factories in the region were also supplying face masks and other PPE to countries around the world.


The coalition has published an extensive list of brands it claims continue to source from the region, or from factories connected to the forced labour of Uighur people, including Gap, C&A, Adidas, Muji, Tommy Hilfiger and Calvin Klein.

Workers at a cotton factory in Awat county, in China’s Xinjiang region.


Workers at a cotton factory in Awat county, in China’s Xinjiang region. Photograph: Xinhua/Alamy
“Virtually the entire [global] apparels industry is tainted by forced Uighur and Turkic Muslim labour,” the coalition said in a statement issued today.


The coalition says many more leading clothing brands also continue to maintain lucrative strategic partnerships with Chinese companies, accepting subsidies from their government to expand textile production in the region or benefiting from the forced labour of Uighur people transferred from Xinjiang to factories across China.


“There is a high likelihood that every high street and luxury brand runs the risk of being linked to what is happening to the Uighur people,” says Chloe Cranston, business and human rights manager at Anti-Slavery International.


In a call to action, the coalition, which includes more than 70 Uighur rights groups, anti-slavery organisations and labour rights campaigners, says the global apparel industry must eradicate all products and materials linked to forced labour in Xinjiang within a year.


“Global brands need to ask themselves how comfortable they are contributing to a genocidal policy against the Uighur people. These companies have somehow managed to avoid scrutiny for complicity in that very policy – this stops today,” said Omer Kanat, executive director of the Uyghur Human Rights Project.




Why more than 1 million Uighurs are being held in camps in China – video explainer
According to the Worker Rights Consortium (WRC), one of the signatories of the call to action, brands have no credible way of proving that their supply chains from the Xinjiang are free of forced labour.


“Forced labourers in the Uighur region face vicious retaliation if they tell the truth about their circumstances. This makes due diligence through labour inspections impossible and virtually guarantees that any brand sourcing from the Uighur region is using forced labour,” said Scott Nova, executive director of the WRC.


“An apparel brand that claims to know, with confidence, that all the farms and factories it uses in the region are free of forced labour is either deeply cynical or misinformed.”


In April, the Global Legal Action Network (Glan), a group of human rights lawyers, also provided evidence to HMRC that brands including Muji, Uniqlo, H&M and Ikea were selling products in the UK containing cotton and yarn from the Xinjiang region. Glan argued that the UK government should halt sales of products linked to forced labour across the region as it breached several UK laws including the 1897 Foreign Made Goods Act.


In response, H&M and Ikea said they would stop buying cotton from the region. In an updated statement to The Guardian, H&M said that it had an indirect relationship with one yarn producer operating in the region but said it was reviewing the relationship.

The coalition says workers face ‘vicious retaliation’ if they tell the truth about their employment conditions.



The coalition says workers face ‘vicious retaliation’ if they tell the truth about their employment conditions. Photograph: VCG/Getty Images
Muji confirmed that it continues to use cotton yarn from Xinjiang but denies that its cotton and yarn are connected to forced labour. “Our business partner [assures] us that the people who make our products have good working conditions and are treated with respect, the independent auditors have conducted on-site audit on these cotton spinning mills and have confirmed that there is no evidence of forced labour and discrimination of ethnoreligious minorities at their facilities.


A Uniqlo spokesperson said that no Uniqlo product is manufactured in the region and insists that all production partners in its supply chain uphold their codes of conduct on human and workers rights.


In a statement, PVH Corporation, which owns Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger, said it did not source finished garments from the region and would cease all business relationships with any factories and mills that produce garments or fabric, or use cotton grown, in Xinjiang within the next 12 months.


Adidas said it does not source goods from Xinjiang and have instructed its suppliers not to source yarn from the region.


A C&A spokesperson said it did not source from any manufacturers or work with any fabric or yarn mills in the region.


Yet members of the coalition said that it was not sufficient for brands and retailers to just sever direct relationships to suppliers but that a complete overhaul of the sector’s links to the region had to be undertaken.


“This isn’t just about direct supply chain links, it’s about how the global apparels sector is helping prop up and facilitate the system of human rights abuses and forced labour,” says Cranston. “There needs to be a deep and thorough interrogation of how brands and retailers are linked to what is happening at scale to the Uighur people.”


Gap has been contacted for a response.


China’s human rights record in Xinjiang has provoked growing international condemnation. Earlier this month, the US imposed sanctions on Chinese officials in protest at the treatment of the Uighur and other minority groups, including Kazakhs.


Last week the Chinese ambassador to the UK denied his government was committing human rights violations after videos resurfaced online appearing to show shackled and blindfolded Uighur prisoners being loaded on to trains in Xinjiang.

The only way to stop China from enslaving and torturing these people in concentration camps and making them do forced labor in Chinese factories is to move all manufacturing out of China. Just banning products made in Xinjiang is not enough. The Chinese will simply move the Uyghurs and other minorities to factories in other regions to continue forcing them to work as slaves.
Until international corporations move all manufacturing out of China, the atrocities in such concentration camps will continue. International corporations are complicit in all of this because they look the other way for cheap labor even as the Uyghurs, Tibetans and other minorities are forced to work as slaves.
 

johnq

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Newspaper investigation claims China hoarded face masks in early January

If true this goes to show China knew about human-to-human transmission when denying it to the world

