The treasure trove of data lays bare how more than 20,000 Uyghurs from just one county - Shufu - were detained or interned in camps between 2017 and 2018 on spurious charges such as growing a beard or failing to top their phone up with credit, under the watchful eye of guards who were ordered to shoot escapees on sight.
Photographs show weeping prisoners observed closely by officers clutching night-sticks, camp indoctrination sessions, and police armed with rifles, riot shields, and clubs training to stop inmates who are shackled with hoods over their heads. Papers debate the positioning of sniper and machine-gun nests in the camps.
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Along with classified speeches in which top Communist Party officials say up to two million Uyghur are affected by “extremist thought” and hail Xi Jinping for re-educating them, it blows apart the government’s official line that such camps are actually “schools” that people are attending voluntarily.
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Taken as a whole, the leak represents perhaps the largest and single-most showing peek into a system of repression that the Chinese government attempted to hide from the world, then made a lie about when challenged. It will also provide tension on the UN over a fact-finding mission to Xinjiang that begins today amid fears of state whitewashing.
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Given the chance to condemn the leak as fake, the Chinese government did not - instead insisting the camps are “countering violent terrorism, radicalization and separatism, [and are] not about human rights or religion.”
Authorities in Xinjiang have taken “a host of decisive, robust and effective deradicalization measures,” China’s U.S. embassy said, and “the region now enjoys social stability and harmony as well as economic development.”
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The reports were leaked by a hacker who claimed to have scalped them from Chinese police computer servers, downloaded and decrypted them before handing them to US-based academic Dr. Adrian Zenz of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, who has been sanctioned by China for his research on Xinjiang.
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Dr. Zenz then shared the documents with a consortium of journalists, including the BBC, who spent months verifying the information they contained before publishing it on Tuesday.
The BBC says it has spoken with the hacker and has substantiated a large portion of the data they shared but is unable to reveal any more information about the source due to fear of reprisals.
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