New reporting from the Associated Press and Buzzfeed News has revealed the inner workings of massive detention centers in Xinjiang. State repression targeted at Uyghurs and other minorities in Xinjiang is complex and multifaceted. “Re-education centers” where Uyghurs were held extra-legally on flimsy pretexts started receiving close International scrutiny in 2018. Uyghur women have been targeted in sterilization drives. Many Uyghurs are not free to practice their religion as they see fit. Forced labor and population transfers have been used to “proletarianize” Uyghurs. Now, for the first time, Dake Kang at The Associated Press has provided first-hand reporting from inside the largest detention center in Xinjiang:
“In one corner of the compound, masked inmates sat in rigid formation. Most appeared to be Uyghur. Zhu Hongbin, the center’s director, rapped on one of the cell’s windows.
“They’re totally unbreakable,” he said, his voice muffled beneath head-to-toe medical gear.
[…] AP journalists did not witness any signs of torture or beating at the facility, and were unable to speak directly to any former or current detainees. But a Uyghur who had fled Xinjiang, Zumret Dawut, said a now-deceased friend who worked at Dabancheng had witnessed treatment so brutal that she fainted. The friend, Paride Amati, said she had seen a pair of teens forced to sign confessions claiming they were involved in terrorism while studying in Egypt, and their skin had been beaten bloody and raw.
[…] Chinese officials also continue to deny that they are holding Uyghurs on false charges. Down the road from the No. 3 center, high walls and guard towers were visible in the same location as the new detention facility shown in satellite imagery.
[…] “We don’t know what it is,” [officials] said. [Source]
2/…in fact, this Dabancheng facility was actually once the "Urumqi City Vocational Skills Training Center". There's hard photographic evidence. In 2018, Reuters went. The nameplate was 乌鲁木齐市职业技能教育培训中心. When we went in April, it changed – to 乌鲁木齐市第三看守所 pic.twitter.com/XRQlLFf14O
— Dake Kang (@dakekang) July 22, 2021
5/The tour appeared to be an attempt to retrospectively legally justify their mass detention campaign in Xinjiang. It's part of a broader shift from the makeshift and extrajudicial “training centers” into a more permanent system of prisons and pre-trial detention facilities.
— Dake Kang (@dakekang) July 22, 2021
Looks like China is retconning Xinjiang camps into judicial detention facilities. Another sign the CCP considers its error was just not making its mass internment of Uyghurs appear “legal” enough https://t.co/K0AmrOSHYt
— Gady Epstein (@gadyepstein) July 22, 2021
The massive rise in arrests cited in Kang’s tweets has been accompanied by an equally massive prison building spree. An investigation by Megha Rajagopalan and Alison Killing for Buzzfeed News, has revealed that Xinjiang’s government now has the prison capacity to simultaneously incarcerate one out of every 25 people within its borders:
The course of camp and prison construction suggests that the government carefully orchestrated the campaign. The pattern of new detention compounds neatly fits the geography of counties and prefectures across Xinjiang, with a camp and detention center in most counties and a prison or two per prefecture. As the new, high-security detention centers were being built — a process that takes about a year from idea to completion — the Chinese government commandeered schools, hospitals, and apartment buildings and quickly converted them into makeshift camps. This twin process allowed Beijing to immediately detain hundreds of thousands of Muslims until its vast new detention infrastructure was complete.
[…] The BuzzFeed News analysis found that by the standards outlined in the [construction standards] document, there is space to detain 1,014,883 people across Xinjiang. That figure does not include the more than 100 other prisons and detention centers that were built before 2016 and are likely still in operation.
Dozens of former detainees have described gross overcrowding in Xinjiang’s prisons and camps, raising the specter that the Chinese government could cram far more people into its sprawling detention system. Last year, a BuzzFeed News investigation of an internment camp in the mountain town of Mongolküre found cells that by Chinese prison standards should only hold up to four people actually held as many as 10. Some remembered being forced to sleep in shifts because of a lack of beds, or even to sleep side by side on single cots. Whether overcrowding continues to occur is less clear, because most of the former detainees who have been able to escape China and describe their experiences were locked up and released early on in the anti-Muslim crackdown. [Source]
The construction standards gave us the amount of square metres needed for each detainee – typically 13-14m2. Normally this figure is used for planning detention facilities – multiply it by the number of detainees to get the size of facility you need to build.