Before the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak was declared a global pandemic, Chinese consulates in Canada and around the world asked Chinese nationals to stockpile as much personal protective equipment (PPE) as possible for hospitals in China, according to an investigation by Canada's Global News.
In an article titled "United Front groups in Canada helped Beijing stockpile coronavirus safety supplies," published on Thursday (April 30), investigative reporter Sam Cooper shared his findings with Jorge Guajardo, Mexico's former ambassador to Beijing, and Canadian lawmaker Erin O'Toole.
Guajardo claimed that China had engaged in a "surreptitious" state-level operation to secure global PPE supply at low prices and did so before the deadly virus had made its way to Western countries, in early March. He said a source in the Mexican supply chain had told him in mid-January that factories were receiving large orders to send N95 respirators to China.
According to O'Toole, China had been hoarding face masks and epidemic safety equipment since Jan. 14, back when Beijing claimed there were no cases of human-to-human transmission. However, O'Toole said the Canadian government did not respond to China's acquisition campaign despite it being well-known among military and emergency service circles.
According to Cooper, while Canada was shipping more than 14,500 kilograms of protective clothing, face masks, goggles, and gloves to China, Chinese community organizations and business groups in Canada bought and shipped at least 90,700 kg of medical supplies to China. He added the stockpiling operation was launched by The United Front Work Department (UFWD) of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), a department in charge of managing potential opposition groups in China and important foreign missions.
Cooper pointed out that China's early suppression of accurate information about the outbreak was the main cause for it becoming a pandemic, a belief shared by international media, including the Associated Press. He said that Beijing's decision to downplay the seriousness of the coronavirus has resulted in millions of individuals infected around the world.


The Chinese government allowed the virus to spread around the world by allowing international travel while stocking up on masks and PPE for itself. All the while lying to the world through WHO that there is no human-to-human transmission. But the Chinese government knew there was human-to-human transmission because they were buying up masks and personal protective equipment to protect themselves from human-to-human transmission of the Covid-19 virus they created in a lab, they leaked out, and they allowed to spread around the world (by allowing international travel of infected people).
 

xizhimen

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US journalist exposes how lies were being made up by the western media about Xinjiang
 

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‘Absolutely No Mercy’: Leaked Files Expose How China Organized Mass Detentions of Muslims
More than 400 pages of internal Chinese documents provide an unprecedented inside look at the crackdown on ethnic minorities in the Xinjiang region.
The students booked their tickets home at the end of the semester, hoping for a relaxing break after exams and a summer of happy reunions with family in China’s far west.


Instead, they would soon be told that their parents were gone, relatives had vanished and neighbors were missing — all of them locked up in an expanding network of detention camps built to hold Muslim ethnic minorities.


The authorities in the Xinjiang region worried the situation was a powder keg. And so they prepared.


The leadership distributed a classified directive advising local officials to corner returning students as soon as they arrived and keep them quiet. It included a chillingly bureaucratic guide for how to handle their anguished questions, beginning with the most obvious: Where is my family?






They’re in a training school set up by the government,” the prescribed answer began. If pressed, officials were to tell students that their relatives were not criminals — yet could not leave these “schools.”





The question-and-answer script also included a barely concealed threat: Students were to be told that their behavior could either shorten or extend the detention of their relatives.





I’m sure that you will support them, because this is for their own good,” officials were advised to say, “and also for your own good.

The directive was among 403 pages of internal documents that have been shared with The New York Times in one of the most significant leaks of government papers from inside China’s ruling Communist Party in decades. They provide an unprecedented inside view of the continuing clampdown in Xinjiang, in which the authorities have corralled as many as a million ethnic Uighurs, Kazakhs and others into internment camps and prisons over the past three years.


Read the Full Document: What Chinese Officials Told Children Whose Families Were Put in Camps


The party has rejected international criticism of the camps and described them as job-training centers that use mild methods to fight Islamic extremism. But the documents confirm the coercive nature of the crackdown in the words and orders of the very officials who conceived and orchestrated it.


Even as the government presented its efforts in Xinjiang to the public as benevolent and unexceptional, it discussed and organized a ruthless and extraordinary campaign in these internal communications. Senior party leaders are recorded ordering drastic and urgent action against extremist violence, including the mass detentions, and discussing the consequences with cool detachment.


Children saw their parents taken away, students wondered who would pay their tuition and crops could not be planted or harvested for lack of manpower, the reports noted. Yet officials were directed to tell people who complained to be grateful for the Communist Party’s help and stay quiet.


The leaked papers offer a striking picture of how the hidden machinery of the Chinese state carried out the country’s most far-reaching internment campaign since the Mao era. The key disclosures in the documents include:


• President Xi Jinping, the party chief, laid the groundwork for the crackdown in a series of speeches delivered in private to officials during and after a visit to Xinjiang in April 2014, just weeks after Uighur militants stabbed more than 150 people at a train station, killing 31. Mr. Xi called for an all-out “struggle against terrorism, infiltration and separatism” using the “organs of dictatorship,” and showing “absolutely no mercy.”

President Xi Jinping of China visiting a mosque in the city of Urumqi in 2014. Xinhua/Reuters

• Terrorist attacks abroad and the drawdown of American troops in Afghanistan heightened the leadership’s fears and helped shape the crackdown. Officials argued that attacks in Britain resulted from policies that put “human rights above security,” and Mr. Xi urged the party to emulate aspects of America’s “war on terror” after the Sept. 11 attacks.


• The internment camps in Xinjiang expanded rapidly after the appointment in August 2016 of Chen Quanguo, a zealous new party boss for the region. He distributed Mr. Xi’s speeches to justify the campaign and exhorted officials to “round up everyone who should be rounded up.”


• The crackdown encountered doubts and resistance from local officials who feared it would exacerbate ethnic tensions and stifle economic growth. Mr. Chen responded by purging officials suspected of standing in his way, including one county leader who was jailed after quietly releasing thousands of inmates from the camps.


The leaked papers consist of 24 documents, some of which contain duplicated material. They include nearly 200 pages of internal speeches by Mr. Xi and other leaders, and more than 150 pages of directives and reports on the surveillance and control of the Uighur population in Xinjiang. There are also references to plans to extend restrictions on Islam to other parts of China.








