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:
Part 3: Explaining Variation in the Growth and Decline of Detention Facilities across Xinjiang
This report explores trends in the growth and decline of nighttime lighting over detention facilities across Xinjiang. It reveals evidence to suggest that long-term prisons have become a greater priority than reeducation centers, helping chart the current trajectory of China’s widespread detention of Uyghur and ethnic minority populations in the region.
Part 2: Have Any of Xinjiang’s Detention Facilities Closed?
This report, the second in a three-part series, employs a novel empirical approach to systematically assess the current operating status of known detention facilities in Xinjiang using nighttime lighting. This analysis provides new, empirical evidence to suggest that the overwhelming majority of detention facilities in Xinjiang remain active, operational, and in many cases, still under construction – despite Chinese claims to the contrary.
Part 1: Investigating the Growth of Detention Facilities in Xinjiang Using Nighttime Lighting
In this three-part investigation, RAND researchers use nighttime lighting in Xinjiang to capture the speed and scope with which China’s detention campaign escalated beginning in 2016.
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.
Documenting Xinjiang’s Detention System
This database of nearly 400 suspected detention facilities in Xinjiang highlights ‘re-education’ camps, detention centres and prisons that have been newly built or expanded since 2017.
Xinjiang Detention and Cultural Sites Interactive Map
ASPI researchers have located, mapped and analysed over 380 suspected detention facilities in Xinjiang that have been built or expanded since 2017, making it the most comprehensive dataset on Xinjiang’s detention system in the world. The project has also located and analysed hundreds of mosques and other important Uyghur and Islamic cultural sites in Xinjiang and assessed how many have been demolished or damaged since 2017. Both datasets are viewable on this interactive map.
China Secretly Built A Vast New Infrastructure To Imprison Muslims
Using satellite images and interviews with former detainees, this investigation of China’s internment camp system identified more than 260 structures built since 2017.
Geolocating Growth of Suspect "Boarding" Facilities in Xinjiang China
In this report, RAND identified facilities suspected of housing young children, the construction of which coincided with a publicly stated policy to build “boarding schools” in Xinjiang, alleged by researchers to board Uyghur youth as part of a policy of intergenerational separation.
Geolocating Explosive Growth in Preschools in Western China due to 're-education' Policies
Twenty facilities that imagery analysis, press and professional journals suggest house Uyghur children have been identified in this first study of geolocating China's detention infrastructure targeting Uyghurs and other Muslim minority groups.
Coordinates of Concentration Camps, Prisons and Labour Camps
This dataset, available to view on Google Earth, identifies a number of suspected concentration camps, prisons, and labor camps in East Turkistan (what China calls the “Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region”).
Brainwashing, Police Guards and Coercive Internment: Evidence from Chinese Government Documents about the Nature and Extent of Xinjiang’s “Vocational Training Internment Camps
Based on the government’s own statements, this article seeks to decisively refute the Chinese government’s propaganda claims that about its “Vocational Skills Education Training Centers”. Official documents and related media reports that are not designed for international audiences paint a very different picture of these “centers” – a picture that confirms the growing body of first-hand witness accounts.
Tracking China’s Muslim Gulag - Turning the Desert Into Detention Camps
This investigation by Reuters and Earthrise Media analyzes satellite imagery to plot the construction and expansion of 39 re-education camps, revealing that tripling of the footprint in the space of 17 months.
Mapping Xinjiang’s Detention Camps
This November 2018 report by ASPI’s International Cyber Policy Centre collates and adds to the current open-source research into China’s growing network of extrajudicial ‘re-education’ camps in Xinjiang province.
China’s hidden camps
China is accused of locking up hundreds of thousands of Muslims without trial in its western region of Xinjiang. The government denies the claims, saying people willingly attend special “vocational schools” which combat “terrorism and religious extremism”.
Now a BBC investigation has found important new evidence of the reality.
How to Find China’s Internment Camps for Uighur Muslims - The Atlantic
Citizen journalists and scholars are in a race against time, scouring the internet for evidence of China’s massive internment system, where vast numbers of Muslims have been sent, before the Chinese government can erase it.
What’s the Difference between Prison, Detention Center and Reeducation Camp?
Analysis of satellite imagery reveals key identifying features that differentiate prisons and reeducation camps in Xinjiang - the former are typically larger and have higher security levels, while the latter have less sophisticated designs and are usually smaller.