A new leak of highly classified Chinese government documents has uncovered the operations manual for running the mass detention camps in Xinjiang and exposed the mechanics of the region’s Orwellian system of mass surveillance and “predictive policing.”

Exposed: China’s operating manuals for mass internment and arrest by algorithm

Leaks

Official Documents

Re-education

Detention

China cables

Surveillance

Artificial Intelligence

More than 400 pages of internal Chinese documents provide an unprecedented inside look at the crackdown on ethnic minorities in the Xinjiang region.

‘Absolutely no mercy’: Leaked files expose how China organized mass detentions of Muslims

This paper investigates publicly available evidence from official sources, including government websites, media reports and other Chinese internet sources, of the unprecedented re-education campaign that has emerged in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in China since the Spring of 2017.

‘Thoroughly reforming them towards a healthy heart attitude’: China’s political re-education campaign in Xinjiang

A former kindergarten principal’s testimony provides the first dramatic public evidence from a Chinese citizen of the expanding gulag in Xinjiang.

"Re-educating" Xinjiang's Muslims

Cultural Destruction

The Chinese government has embarked on a systematic campaign to rewrite the cultural heritage of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) in northwest China by desecrating or “rectifying” mosques and indigenous sacred sites.

This report maps over 900 mosques and other important Uyghur religious-cultural sites across Xinjiang, analyses their condition before and after 2017, and then used statistical extrapolation to estimate the full extent of their destruction and alteration.

Cultural erasure: Tracing the destruction of Uyghur and Islamic spaces in Xinjiang

Cultural Genocide

Culture

ASPI

ASPI researchers have identified and mapped more than 380 suspected detention facilities in Xinjiang, highlighting ‘re-education’ camps, detention centres and prisons that have been newly built or expanded since 2017. This is the largest database of Xinjiang’s detention facilities in existence, and we believe that it covers most such facilities.

Documenting Xinjiang’s detention system

Forced Labour

The Chinese Government is building the world’s largest police-run DNA database in close cooperation with key industry partners across the globe. Yet, unlike the managers of other forensic databases, Chinese authorities are deliberately enrolling tens of millions of people who have no history of serious criminal activity. Those individuals (including preschool-age children) have no control over how their samples are collected, stored and used.

Genomic surveillance: Inside China's DNA dragnet

A .zip collection of 380+ suspected detention facilities in Xinjiang and additional info for each one. This file will continue to be updated with new sites and information. 
v1.0

Detention Facilities (v1.0)

Xinjiang

v1.01 - Minor changes and new sites added.

Cultural Destruction - Combined (v1.01)

Cultural Destruction - Damaged or Destroyed Subset (v1.01)

Knowledge centre

A collection of visual assets, documents and data relating to our Cultural Erasure report.

Media Package – Xinjiang's Cultural Erasure

ASPI International Cyber Policy Centre’s newly launched​ ​Xinjiang Data Project​ ​brings together rigorous, empirical research on the human rights situation in Xinjiang. It focuses on a core set of topics including mass internment camps, surveillance and emerging technologies, forced labour and supply chains, the ‘re-education’ campaign and deliberate cultural destruction.

The Xinjiang Data Project: Quantifying cultural erasure and documenting the detention system

Cultural Destruction - Other Cultural Sites (v1.0)

Cultural Destruction - Mosques (v1.0)

Researchers at ASPI’s International Cyber Policy Centre have now located, mapped and analysed 380 suspected detention facilities in Xinjiang, making it the most comprehensive data on Xinjiang’s detention system in the world. This new database highlights ‘re-education’ camps, detention centres, and prisons which have been newly built or expanded since 2017, and we believe it covers most such detention facilities.

New ASPI research: 'Documenting Xinjiang’s detention system' (in Uyghur)

A zipped media package with visual assets and information about our Documenting Xinjiang's Detention Facilties research output.

Warning: This is a large file with videos. 