The documents include 96 pages of internal speeches by

Mr. Xi,



102 pages of internal speeches by other officials,



161 pages of directives and reports on the surveillance and

control of the Uighur population in Xinjiang



and 44 pages of material from internal investigations

into local officials.




Though it is unclear how the documents were gathered and selected, the leak suggests greater discontent inside the party apparatus over the crackdown than previously known. The papers were brought to light by a member of the Chinese political establishment who requested anonymity and expressed hope that their disclosure would prevent party leaders, including Mr. Xi, from escaping culpability for the mass detentions.


The Chinese leadership wraps policymaking in secrecy, especially when it comes to Xinjiang, a resource-rich territory located on the sensitive frontier with Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia. Predominantly Muslim ethnic minority groups make up more than half the region’s population of 25 million. The largest of these groups are the Uighurs, who speak a Turkic language and have long faced discrimination and restrictions on cultural and religious activities.



A restaurant in the old city of Yarkand in August. Above patrons a propaganda poster is quoting Xi Jinping : "Every ethnic group must tightly bind together like the seeds of a pomegranate." Gilles Sabrié for The New York Times

Beijing has sought for decades to suppress Uighur resistance to Chinese rule in Xinjiang. The current crackdown began after a surge of antigovernment and anti-Chinese violence, including ethnic riots in 2009 in Urumqi, the regional capital, and a May 2014 attack on an outdoor market that killed 39 people just days before Mr. Xi convened a leadership conference in Beijing to set a new policy course for Xinjiang.


Since 2017, the authorities in Xinjiang have detained many hundreds of thousands of Uighurs, Kazakhs and other Muslims in internment camps. Inmates undergo months or years of indoctrination and interrogation aimed at transforming them into secular and loyal supporters of the party.


Of the 24 documents, the directive on how to handle minority students returning home to Xinjiang in the summer of 2017 offers the most detailed discussion of the indoctrination camps — and the clearest illustration of the regimented way the party told the public one story while mobilizing around a much harsher narrative internally.





Even as the document advises officials to inform students that their relatives are receiving “treatment” for exposure to radical Islam, its title refers to family members who are being “dealt with,” or chuzhi, a euphemism used in party documents to mean punishment.


Officials in Turpan, a city in eastern Xinjiang, drafted the question-and-answer script after the regional government warned local officials to prepare for the returning students. The agency coordinating efforts to “maintain stability” across Xinjiang then distributed the guide across the region and urged officials to use it as a model.


The government sends Xinjiang’s brightest young Uighurs to universities across China, with the goal of training a new generation of Uighur civil servants and teachers loyal to the party.


The crackdown has been so extensive that it affected even these elite students, the directive shows. And that made the authorities nervous.


“Returning students from other parts of China have widespread social ties across the entire country,” the directive noted. “The moment they issue incorrect opinions on WeChat, Weibo and other social media platforms, the impact is widespread and difficult to eradicate.”






The document warned that there was a “serious possibility” students might sink into “turmoil” after learning what had happened to their relatives. It recommended that police officers in plain clothes and experienced local officials meet them as soon as they returned “to show humane concern and stress the rules.”





The directive’s question-and-answer guide begins gently, with officials advised to tell the students that they have “absolutely no need to worry” about relatives who have disappeared.





Tuition for their period of study is free and so are food and living costs, and the standards are quite high,” officials were told to say, before adding that the authorities were spending more than $3 per day on meals for each detainee, “even better than the living standards that some students have back home.





If you want to see them,” the answer concluded, “we can arrange for you to have a video meeting.

The authorities anticipated, however, that this was unlikely to mollify students and provided replies to a series of other questions: When will my relatives be released? If this is for training, why can’t they come home? Can they request a leave? How will I afford school if my parents are studying and there is no one to work on the farm?


The guide recommended increasingly firm replies telling the students that their relatives had been “infected” by the “virus” of Islamic radicalism and must be quarantined and cured. Even grandparents and family members who seemed too old to carry out violence could not be spared, officials were directed to say.


“If they don’t undergo study and training, they’ll never thoroughly and fully understand the dangers of religious extremism,” one answer said, citing the civil war in Syria and the rise of the Islamic State. “No matter what age, anyone who has been infected by religious extremism must undergo study.”


Students should be grateful that the authorities had taken their relatives away, the document said.


“Treasure this chance for free education that the party and government has provided to thoroughly eradicate erroneous thinking, and also learn Chinese and job skills,” one answer said. “This offers a great foundation for a happy life for your family.”


The authorities appear to be using a scoring system to determine who can be released from the camps: The document instructed officials to tell the students that their behavior could hurt their relatives’ scores, and to assess the daily behavior of the students and record their attendance at training sessions, meetings and other activities.








Family members, including you, must abide by the state’s laws and rules, and not believe or spread rumors,” officials were told to say. “Only then can you add points for your family member, and after a period of assessment they can leave the school if they meet course completion standards.





If asked about the impact of the detentions on family finances, officials were advised to assure students that “the party and the government will do everything possible to ease your hardships.





The line that stands out most in the script, however, may be the model answer for how to respond to students who ask of their detained relatives, “Did they commit a crime?





The document instructed officials to acknowledge that they had not. “It is just that their thinking has been infected by unhealthy thoughts,” the script said.





Freedom is only possible when this ‘virus’ in their thinking is eradicated and they are in good health.
Secret Speeches

The ideas driving the mass detentions can be traced back to Xi Jinping’s first and only visit to Xinjiang as China’s leader, a tour shadowed by violence.


In 2014, little more than a year after becoming president, he spent four days in the region, and on the last day of the trip, two Uighur militants staged a suicide bombing outside a train station in Urumqi that injured nearly 80 people, one fatally.


