All Reading
This section contains a curated list of useful articles, investigations, books and other reading materials. The list is updated on a weekly basis and suggestions for additions are welcome.
Starting Points:
Protest in Xinjiang Against Lockdown After Fire Kills 10
A fire in a residential high-rise in Urumqi, where many residents have been under lockdown, set off public anger and questions about China’s zero-Covid policy.
For Uyghurs, U.N. Report on China’s Abuses is a Long-Awaited Vindication
For the many Uyghur activists who have campaigned to bring China’s intense crackdown in Xinjiang to light, the recently-released United Nations report that largely validated their claims was a powerful, if long-delayed, vindication.
U.N. Says China May Have Committed ‘Crimes Against Humanity’ in Xinjiang
The organization’s human rights office delivered its much-delayed report minutes before Michelle Bachelet, the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, was to leave office.
‘An Invisible Cage’: How China Is Policing The Future
Across China, the police are buying technology that harnesses vast surveillance data to predict crime and protest before they happen, targeting people whose behavior or characteristics are suspicious in the eyes of an algorithm and the Chinese authorities, even if they’ve done nothing wrong.
Four Takeaways From a Times Investigation Into China’s Expanding Surveillance State
China is collecting a staggering amount of personal data from everyday citizens at a previously-unknown scale, a Times investigation has found.
China’s Surveillance State Is Growing. These Documents Reveal How.
A Times Investigation analyzing over 100,000 government bidding documents found that China’s ambition to collect digital and biological data from its citizens is more expansive and invasive than previously known.
Document: What Chinese Officials Told Children Whose Families Were Put in Camps
This document, part of 403 pages obtained by the New York Times, tells Chinese officials in Xinjiang how to explain the disappearance of parents and families detained in camps built to hold Muslim minorities. Anguished students asking about their parents were told they had nothing to worry about.
5 Takeaways from the Leaked Files on China’s Mass Detention of Muslims
Hundreds of pages of internal papers - known as the Xinjiang Papers - offer new insight into how the program began, how it was justified even as the damage it caused was clear, and how some officials resisted it.
‘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.
Opinion: China Locks Up Ethnic Minorities in Camps. It Says So Itself.
In recent weeks, the Xinjiang People’s Congress passed legislation that for the first time provides an explicit basis for the “transformation” of people influenced by “extremism” in “education institutions”.
China Tells U.N. Rights Chief to Respect Its Sovereignty After Xinjiang Comments
China on Tuesday called for U.N. human rights chief Michelle Bachelet to respect its sovereignty, after she urged it to allow monitors into the restive far western region of Xinjiang and expressed concern about the situation there.
China Is Detaining Muslims in Vast Numbers. The Goal: Transformation
On the edge of a desert in far western China, an imposing building sits behind a fence topped with barbed wire. Inside, hundreds of ethnic Uighur Muslims spend their days in a high-pressure indoctrination program.
What Really Happens in China’s ‘Re-education’ Camps
What does it take to intern half a million members of one ethnic group in just a year? Enormous resources and elaborate organization, but the Chinese authorities aren’t stingy. Vast swathes of the Uighur population in China’s western region of Xinjiang — as well as Kazakhs, Kyrgyz and other ethnic minorities — are being detained to undergo what the state calls “transformation through education.” Many tens of thousands of them have been locked up in new thought-control camps with barbed wire, bombproof surfaces, reinforced doors and guard rooms.
Egyptian Police Detain Uighurs and Deport Them to China
At least 12 Chinese nationals were deported and put on a flight to China late Thursday, and 22 more were detained for immediate deportation, three Egyptian aviation officials said.
China Cuts Mobile Service of Xinjiang Residents Evading Internet Filters
The Chinese government is shutting down the mobile service of residents in Xinjiang who use software that lets them circumvent Internet filters, escalating an already aggressive electronic surveillance strategy in the country’s fractious western territory.
Behind Cry for Help From China Labor Camp
The cry for help, a neatly folded letter stuffed inside a package of Halloween decorations sold at Kmart, traveled 5,000 miles from China into the hands of a mother of two in Oregon. Scrawling in wobbly English on a sheet of onionskin paper, the writer said he was imprisoned at a labor camp in this northeastern Chinese town, where he said inmates toiled seven days a week, their 15-hour days haunted by sadistic guards.
Torture is 'Widespread' in China, UN Investigator Says
A high-level United Nations investigator condemned the "widespread" use of torture in Chinese law enforcement and said Beijing must abolish labor camps before it can end such abuses, according to a summary of his findings.