Media Package - Documenting Xinjiang's Detention Facilities

A .zip collection of 61 suspected detention facilities in Xinjiang that have expanded since mid-2019, and additional info for each one. This file will continue to be updated with new sites and information. 
v1.0

Detention Facilities - Expanded Camps Subset (v1.0)

The Xinjiang Documentation Project offers a variety of reports from different perspectives on the ongoing events in Xinjiang. The project curates a range of resources and documents including timelines, key documents, translations and media links. 

The UBC Xinjiang Documentation Project

Eyewitness

New ASPI research: 'Documenting Xinjiang’s detention system'

Download and read the classified documents at the heart of the China Cables on the ICIJ website.

Read the China Cables Documents

This ICIJ investigation demonstrates how the man who signed China’s confidential plans for sweeping extrajudicial detentions and internment camps in Xinjiang had a “lot of ground experience in the trickiest parts of Xinjiang.”

Xinjiang’s architect of mass detention: Zhu Hailun

Urdu translation of the leaked China Cables telegram document.

چائنا کیبلز: ٹیلیگرام کے بارے میں دستاویزات خارج ہوگئیں

Urdu translation of the leaked China Cables IJOP daily bulletin documents.

چائنا کیبلز: "مربوط مشترکہ کارروائی کے پلیٹ فارم" کے بارے میں شائع شدہ بلیٹن

Urdu translation of the leaked China Cables court case documents.

چائنا کیبلز: عدالت سے متعلق کیس سے متعلق دستاویزات خارج ہوگئیں

Russian translation of the leaked China Cables telegram document.

китайские депеши: Утечка документов телеграммы

Russian translation of the leaked China Cables daily bulletin documents.

китайские депеши: Утечка ежедневных бюллетени Совместной комплексной операционной платформы

Russian translation of the leaked China Cables court case documents.

китайские депеши: Утечка документов судебного дела

Malay translation of the leaked China Cables telegram document.

China Cables: Dokumen telegram yang bocor

Malay translation of the leaked China Cables daily bulletin documents.

China Cables: Bocor "Buletin" setiap hari dari Platform Operasi Bersama Bersepadu

Malay translation of the leaked China Cables court case documents.

China Cables: Dokumen kes mahkamah yang bocor

Indonesian translation of the leaked China Cables telegram document.

China Cables: Dokumen telegram bocor

Indonesian translation of the leaked China Cables daily bulletin documents.

China Cables: Dokumen "Buletin" harian yang bocor dari Platform Operasi Gabungan Terpadu

Indonesian translation of the leaked China Cables court case documents.

China Cables: Dokumen kasus pengadilan bocor

French translation of the leaked China Cables telegram document.

China Cables: Fuite de documents de télégramme

French translation of the leaked China Cables IJOP daily bulletin documents.

China Cables: Fuite des documents du bulletin quotidien IJOP

French translation of the leaked China Cables court case documents.

China Cables: Fuites de documents judiciaires

Arabic translation of the leaked China Cables telegram document.

البرقيات الصينية: وثائق برقية مسربة

Arabic translation of the leaked China Cables IJOP daily bulletin documents.

البرقيات الصينية: النشرة اليومية المسربة لمنصة التشغيل المشتركة المتكاملة

Arabic translation of the leaked China Cables court case documents.

البرقيات الصينية: وثائق قضية محكمة مسربة

An in depth oral history of Xinjiang's detention system based on eyewitness and survivor accounts.

Weather Reports: Voices from Xinjiang

Drawing on research in the region between 2010 and 2017, government documents, and colonial theory, this article introduces and interrogates the “Three News” housing campaign. It argues that by imposing what I call “authoritarian reflectiveness,” the CCP intends to uproot Uyghur configurations of order and replace them with Han domestic sensibilities.

If you don’t know how, just learn: Chinese housing and the transformation of Uyghur domestic space

Residential Demolition

Arabic translation of the ICIJ China Cables report.
الترجمة العربية لتقرير الكابلات الصينية ICIJ

فضح: كتيبات إرشادات التشغيل الصينية المتعلقة بالحجز الجماعي والاعتقال باستخدام الحلول الحسابية أو الخوارزمية

French translation of the ICIJ China Cables report.
Traduction française du rapport ICIJ China Cables.