Weeks earlier, militants with knives had gone on a rampage at another railway station, in southwest China, killing 31 people and injuring more than 140. And less than a month after Mr. Xi’s visit, assailants tossed explosives into a vegetable market in Urumqi, wounding 94 people and killing at least 39.


Against this backdrop of bloodshed, Mr. Xi delivered a series of secret speeches setting the hard-line course that culminated in the security offensive now underway in Xinjiang. While state media have alluded to these speeches, none were made public.


The text of four of them, though, were among the leaked documents — and they provide a rare, unfiltered look at the origins of the crackdown and the beliefs of the man who set it in motion.


“The methods that our comrades have at hand are too primitive,” Mr. Xi said in one talk, after inspecting a counterterrorism police squad in Urumqi. “None of these weapons is any answer for their big machete blades, ax heads and cold steel weapons.”


“We must be as harsh as them,” he added, “and show absolutely no mercy.”


In free-flowing monologues in Xinjiang and at a subsequent leadership conference on Xinjiang policy in Beijing, Mr. Xi is recorded thinking through what he called a crucial national security issue and laying out his ideas for a “people’s war” in the region.


Although he did not order mass detentions in these speeches, he called on the party to unleash the tools of “dictatorship” to eradicate radical Islam in Xinjiang.


A watchtower this spring at a high-security facility near what is believed to be a re-education camp on the outskirts of Hotan. Greg Baker/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images




Mr. Xi displayed a fixation with the issue that seemed to go well beyond his public remarks on the subject. He likened Islamic extremism alternately to a virus-like contagion and a dangerously addictive drug, and declared that addressing it would require “a period of painful, interventionary treatment.”


“The psychological impact of extremist religious thought on people must never be underestimated,” Mr. Xi told officials in Urumqi on April 30, 2014, the final day of his trip to Xinjiang. “People who are captured by religious extremism — male or female, old or young — have their consciences destroyed, lose their humanity and murder without blinking an eye.”


In another speech, at the leadership conclave in Beijing a month later, he warned of “the toxicity of religious extremism.”


“As soon as you believe in it,” he said, “it’s like taking a drug, and you lose your sense, go crazy and will do anything.”


In several surprising passages, given the crackdown that followed, Mr. Xi also told officials to not discriminate against Uighurs and to respect their right to worship. He warned against overreacting to natural friction between Uighurs and Han Chinese, the nation’s dominant ethnic group, and rejected proposals to try to eliminate Islam entirely in China.


“In light of separatist and terrorist forces under the banner of Islam, some people have argued that Islam should be restricted or even eradicated,” he said during the Beijing conference. He called that view “biased, even wrong.”


But Mr. Xi’s main point was unmistakable: He was leading the party in a sharp turn toward greater repression in Xinjiang.


Before Mr. Xi, the party had often described attacks in Xinjiang as the work of a few fanatics inspired and orchestrated by shadowy separatist groups abroad. But Mr. Xi argued that Islamic extremism had taken root across swaths of Uighur society.


In fact, the vast majority of Uighurs adhere to moderate traditions, though some began embracing more conservative and more public religious practices in the 1990s, despite state controls on Islam. Mr. Xi’s remarks suggest he was alarmed by the revival of public piety. He blamed lax controls on religion, suggesting that his predecessors had let down their guard.




Chinese security forces securing an area outside a mosque in Kashgar, China, in 2014. Kevin Frayer/Getty Images

While previous Chinese leaders emphasized economic development to stifle unrest in Xinjiang, Mr. Xi said that was not enough. He demanded an ideological cure, an effort to rewire the thinking of the region’s Muslim minorities.


“The weapons of the people’s democratic dictatorship must be wielded without any hesitation or wavering,” Mr. Xi told the leadership conference on Xinjiang policy, which convened six days after the deadly attack on the vegetable market.

The Soviet Prism

Mr. Xi is the son of an early Communist Party leader who in the 1980s supported more relaxed policies toward ethnic minority groups, and some analysts had expected he might follow his father’s milder ways when he assumed leadership of the party in November 2012.


But the speeches underscore how Mr. Xi sees risks to China through the prism of the collapse of the Soviet Union, which he blamed on ideological laxity and spineless leadership.


Across China, he set about eliminating challenges to party rule; dissidents and human rights lawyers disappeared in waves of arrests. In Xinjiang, he pointed to examples from the former Soviet bloc to argue that economic growth would not immunize a society against ethnic separatism.


The Baltic republics were among the most developed in the Soviet Union but also the first to leave when the country broke up, he told the leadership conference. Yugoslavia’s relative prosperity did not prevent its disintegration either, he added.


“We say that development is the top priority and the basis for achieving lasting security, and that’s right,” Mr. Xi said. “But it would be wrong to believe that with development every problem solves itself.”


In the speeches, Mr. Xi showed a deep familiarity with the history of Uighur resistance to Chinese rule, or at least Beijing’s official version of it, and discussed episodes rarely if ever mentioned by Chinese leaders in public, including brief periods of Uighur self-rule in the first half of the 20th century.


Violence by Uighur militants has never threatened Communist control of the region. Though attacks grew deadlier after 2009, when nearly 200 people died in ethnic riots in Urumqi, they remained relatively small, scattered and unsophisticated.


Even so, Mr. Xi warned that the violence was spilling from Xinjiang into other parts of China and could taint the party’s image of strength. Unless the threat was extinguished, Mr. Xi told the leadership conference, “social stability will suffer shocks, the general unity of people of every ethnicity will be damaged, and the broad outlook for reform, development and stability will be affected.”


