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:
China Can Lock Up A Million Muslims In Xinjiang At Once
This investigation reveals the full capacity of China's previously secret network of prisons and detention camps in Xinjiang: enough space to detain more than 1 million people.
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.
Trapped in the System: Experiences of Uyghur Detention in Post-2015 Xinjiang
This report presents the results of in-depth interviews conducted with eight individuals with recent direct experience inside detention facilities in China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.
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.
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.
More Evidence About Camps and Prisons for Uyghurs in Xinjiang
Photos and testimonies from residents in Xinjiang’s Kashi prefecture expose details of facilities used by the CCP to detain millions of innocent people.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
Thoroughly Reforming Them Towards a Healthy Heart Attitude: China's Political Re-education Campaign in Xinjiang.
This paper investigates publicly available evidence of China’s political re-education facilities from official sources, including government websites, media reports and other Chinese internet sources.
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.
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.