Révélés : Les manuels chinois d'internement et d'arrestation de masse pare algorithme

Malay translation of the ICIJ China Cables report.
Terjemahan bahasa Malaysia dari laporan ICIJ China Cables.

Terdedah: Panduan Operasi China Untuk Tahanan Besar-Besaran Dan Penahanan Menggunakan Algoritma

Indonesian translation of the ICIJ China Cables report.
Terjemahan bahasa Indonesia dari laporan China Cable ICIJ.

Terbongkar: Manual Operasi Cina untuk Penahanan dan Penangkapan Massal Berdasarkan Algoritme

Russian translation of the ICIJ China Cables report.
Русский перевод отчета ICIJ China Cables.

Разоблачение: эксплуатационные инструкции КНР, основанные на алгоритмах массового интернирования и арестов

Chinese translation of the ICIJ China Cables report.
ICIJ中国电缆报告的中文翻译。

曝光:中国利用计算程序实施大规模拘留和逮捕的运作方式

Urdu translation of the ICIJ China Cables report.
آئی سی آئی جے چائنہ کیبلز کی رپورٹ کا اردو ترجمہ۔

بے نقاب: ریاضی کے الگورتھم کے کلیوں کے ذریعے اجتماعی نظر بندی اور حراست کے لیے چین کے عملی ہدایت نامے

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.

Mapping Xinjiang's detention camps

In this op-ed, Tom Cliff posits that, by rejecting the idea that Chinese leaders do not realise the effects of what they are doing, the questions ‘Why are they doing it? What do they hope to achieve?’ become relevant.

Xinjiang today: Wang Zhen rides again?

How China’s government conflates Uyghur identity with mental illness.

"Once their mental state is healthy, they will be able to live happily in society"

In this report, Timothy Grose offers a detailed picture of the multilayered identities of contemporary Uyghur youth and an assessment of the effectiveness of the "Xinjiang Class" re-education programme in meeting its political goals.

Negotiating inseparability in China: A conversation with Timothy Grose

The Chinese authorities turned to a Massachusetts company and a prominent Yale researcher as they built an enormous system of surveillance and control.

China uses DNA to track its people, with the help of American expertise

How one university student was almost buried by the "people's war on terror".

A summer vacation in China's Muslim gulag

This episode of Four Corners, from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, exposes how China is creating the world's largest prison. Contains a video with transcript.

Tell the world

A researcher shares her account of police surveillance, home raids, evictions and arrests while conducting doctoral research in Xinjiang between 2014 and 2016.

I was in China doing research when I saw my Uyghur friends disappear

A new report revealed a broad campaign that targeted Muslims in China and their diaspora in other countries, beginning as early as 2013.

China's software stalked Uyghurs earlier and more widely, researchers learn

The Chinese state has destroyed and desecrated Uyghur historical and holy places at a scale unprecedented in the history of Eastern Turkistan (Altishahr, Xinjiang) as a Chinese-dominated region. Among the demolished places were mosques, and these have received the bulk of international media attention. But another kind of sacred site - the Mazar - has arguably been a more significant crux of desecration.

The spatial cleansing of Xinjiang: Mazar desecration in context

Shrine

For the past year, Paul Mozur has been investigating the story of a son determined to free his mother from a repressive system of detention and surveillance in western China. Today, we hear from the mother herself for the first time.

A woman's journey through China's detention camps

In a major ethical leap for the tech world, Chinese start-ups have built algorithms that the government uses to track members of a largely Muslim minority group.

One month, 500,000 face scans: How China is using AI to profile a minority

Why has the Communist Party come to rely on mass internment to control the Uyghurs? What are the implications for China’s future political development under President Xi Jinping? And how should the international community respond?

Patriotic songs and self-criticism: why China is ‘re-educating’ Muslims in mass detention camps

In Part 2 of a BuzzFeed News investigation, ex-prisoners detail the horrors of China’s detention camps. See also: "Built to last".

What they saw

In Part 1 of 2, a BuzzFeed News investigation obased on thousands of satellite images reveals a vast, growing infrastructure for long-term detention and incarceration. See also: "What they saw".