Setting aside diplomatic niceties, he traced the origins of Islamic extremism in Xinjiang to the Middle East, and warned that turmoil in Syria and Afghanistan would magnify the risks for China. Uighurs had traveled to both countries, he said, and could return to China as seasoned fighters seeking an independent homeland, which they called East Turkestan.


“After the United States pulls troops out of Afghanistan, terrorist organizations positioned on the frontiers of Afghanistan and Pakistan may quickly infiltrate into Central Asia,” Mr. Xi said. “East Turkestan’s terrorists who have received real-war training in Syria and Afghanistan could at any time launch terrorist attacks in Xinjiang.”


Mr. Xi’s predecessor, Hu Jintao, responded to the 2009 riots in Urumqi with a clampdown but he also stressed economic development as a cure for ethnic discontent — longstanding party policy. But Mr. Xi signaled a break with Mr. Hu’s approach in the speeches.





“In recent years, Xinjiang has grown very quickly and the standard of living has consistently risen, but even so ethnic separatism and terrorist violence have still been on the rise,” he said. “This goes to show that economic development does not automatically bring lasting order and security.”


Ensuring stability in Xinjiang would require a sweeping campaign of surveillance and intelligence gathering to root out resistance in Uighur society, Mr. Xi argued.


He said new technology must be part of the solution, foreshadowing the party’s deployment of facial recognition, genetic testing and big data in Xinjiang. But he also emphasized old-fashioned methods, such as neighborhood informants, and urged officials to study how Americans responded to the Sept. 11 attacks.


Like the United States, he said, China “must make the public an important resource in protecting national security.”


“We Communists should be naturals at fighting a people’s war,” he said. “We’re the best at organizing for a task.”


The only suggestion in these speeches that Mr. Xi envisioned the internment camps now at the heart of the crackdown was an endorsement of more intense indoctrination programs in Xinjiang’s prisons.


“There must be effective educational remolding and transformation of criminals,” he told officials in southern Xinjiang on the second day of his trip. “And even after these people are released, their education and transformation must continue.”


Within months, indoctrination sites began opening across Xinjiang — mostly small facilities at first, which held dozens or hundreds of Uighurs at a time for sessions intended to pressure them into disavowing devotion to Islam and professing gratitude for the party.


Then in August 2016, a hard-liner named Chen Quanguo was transferred from Tibet to govern Xinjiang. Within weeks, he called on local officials to “remobilize” around Mr. Xi’s goals and declared that Mr. Xi’s speeches “set the direction for making a success of Xinjiang.”


New security controls and a drastic expansion of the indoctrination camps followed.






The struggle against terror and to safeguard stability is a protracted war, and also a war of offense,” Mr. Chen said in a speech to the regional leadership in October 2017 that was among the leaked papers.





In another document, a record of his remarks in a video conference in August 2017, he cited “vocational skills, education training and transformation centers” as an example of “good practices” for achieving Mr. Xi’s goals for Xinjiang.

The crackdown appears to have smothered violent unrest in Xinjiang, but many experts have warned that the extreme security measures and mass detentions are likely to breed resentment that could eventually inspire worse ethnic clashes.


The camps have been condemned in Washington and other foreign capitals. As early as the May 2014 leadership conference, though, Mr. Xi anticipated international criticism and urged officials behind closed doors to ignore it.


“Don’t be afraid if hostile forces whine, or if hostile forces malign the image of Xinjiang,” he said.

‘Round Up Everyone’

The documents show there was more resistance to the crackdown inside the party than previously known — and highlight the key role that the new party boss in Xinjiang played in overcoming it.


Mr. Chen led a campaign akin to one of Mao’s turbulent political crusades, in which top-down pressure on local officials encouraged overreach and any expression of doubt was treated as a crime.


In February 2017, he told thousands of police officers and troops standing at attention in a vast square in Urumqi to prepare for a “smashing, obliterating offensive.” In the following weeks, the documents indicate, the leadership settled on plans to detain Uighurs in large numbers.


Mr. Chen issued a sweeping order: “Round up everyone who should be rounded up.” The vague phrase appears repeatedly in internal documents from 2017.



The party boss for the Xinjiang region, Chen Quanguo, right, during a Communist Party Congress in Beijing in 2017. Etienne Oliveau/Getty Images

The party had previously used the phrase — “ying shou jin shou” in Chinese — when demanding that officials be vigilant and comprehensive in collecting taxes or measuring harvests. Now it was being applied to humans in directives that ordered, with no mention of judicial procedures, the detention of anyone who displayed “symptoms” of religious radicalism or antigovernment views.


The authorities laid out dozens of such signs, including common behavior among devout Uighurs such as wearing long beards, giving up smoking or drinking, studying Arabic and praying outside mosques.


Party leaders reinforced the orders with warnings about terrorism abroad and potential copycat attacks in China.






For example, a 10-page directive in June 2017 signed by Zhu Hailun, then Xinjiang’s top security official, called recent terrorist attacks in Britain “a warning and a lesson for us.” It blamed the British government’s “excessive emphasis on ‘human rights above security,’ and inadequate controls on the propagation of extremism on the internet and in society.”





It also complained of security lapses in Xinjiang, including sloppy investigations, malfunctions in surveillance equipment and the failure to hold people accused of suspicious behavior.





Keep up the detentions, it ordered. “Stick to rounding up everyone who should be rounded up,” it said. “If they’re there, round them up.




The number of people swept into the camps remains a closely guarded secret. But one of the leaked documents offers a hint of the scale of the campaign: It instructed officials to prevent the spread of infectious diseases in crowded facilities.

‘I Broke the Rules’

The orders were especially urgent and contentious in Yarkand County, a collection of rural towns and villages in southern Xinjiang where nearly all of the 900,000 residents are Uighur.


