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:

Eyewitness Accounts

Overview Reports

Lists / Databases of Victims

Satellite Imagery of Camps, Prisons & Cultural Destruction

How I escaped a Chinese internment camp
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How I escaped a Chinese internment camp

Zumrat Dawut is a mother of three from Ürümqi, the capital of the Xinjiang autonomous region in China. In 2018, she was arrested and sent to a detention facility for Uyghur women where she said she endured brutal living conditions and beatings. This comic, featuring art by Fahmida Azim, tells Zumrat's story.

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The architecture of repression: Unpacking Xinjiang’s governance
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The architecture of repression: Unpacking Xinjiang’s governance

This report is a part of a larger online project which can be found on the Xinjiang Data Project website. The project maps and analyses the governance mechanisms employed by the Chinese party-state in Xinjiang from 2014 to 2021 within the context of the region’s ongoing human rights crisis. The authors have located and scrutinised thousands of Chinese-language sources, including leaked police records and government budget documents never before published. For policymakers, this report will provide an evidence base to inform policy responses including possible sanctions. For the general public and anyone whose interests are linked to Xinjiang and China more broadly, this project can inform risk analysis and ethical considerations.

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The Uyghur Tribunal - Hearing Session 2
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The Uyghur Tribunal - Hearing Session 2

The Uyghur Tribunal was launched in September 2020 as an independent people’s tribunal to investigate ‘ongoing atrocities and possible Genocide’ against the Uyghurs, Kazakhs and other Turkic Muslim Populations. The Uyghur Tribunal, which has no powers of sanction or enforcement, will confine itself to reviewing evidence in order to reach an impartial and considered judgment on whether international crimes are proved to have been committed by the PRC. There will be two sets of Hearings, at which witnesses will present live evidence. These will be open to the public and streamed live. The first hearings took place between 4 and 7 June 2021. Click here to view recorded livestreams of the second set of hearings from 10 to 13 September 2021.

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‘It Went on For Four Hours, Just to Film a Single Video’: Uyghur Former Camp Instructor
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‘It Went on For Four Hours, Just to Film a Single Video’: Uyghur Former Camp Instructor

Qelbinur Sidik, 51, is one of the few people to relate their experiences working at a facility in the vast network of internment camps in northwest China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR). A well-respected instructor, Sidik was forced to teach the language at a men’s camp between March and September 2017, as well as at a women’s camp between September and October of that year. Sidik, who now lives in the Netherlands, estimates that the two camps held around 3,000 and 10,000 detainees, respectively.

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Big Data Program Targets Xinjiang’s Muslims - Leaked List of Over 2,000 Detainees Demonstrates Automated Repression
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Big Data Program Targets Xinjiang’s Muslims - Leaked List of Over 2,000 Detainees Demonstrates Automated Repression

A big data program for policing in China’s Xinjiang region arbitrarily selects Turkic Muslims for possible detention, Human Rights Watch said today. A leaked list of over 2,000 detainees from Aksu prefecture provided to Human Rights Watch is further evidence of China’s use of technology in its repression of the Muslim population.

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Inside A Xinjiang Detention Camp
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Inside A Xinjiang Detention Camp

It started as a single small compound. Within 18 months, it had grown to more than 10 times its original size, capable of holding about 3,700 detainees. China's mass internment system for Muslims in Xinjiang is so secretive that, despite a growing international outcry, little is known about any one detention camp. Interviews and architectural modeling offer a rare and terrifying view into a massive internment complex.

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A life story of former Chinese concentration camp teacher

A life story of former Chinese concentration camp teacher

On March 1, 2017 at the start of the mass imprisonment campaign of the Uyghurs led by the Chinese Communist Party, the life of a schoolteacher from an influential family was turned upside down, when she was recruited as a teacher in a “re-education camp”. She speaks about the inhuman conditions, of detention, rape, torture, forced sterilisation and the absurdity of her educational mission. Her witness account was published previously by the French newspaper Libération on 20th July.

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“99 bad things”: A man’s 2-year journey through Xinjiang’s complex detention network
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“99 bad things”: A man’s 2-year journey through Xinjiang’s complex detention network

Three years after the start of the mass incarcerations in China’s northwestern Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, there are now dozens of eyewitness accounts testifying to the coercive, violent, and often cruel nature of Xinjiang’s “re-education initiative”. Among these, however, few are as informative, comprehensive, and detailed as Erbaqyt Otarbai’s, a Kazakh truck driver who – following a trip to Xinjiang in May 2017 – found himself caught up in the system for two full years, with the majority of the time spent in detention centers, “re-education” camps, a hospital, an improvised factory, and house arrest. His account – independently corroborated various times over by former cellmates, satellite images, and testimonies for victims that he met along the way – offers a rare and invaluable view of not only the system’s many facets but also of their evolution.

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