China’s extensive and brutal campaign of repression against Xinjiang’s Uyghur Muslim minority is taking on a face for the first time. Tens of thousands of police files, photographs and official documents by senior officials of the Communist Party of China (CPC) to which EL PAÍS has had access offer unparalleled proof of the magnitude of the prison system established in China’s far western region of Xinjiang and the paranoia that guides Beijing’s policies against ethnic minorities. The investigation was led by Adrian Zenz, a German scholar and expert on the Xinjiang internment campaign, in collaboration with 14 media outlets from 11 countries.
Named the Xinjiang Police Files, the cache of secret documents makes it possible to identify thousands of inmates in so-called re-education centers built by China, including minors; to determine their internment status; and to show through images taken inside the facilities how officers practice detention, interrogation and abuse. The files also detail instructions for the police officers that are reminiscent of prison routines, and contain transcripts of public speeches by top leaders of the CPC in Xinjiang, among them the former regional secretary Chen Quanguo, showing support for the doctrine of maximum security against prisoners, and advising to open fire if a prisoner compromises the safety of the camp or tries to escape.
“Behind this systematic repression is the fear and paranoia expressed by [Chinese President] Xi Jinping about the resistance of the Uyghurs to the state’s attempt to control them,” said Zenz, Director and Senior Fellow in China Studies at the Foundation, in a telephone conversation with EL PAÍS. According to the study carried out by this academic, the confinement of Uyghurs in re-education camps is the “largest internment of a religious ethnic minority since the Holocaust.” At least one million citizens, most of them Uyghurs, have been locked up in re-education camps scattered across the geography of Xinjiang, according to a figure that is widely agreed on by journalists, academics and the United Nations.
The Xinjiang Police Files have been obtained by an anonymous third party by hacking into computer systems operated by the Public Security Bureau (PSB), which has police functions, in the Xinjiang counties of Konasheher, located in Kashgar prefecture, and Tekes, in Ili Kazakh prefecture. This individual, who prefers not to be identified for security reasons, acted on their own initiative, without conditions or a mandate from any of the researchers involved in the project. The documents and images have been authenticated by this group of journalists, as well as the existence of three re-education centers from which the files were obtained, thanks to a geolocation process based on the photographs taken by the officers.
The prefecture of Kashgar, located in what is officially the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, on the the border with Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, is precisely one of the stops planned on the official trip initiated this Monday by the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, former Chilean president Michelle Bachelet. Her visit to the re-education centers for Uyghurs, the majority ethnic group in this region of some 25 million inhabitants, was one of the fundamental demands made on Bachelet by human rights organizations. The Xi government first acknowledged the existence of these facilities in a white paper (a reference document that guides state policy) in October 2018. However, Beijing rejects the accusations about the repression of minorities in Xinjiang. and claims that these centers serve for the education and training of “students” who are free to move around. The regime calls these camps Vocational Skills Education and Training Centers.