In the 2014 speeches, Mr. Xi had singled out southern Xinjiang as the front line in his fight against religious extremism. Uighurs make up close to 90 percent of the population in the south, compared to just under half in Xinjiang over all, and Mr. Xi set a long-term goal of attracting more Han Chinese settlers.


He and other party leaders ordered a quasi-military organization, the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, to accelerate efforts to settle the area with more Han Chinese, the documents show.


A few months later, more than 100 Uighur militants armed with axes and knives attacked a government office and police station in Yarkand, killing 37 people, according to government reports. In the battle, the security forces shot dead 59 assailants, the reports said.


An official named Wang Yongzhi was appointed to run Yarkand soon afterward. With his glasses and crew cut, he looked the picture of a party technocrat. He had grown up and spent his career in southern Xinjiang and was seen as a deft, seasoned official who could deliver on the party’s top priorities in the area: economic development and firm control of the Uighurs.


But among the most revealing documents in the leaked papers are two that describe Mr. Wang’s downfall — an 11-page report summarizing the party’s internal investigation into his actions, and the text of a 15-page confession that he may have given under duress. Both were distributed inside the party as a warning to officials to fall in line behind the crackdown.


Han officials like Mr. Wang serve as the party’s anchors in southern Xinjiang, watching over Uighur officials in more junior positions, and he seemed to enjoy the blessing of top leaders, including Yu Zhengsheng, then China’s most senior official for ethnic issues, who visited the county in 2015.


Mr. Wang set about beefing up security in Yarkand but he also pushed economic development to address ethnic discontent. And he sought to soften the party’s religious policies, declaring that there was nothing wrong with having a Quran at home and encouraging party officials to read it to better understand Uighur traditions.


When the mass detentions began, Mr. Wang did as he was told at first and appeared to embrace the task with zeal.


He built two sprawling new detention facilities, including one as big as 50 basketball courts, and herded 20,000 people into them.


He sharply increased funding for the security forces in 2017, more than doubling spending on outlays such as checkpoints and surveillance to 1.37 billion renminbi, or about $180 million.


And he lined up party members for a rally in a public square and urged them to press the fight against terrorists. “Wipe them out completely,” he said. “Destroy them root and branch.”




Military police at a rally in Hotan, in February 2017. Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

But privately, Mr. Wang had misgivings, according to the confession that he later signed, which would have been carefully vetted by the party.


He was under intense pressure to prevent an outburst of violence in Yarkand, and worried the crackdown would provoke a backlash.


The authorities set numeric targets for Uighur detentions in parts of Xinjiang, and while it is unclear if they did so in Yarkand, Mr. Wang felt the orders left no room for moderation and would poison ethnic relations in the county.


He also worried that the mass detentions would make it impossible to record the economic progress he needed to earn a promotion.


The leadership had set goals to reduce poverty in Xinjiang. But with so many working-age residents being sent to the camps, Mr. Wang was afraid the targets would be out of reach, along with his hopes for a better job.


His superiors, he wrote, were “overly ambitious and unrealistic.”


“The policies and measures taken by higher levels were at gaping odds with realities on the ground and could not be implemented in full,” he added.


To help enforce the crackdown in southern Xinjiang, Mr. Chen transferred in hundreds of officials from the north. Publicly, Mr. Wang welcomed the 62 assigned to Yarkand. Privately, he seethed that they did not understand how to work with local officials and residents.


The pressure on officials in Xinjiang to detain Uighurs and prevent fresh violence was relentless, and Mr. Wang said in the confession — presumably signed under pressure — that he drank on the job. He described one episode in which he collapsed drunk during a meeting on security.





“While reporting on my work in the afternoon meeting, I rambled incoherently,” he said. “I’d just spoken a few sentences and my head collapsed on the table. It became the biggest joke across the whole prefecture.”


Thousands of officials in Xinjiang were punished for resisting or failing to carry out the crackdown with sufficient zeal. Uighur officials were accused of protecting fellow Uighurs, and Gu Wensheng, the Han leader of another southern county, was jailed for trying to slow the detentions and shield Uighur officials, according to the documents.


Secret teams of investigators traveled across the region identifying those who were not doing enough. In 2017, the party opened more than 12,000 investigations into party members in Xinjiang for infractions in the “fight against separatism,” more than 20 times the figure in the previous year, according to official statistics.


Mr. Wang may have gone further than any other official.


Quietly, he ordered the release of more than 7,000 camp inmates — an act of defiance for which he would be detained, stripped of power and prosecuted.






I undercut, acted selectively and made my own adjustments, believing that rounding up so many people would knowingly fan conflict and deepen resentment,” Mr. Wang wrote.





Without approval and on my own initiative,” he added, “I broke the rules.
Brazen Defiance

Mr. Wang quietly disappeared from public view after September 2017.


About six months later, the party made an example of him, announcing that he was being investigated for “gravely disobeying the party central leadership’s strategy for governing Xinjiang.”


The internal report on the investigation was more direct. “He should have given his all to serving the party,” it said. “Instead, he ignored the party central leadership’s strategy for Xinjiang, and he went as far as brazen defiance.”


Both the report and Mr. Wang’s confession were read aloud to officials across Xinjiang. The message was plain: The party would not tolerate any hesitation in carrying out the mass detentions.


Propaganda outlets described Mr. Wang as irredeemably corrupt, and the internal report accused him of taking bribes on construction and mining deals and paying off superiors to win promotions.


The authorities also emphasized he was no friend of Uighurs. To hit poverty-reduction targets, he was said to have forced 1,500 families to move into unheated apartments in the middle of the winter. Some villagers burned wood indoors to keep warm, leading to injuries and deaths, his confession said.


But Mr. Wang’s greatest political sin was not revealed to the public. Instead, the authorities hid it in the internal report.


