Documents shed light on China’s Uighur internment camps

NEW YORK

Leaked documents from China’s Communist Party expose the brainwashing taking place inside high-security internment camps for Muslims in the country’s tightly controlled Xinjiang region.

The so-called China Cables were obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), a U.S-based donor-funded reporting outlet, and shared with 17 media partners for publication on Sunday.

The documents lift the lid on conditions for about a million members of the Muslim Uighur community in the far western region who are thought to be detained without trial and forced to undergo indoctrination.

China’s government has repeatedly said the camps offer voluntary education and training to help stamp out Islamic extremism. Beijing’s envoy to the U.K. told the BBC, one of the ICIJ’s media partners, that the documents were fake news.

The files “include a classified list of guidelines” approved by top Chinese officials for running camps and a “massive data collection and analysis system that uses artificial intelligence” to help round up suspect Xinjiang residents, said ICIJ reporter Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian.

“The system is able to amass vast amounts of intimate personal data through warrantless manual searches, facial recognition cameras, and other means to identify candidates for detention, flagging for investigation hundreds of thousands merely for using certain popular mobile phone apps,” wrote Allen-Ebrahimian.

“The documents detail explicit directives to arrest Uighurs with foreign citizenship and to track Xinjiang Uighurs living abroad, some of whom have been deported back to China by authoritarian governments.”

Earlier this month, another trove of Chinese government documents leaked to the New York Times daily revealed details about Beijing’s fears over religious extremism and its wholesale crackdown on Uighurs.

United Nations experts and campaigners say that some 1 million Uighurs and others, mostly Muslims, have been confined in Xinjiang in a crackdown that has been criticized by the U.S., European nations and others.