Heartbreak, Disinformation, and New Punitive Measures in the Wake of Xinjiang Police Files Release

by Oliver Young | May 27, 2022

With the release of the Xinjiang Police Files on Tuesday, the world has seen what Xinjiang’s “re-education” camps look like from inside official Chinese government databases: mugshots of thousands of faces, spreadsheets filled with personal data on detainees, and training guidelines  for guards, including “shoot to kill” directives in the event of a detainee escape. The photos and files have elicited a range of empathetic emotions from Uyghur communities in exile, Chinese netizens, and foreign governments, and an increased resolve for accountability. For the Chinese government, however, the...

Being confronted by each of those photos, each of those individual faces, left me heartbroken. To be living on the same soil as those who have been treated so cruelly and to be oblivious to their suffering, which was right in plain sight, makes me ashamed. Why do they have to be treated like that? I am full of rage, and helplessness."

— Comment from a Weibo user after seeing photos of Uyghur detainees contained in the "Xinjiang Police Files," a leaked trove of photographs and other corroborating evidence about the scale and brutality of detention camps in Xinjiang

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