— Alison Killing (@alisonkilling) July 21, 2021
An updated spreadsheet with all the Xinjiang detention facilities can be downloaded from our github – it includes the facilities that are part of the current program, those from pre-2016 and where there is corroborating evidence, links to that. https://t.co/t7fvtJ1Wit
— Alison Killing (@alisonkilling) July 21, 2021
People often talk about 'the next-stage' in Xinjiang, after the mass detentions, but they are still ongoing.
What will be one of the largest camps in all of Xinjiang began construction in early 2021. It is 680,000m2 and will have at least 67 buildings.https://t.co/ckPUlbC9t0 pic.twitter.com/J5kAylikvI
— Nathan Ruser (@Nrg8000) July 19, 2021
China has used aggressive overt and covert methods to shape global narratives about Xinjiang. Companies that eschew Xinjiang cotton have faced boycotts. Individuals who report or research Xinjiang have been harassed and sanctioned. Sophie Richardson, the China director of Human Rights Watch, was sanctioned today for her research on Hong Kong. HRW has also published numerous investigations into Xinjiang and Tibet.
It is testament to the highly effective work of @HRW's China director, Sophie Richardson @SophieHRW, that the Chinese government just imposed sanctions on her. https://t.co/W7FhorenLR pic.twitter.com/mJNwlImfUo
— Kenneth Roth (@KenRoth) July 23, 2021
Beijing doesn’t want you conducting business with Sophie, notorious advocate for human rights https://t.co/ejnXaFglCl
— Gady Epstein (@gadyepstein) July 23, 2021
Another recent attempt to cudgel the world into silence on Xinjiang involved the American camera company Kodak. Kodak’s Instagram account shared a number of images of Xinjiang taken by French photographer Patrick Wack, which he described as “a visual narrative of the region and is a testimony to its abrupt descent into an Orwellian dystopia.” Although Instagram is banned in China, a number of Chinese users complained about the image. Nationalist tabloid Global Times ran a piece accusing Wack of being “eager to bask in the fame and fortune that anti-China matters can bring.” Kodak deleted the post and issued a groveling apology. At The New York Times, Mike Ives reported on Kodak’s decision to self-censor:
“So for them, one of the main actors historically in photography, to say they don’t want to be political is what’s upsetting so many people,” said Mr. Wack, who lived in China for 11 years and is now based in Berlin.
[…] In the post that Kodak uploaded this week to replace Mr. Wack’s photos and commentary, the company said that its Instagram page was designed to “enable creativity by providing a platform for promoting the medium of film,” not to be a “platform for political commentary.”
On its Chinese-language website, Kodak said in a statement that it had identified a “supervision loophole” in its content production that it promised to “review and correct.” [Source]
DUST, a photo book by @patwack gathering four years of work in the Xinjiang Uyghur Region from 2016 to 2019 and its abrupt descent into an Orwellian dystopia. Texts by @remi_castets @DruGladney @pedroletti https://t.co/IMpBwNHn1q @DilReyhan @rglucks1 @UyghurProject #FreeUyghurs pic.twitter.com/oPx0ZUsqDY
— Patrick Wack (@patwack) July 11, 2021
Following Kodak's Instagram account posting photos from an upcoming book about Xinjiang (& almost immediately following the Global Times writing about it), @Kodak has deleted the photos, and posted a statement dissociating itself from the outstanding photography within the boom. pic.twitter.com/076TZkEYJt
— Nathan Ruser (@Nrg8000) July 20, 2021
.@Kodak deleted and apologized for an Instagram photo which linked to the photographer's account that mentioned "mass-incarceration" in Xinjiang. Didn't see any reporting on this. Is it because this is too common now it is no longer newsworthy? pic.twitter.com/mj3uov8Dzs
— Yaqiu Wang 王亚秋 (@Yaqiu) July 20, 2021