“He refused,” it said, “to round up everyone who should be rounded up.”



The only way to stop China from enslaving and torturing these people in concentration camps and making them do forced labor in Chinese factories is to move all manufacturing out of China. Just banning products made in Xinjiang is not enough. The Chinese will simply move the Uyghurs and other minorities to factories in other regions to continue forcing them to work as slaves.
Until international corporations move all manufacturing out of China, the atrocities in such concentration camps will continue. International corporations are complicit in all of this because they look the other way for cheap labor even as the Uyghurs, Tibetans and other minorities are forced to work as slaves.
 

johnq

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Blanked-Out Spots On China's Maps Helped Us Uncover Xinjiang's Camps
In the summer of 2018, as it became even harder for journalists to work effectively in Xinjiang, a far-western region of China, we started to look at how we could use satellite imagery to investigate the camps where Uighurs and other Muslim minorities were being detained. At the time we began, it was believed that there were around 1,200 camps in existence, while only several dozen had been found. We wanted to try to find the rest.
Our breakthrough came when we noticed that there was some sort of issue with satellite imagery tiles loading in the vicinity of one of the known camps while using the Chinese mapping platform Baidu Maps. The satellite imagery was old, but otherwise fine when zoomed out — but at a certain point, plain light gray tiles would appear over the camp location. They disappeared as you zoomed in further, while the satellite imagery was replaced by the standard gray reference tiles, which showed features such as building outlines and roads.
At that time, Baidu only had satellite imagery at medium resolution in most parts of Xinjiang, which would be replaced by their general reference map tiles when you zoomed in closer. That wasn’t what was happening here — these light gray tiles at the camp location were a different color than the reference map tiles and lacked any drawn information, such as roads. We also knew that this wasn’t a failure to load tiles, or information that was missing from the map. Usually when a map platform can’t display a tile, it serves a standard blank tile, which is watermarked. These blank tiles are also a darker color than the tiles we had noticed over the camps.
Once we found that we could replicate the blank tile phenomenon reliably, we started to look at other camps whose locations were already known to the public to see if we could observe the same thing happening there. Spoiler: We could. Of the six camps that we used in our feasibility study, five had blank tiles at their location at zoom level 18 in Baidu, appearing only at this zoom level and disappearing as you zoomed in further. One of the six camps didn’t have the blank tiles — a person who had visited the site in 2019 said it had closed, which could well have explained it. However, we later found that the blank tiles weren’t used in city centers, only toward the edge of cities and in more rural areas. (Baidu did not respond to repeated requests for comment.)
Having established that we could probably find internment camps in this way, we examined Baidu's satellite tiles for the whole of Xinjiang, including the blank masking tiles, which formed a separate layer on the map. We analyzed the masked locations by comparing them to up-to-date imagery from Google Earth, the European Space Agency’s Sentinel Hub, and Planet Labs.
In total there were 5 million masked tiles across Xinjiang. They seemed to cover any area of even the slightest strategic importance — military bases and training grounds, prisons, power plants, but also mines and some commercial and industrial facilities. There were far too many locations for us to sort through, so we narrowed it down by focusing on the areas around cities and towns and major roads.
Prisons and internment camps need to be near infrastructure — you need to get large amounts of building materials and heavy machinery there to build them, for starters. Chinese authorities would have also needed good roads and railways to bring newly detained people there by the thousand, as they did in the early months of the mass internment campaign. Analyzing locations near major infrastructure was therefore a good way to focus our initial search. This left us with around 50,000 locations to look at.
We began to sort through the mask tile locations systematically using a custom web tool that we built to support our investigation and help manage the data. We analyzed the whole of Kashgar prefecture, the Uighur heartland, which is in the south of Xinjiang, as well as parts of the neighboring prefecture, Kizilsu, in this way. After looking at 10,000 mask tile locations and identifying a number of facilities bearing the hallmarks of detention centers, prisons, and camps, we had a good idea of the range of designs of these facilities and also the sorts of locations in which they were likely to be found.
We quickly began to notice how large many of these places are — and how heavily securitized they appear to be, compared to the earlier known camps. In site layout, architecture, and security features, they bear greater resemblance to other prisons across China than to the converted schools and hospitals that formed the earlier camps in Xinjiang. The newer compounds are also built to last, in a way that the earlier conversions weren’t. The perimeter walls are made of thick concrete, for example, which takes much longer to build and perhaps later demolish, than the barbed wire fencing that characterizes the early camps.
In almost every county, we found buildings bearing the hallmarks of detention centers, plus new facilities with the characteristics of large, high-security camps and/or prisons. Typically, there would be an older detention center in the middle of the town, while on the outskirts there would be a new camp and prison, often in recently developed industrial areas. Where we hadn’t yet found these facilities in a given county, this pattern pushed us to keep on looking, especially in areas where there was no recent satellite imagery. Where there was no public high-resolution imagery, we used medium-resolution imagery from Planet Labs and Sentinel to locate likely sites. Planet was then kind enough to give us access to high-resolution imagery for these locations and to task a satellite to capture new imagery of some areas that hadn’t been photographed in high resolution since 2006. In one county, this allowed us to see that the detention center that had previously been identified by other researchers had been demolished and to find the new prison just out of town.


This is Yiwu, Hami prefecture in Google Earth, in the most recent publicly available high-resolution imagery. The photo was taken in 2006. The white marker shows the old, now-demolished prison and the red marker shows the new one on the outskirts.





Google Earth




Here is a close-up of the location where the new prison would eventually be built.





Google Earth



Planet Labs took a new satellite image in 2020, showing the fully built facility.





