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:
Uyghur woman details life inside Chinese 're-education camp' in Xinjiang
A Uyghur woman has detailed conditions she says were tantamount to torture inside one of China's "re-education camps" in far western Xinjiang province. Gulbahar Jelilova, who says she spent 15 months inside one of the camps, has given a rare firsthand account of the conditions.
Where Did the One Million Figure for Detentions in Xinjiang’s Camps Come From?
Given the Chinese government has not released its own official numbers, and given the extreme obstacles that prevent independent on-the-ground accounting of camp inmates, how do outside observers arrive at the one million estimate?
‘Now We Don’t Talk Anymore’ - Inside the ‘Cleansing’ of Xinjiang
Last summer, when I traveled to Xinjiang, I witnessed the most abject sense of fear and trauma I have encountered in 27 years of researching identity and religion among its Uighur communities.
US sportswear traced to factory in China’s internment camps
Behind locked gates, men and women are sewing sportswear that can end up on U.S. college campuses and sports teams. The Associated Press has tracked recent, ongoing shipments from a factory inside an internment camp to Badger Sportswear, a leading supplier in Statesville, North Carolina. The shipments show how difficult it is to stop products made with forced labor from getting into the global supply chain, even though such imports are illegal in the U.S.
Fear and Loathing in Xinjiang: Ethnic Cleansing in the 21st Century
What we are witnessing in Xinjiang is a new form of ethnic cleansing that draws from all of these mass atrocities of the past while benefiting from the technologies of control available in the 21st century.
‘As if you’ve spent your whole life in prison’: Starving and subdued in Xinjiang detention centers
When Chinese state authorities prepared to release Gulbahar Jelil, an ethnic Uyghur woman born and raised in Kazakhstan, they told her that she was forbidden to tell anyone about what she had experienced over the one year, three months, and 10 days in which she was detained…
She didn’t listen.
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.
An Inside Look at China's Reeducation Camps
A million Muslims are being held in reeducation camps in northwestern China, where they are forced to learn Mandarin and sing communist songs. Ex-prisoners who have escaped across the border to Kazakhstan talk about their imprisonment.
Ex-Detainee Describes Torture In China's Xinjiang Re-Education Camp
Samarkand says he was transferred to a re-education camp, where people were separated into three groups: those who were religious, those who were suspected of being criminals, and those, like him, who had traveled abroad. All of them, says Samarkand, had one thing in common, though: They had grown up in Muslim families and communities.
In China’s Xinjiang, surveillance is all pervasive
There are few more difficult places for a foreign journalist to report from in China than Xinjiang. The surveillance is all pervasive. Streets bristle with CCTV cameras. In some cities, there are now police posts every 30 metres.
Xinjiang’s Re-Education and Securitization Campaign: Evidence from Domestic Security Budgets
In August 2018, at a meeting of the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, the PRC flatly denied the existence of “re-education camps”, stating that they were instead “vocational education and employment training centers to acquire employment skills and legal knowledge”. But the PRC government’s own budgets appear to contradict these assertions.
Interview: ‘I Did Not Believe I Would Leave Prison in China Alive’
Tursun was taken into custody several times, including at one of a network of political “re-education camps,” where Chinese authorities began detaining Uyghurs accused of harboring “strong religious views” and “politically incorrect” ideas in April 2017. Tursun said she was targeted because she had lived in Egypt—one of a number of countries blacklisted by authorities in the XUAR because of a perceived threat of religious radicalization.
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.
PART III: Interview: ‘We tell them that they would be banned from seeing their family again.’
An officer at a police station in Kashgar prefecture recently told RFA’s Uyghur Service about the conditions at a camp where he worked as a guard for 10 months. In the third part of the interview, the officer—who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal—describes how the ban on religious practices in the camp affects bedtime, and even the specific language detainees can use when talking with family members.
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's Decimation of Uyghur Minds
Academics, journalists and rights groups have recently documented the accelerating repression of the 11-million strong Uyghur population living in Xinjiang. The burgeoning security apparatus, ubiquitous surveillance, gathering of biometrics, the use of big data, and similar technological features of Chinese authoritarianism have invited comparisons of Xinjiang to an open-air prison or to the dystopian visions captured in Orwell’s 1984 or Zamyatin’s We.
Inside China's Internment Camps: Tear Gas, Tasers and Textbooks
An AFP examination of more than 1,500 publicly available government documents -- ranging from tenders and budgets to official work reports -- shows the “re-education” centres are run more like jails than schools.
China’s Government Has Ordered a Million Citizens to Occupy Uighur Homes. Here’s What They Think They’re Doing.
Little attention has been paid to the mobilization of more than a million Chinese civilians to aid the military and police in their repressive campaign by occupying the homes of Xinjiang’s Uighurs and other Muslim minorities.
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.
PART II: Interview: ‘We Can Observe The Toilet With Cameras as Well’
An officer at a police station in Kashgar prefecture recently told RFA’s Uyghur Service about the conditions at a camp where he worked as a guard for 10 months. In the second part of the interview, the officer—who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal—describes the stern regimen detainees must follow in one camp.