Built to last

More than a million Muslims have been arbitrarily detained in China’s Xinjiang region. As this report explores, the re-education camps are just one part of the government’s crackdown on Uyghurs.

China's repression of Uyghurs in Xinjiang

As China silences Uyghur poets’ voices in Xinjiang, Uyghur poets and artists in the diaspora have spoken up, bearing eloquent witness to the catastrophe in their homeland. Some under their own names and others using pseudonyms, these writers and artists, many of whom live in Turkey’s large Uyghur refugee community, are giving expression to the pain, as well as the resilience, of their people.

Uighur poets on repression and exile

Authorities take down once-bustling Uighur neighbourhoods to create a compliant economic hub.

After mass detentions, China razes Muslim communities to build a loyal city

This 2017 report details the rapidly growing surveillance state in Xinjiang and its tools: security checkpoints, facial scanners, ID cards and other advanced technology.

Twelve days in Xinjiang: How China's surveillance state overwhelms daily life

In the absence of officially reported numbers or other hard evidence, researchers of various stripes have converged on the figure of one million as a common estimate of the people the Chinese government is detaining in Xinjiang’s camps. But where does this figure come from, and how is it formulated?

Where did the one million figure for detentions in Xinjiang's camps come from?

A set of Chinese Communist Party documents was leaked to The New York Times and published last weekend. They not only reveal the rationale and implementation of the Chinese Communist Party’s policies in Xinjiang, a nominally autonomous region in northwestern China. They also open a window onto how China functions today, both at the top and closer to the bottom of its party-state hierarchy. And that reveals two things about the CCP: its awesome power and its fundamental weakness.

Between the lines of the Xinjiang Papers

In northwest China, the government is cracking down on the minority Muslim Uyghur population, keeping them under constant surveillance and throwing more than a million people into concentration camps. But in Istanbul, 3,000 miles away, a community of women who have escaped a life of repression are fighting a digital resistance.

Inside China's massive surveillance operation

This article recounts an interview with Omar Belaki, a Kazakhstani citizen, in which he details his experienced being incarcerated for several months under the CCP's detention and re-education regime.

China’s mass indoctrination camps evoke Cultural Revolution

One of the earliest reports of the detention camp disappearances. Through rare interviews with Uyghurs who recently left China, a review of government procurement contracts and unreported documents, and a trip through southern Xinjiang, the AP pieced together a picture of a campaign that’s ostensibly rooting out terror — but instead instilling fear.

In Western China, thought police instill fear

Gene A. Bunin has spent the past eighteen months talking to Uighur restaurant workers all over China. These conversations reveal how this Muslim minority feel the daily threat of arrest, detention and ‘re-education’.

'We’re a people destroyed': why Uyghur Muslims across China are living in fear

Musicians, folklorists, and storytellers disappear after being forced back to China.

Kyrgyz students vanish into Xinjiang’s maw

该数据库记录了新疆成千上万的被拘留，被迫工作或失踪的少数民族公民。

新疆受害者资料库

This database documents thousands of ethnic minority citizens from Xinjiang who have been forced into detention or labor, 're-homed' or disappeared.

Xinjiang Victim's Database

A leaked cache of secret Chinese Government documents reveals how authorities in Xinjiang red-flagged 23 Australian citizens during a security crackdown that consigned tens of thousands of people to arbitrary detention and mass indoctrination.

The China Cables: Leak reveals the scale of Beijing's repressive control over Xinjiang

In Uyghur society, lending money is more than capital exchange, it's part of a practice that social theorist AbdouMaliq Simone refers to as “taking care.” In Xinjiang, as China's "People's War on Terror" accelerated, money transfers across international boundaries were seen as a possible sign of extremism — just another way that Uyghurs were cut off from their support networks and isolated from one another.

Uyghur ‘caretaking’ and the isolation of re-education

Smartphones and the internet gave the Uyghurs a sense of their own identity – but now the Chinese state is using technology to strip them of it.