Planet Labs



Prison requirements — why prisons are built where they are
There’s good reason why these places are developed close to towns. There’s the occasional camp in a more remote location, such as the sprawling internment camp in Dabancheng, but even there it’s next to a major road, with a small town nearby. Having the prison or camp close to an existing town minimizes, in principle, the distance that detainees must be transported (although there are also examples of prisoners and detainees being taken right across Xinjiang, from Kashgar to Korla, as in the drone video that reemerged recently, according to analysts). It is easier for families to visit loved ones who are in custody. Being near a town means that a prison or camp can be staffed more easily. Guards have families, their children need to go to school, their partners have jobs, they need access to healthcare, etc. Construction workers are needed to build the prison in the first place. It is also useful for amenities. Prisons and camps need electricity, water, telephone lines. It is way cheaper and easier to connect to an existing nearby network than to run new pipes and cables tens of kilometers to a more remote location.

Finally, you need a large plot of land for a prison, preferably with space to expand in the future, and this is what the recently developed industrial estates offer: large, serviced plots, close to existing towns and cities. Building in industrial estates also places the camps close to factories for forced labor. While many camps have factories within their compounds, in several cases that we know of detainees are bused to other factory sites to work.
Our list of sites
In total we identified 428 locations in Xinjiang bearing the hallmarks of prisons and detention centers. Many of these locations contain two to three detention facilities — a camp, pretrial administrative detention center, or prison. We intend to analyze these locations further and make our database more granular over the next few months.
Of these locations, we believe 315 are in use as part of the current internment program — 268 new camp or prison complexes, plus 47 pretrial administrative detention centers that have not been expanded over the past four years. We have witness testimony showing that these detention centers have frequently been used to detain people, who are often then moved on to other camps, and so we feel it is important to include them. Excluded from this 315 are 39 camps that we believe are probably closed and 11 that have closed — either they’ve been demolished or we have witness testimony that they are no longer in use. There are a further 14 locations identified by other researchers, but where our team has only been able to check the satellite evidence, which in these cases is weak. These 14 are not included in our list.

We have also located 63 prisons that we believe belong to earlier, pre-2016 programs. These facilities were typically built several years — in some cases, several decades — before the current internment program and have not been significantly extended since 2016. They are also different in style from the detention centers, known in Chinese as “kanshousuo,” and also from the newer camps. These facilities are not part of the 315 we believe to be in use as part of the current internment program and are included separately in our database.
Many of the earlier camps, which were converted from other uses, had their courtyard fencing, watchtowers, and other security features removed, often in late 2018 or early 2019. In some cases, the removal of most barricading, plus the fact that there are often cars parked in several places across the compounds, suggests that they’re no longer camps and are classified as probably closed in our database. The removal of the security features, in several cases, coincided with the opening of a larger, higher-security facility being completed nearby, suggesting that detainees may have been moved to the newer location.
Where facilities were purpose-built as camps and have had courtyard fencing removed but otherwise don’t show any change of use (like cars in the compound), we think they’re likely to still be camps — albeit with lower levels of security.


The only way to stop China from enslaving and torturing these people in concentration camps and making them do forced labor in Chinese factories is to move all manufacturing out of China. Just banning products made in Xinjiang is not enough. The Chinese will simply move the Uyghurs and other minorities to factories in other regions to continue forcing them to work as slaves.
Until international corporations move all manufacturing out of China, the atrocities in such concentration camps will continue. International corporations are complicit in all of this because they look the other way for cheap labor even as the Uyghurs, Tibetans and other minorities are forced to work as slaves.
 

xizhimen

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Not a single Muslim country sides with the west on Xinjiang issue, that's how successful western media works in the Muslim majority countries.
 

xizhimen

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House's look stunning though. India should do something this for its rural pop though to in my opinion.
They were all given free to the locals by the government with free basic furniture and home appliances.
 

johnq

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China's secret internment camps
China has been quietly detaining its population of Uighurs, the country’s Muslim minority, in internment camps. First-hand accounts from inside the camps paint a brutal picture of torture and political indoctrination. At first, China denied the existence of these camps and tried to cover them up. But as a network of academics and activists uncovered evidence of the camps' locations, and the reality of what’s going on inside, China changed its story.
 

xizhimen

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China's secret internment camps
China has been quietly detaining its population of Uighurs, the country’s Muslim minority, in internment camps. First-hand accounts from inside the camps paint a brutal picture of torture and political indoctrination. At first, China denied the existence of these camps and tried to cover them up. But as a network of academics and activists uncovered evidence of the camps' locations, and the reality of what’s going on inside, China changed its story.
Not a single Muslim country sides with the west on Xinjiang issue, that's how successful western media works in the Muslim majority countries.
 

johnq

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China's secret internment camps
China has been quietly detaining its population of Uighurs, the country’s Muslim minority, in internment camps. First-hand accounts from inside the camps paint a brutal picture of torture and political indoctrination. At first, China denied the existence of these camps and tried to cover them up. But as a network of academics and activists uncovered evidence of the camps' locations, and the reality of what’s going on inside, China changed its story.
 

johnq

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Inside China's 'thought transformation' camps - BBC News
The BBC has been given rare access to the vast system of highly secure facilities thought to be holding more than a million Muslims in China’s western region of Xinjiang. Authorities there insist they are just training schools. But the BBC’s visit uncovers important evidence about the nature of the system and the conditions for the people inside it. The BBC's China Correspondent John Sudworth sent this report.
 

johnq

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Gravitas: After the Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang, China targets Tibetans
China is implementing its Xinjiang playbook in Tibet. According to a report, Tibetans are being forced into 'military styled' indoctrination camps.
 

johnq

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Blindfolded, shaved and shackled, video showing the mistreatment of Uighur's in China
The Australian government has condemned a video that surfaced online last week showing the mistreatment of Uighur's in China.
 
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