China’s hi-tech war on its Muslim minority

This public database maps companies and organisations to visualise a holistic picture of the increasingly global reach of China’s tech giants, including companies working in the artificial intelligence (AI) and surveillance tech sectors.

Mapping more of China's tech giants: AI and surveillance

A New York Times investigation drawing on government and company records as well as interviews with industry insiders found that China is in effect hard-wiring Xinjiang for segregated surveillance, using an army of security personnel to compel ethnic minorities to submit to monitoring and data collection while generally ignoring the majority Han Chinese, who make up 36 percent of Xinjiang’s population.

How China uses high-tech surveillance to subdue minorities

The Communist Party wants to remold Xinjiang’s minorities into loyal blue-collar workers to supply Chinese factories with cheap labor.

Inside China’s push to turn Muslim minorities into an army of workers

Arrests, trials and prison sentences have surged in Xinjiang, where Uyghurs and Kazakhs also face re-education camps.

China’s prisons swell after deluge of arrests engulfs Muslims

In this investigation, Axios obtains a Chinese government request sent to the Turkish government for a Uighur man who fled Xinjiang amid worsening repression.

Documents show China's secret extradition request for Uyghur in Turkey

Chinese recipients of World Bank loans tried to secure funding for the purchase of facial recognition technology for use in China’s northwest region of Xinjiang, according to documents obtained in this Axios investigation.

China tried to get World Bank funds to spy on Uyghurs

A school in Xinijang, supported by a $50 million loan from the World Bank, purchased barbed wire, gas launchers, and body armor.

The World Bank was warned about funding repression in Xinjiang

This AP investigation, based on government statistics, state documents and interviews, documents the widespread and systematic practice of forced birth control of Uyghurs and other minorities by the CCP in a practice some experts are calling a form of "demographic genocide".

China cuts Uyghur births with IUDs, abortion, sterilization

Population Control

This report focuses on what we know about forced labor in Xinjiang, how it connects to Western supply chains and identifies actions that are most likely to improve the situation.

Connecting the dots in Xinjiang: Forced labor, forced assimilation, and Western supply chains

Based on official documents, media reports, first-hand witness accounts and the Chinese government’s own statements, this article decisively refutes propaganda claims that Xinjiang's "Vocational Skills Education Training Centers" are merely benign training institutions.

Brainwashing, police guards and coercive internment: Evidence from Chinese government documents about the nature and extent of Xinjiang’s “Vocational Training Internment Camps”

This report examines official PRC budgetary figures, analyzing spending breakdowns at the regional, prefectural, and county levels to produce findings of unprecedented granularity.

Xinjiang's re-education and securitization campaign: Evidence from domestic security budgets

This report presents a summary of Dr. Adrian Zenz's 2018 longform research into the CCP's camps and detention centers.

New evidence for China's political re-education campaign in Xinjiang

This report presents detailed analysis of another troubling aspect of state policy in Xinjiang: measures to forcibly suppress birthrates among ethnic Uyghur communities, to include the mass application of mandatory birth control and sterilizations.

Sterilizations, IUDs, and mandatory birth control: The CCP’s campaign to suppress Uyghur birthrates in Xinjiang

The Chinese government has facilitated the mass transfer of Uyghur and other ethnic minority citizens from the far west region of Xinjiang to factories across the country. Under conditions that strongly suggest forced labour, Uyghurs are working in factories that are in the supply chains of at least 82 well-known global brands in the technology, clothing and automotive sectors, including Apple, BMW, Gap, Huawei, Nike, Samsung, Sony and Volkswagen.

Uyghurs for Sale: ‘Re-education’, forced labour and surveillance beyond Xinjiang

While Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and other Turkic Muslims people are secretly transferred into prisons all over China (Bunin 2019; Kuo 2019; Jiang 2019), or re-emerge as bare minimum wage workers on the ‘re-education camp’ factory floors (Byler 2019), China’s settler institution, the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps (兵团, Bingtuan), is facilitating new waves of Han influx from Inner China (内地, Neidi) to settle as farmers, civil servants, prison guards, police officers, and teachers.

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