Leaked Documents Show Operations of Prison Camps in China's Xinjiang
Leaked documents released on Sunday detailed how China controls everything from the frequency of haircuts to when the doors are locked in the mass detention camps of its Xinjiang region.
The documents, obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and published by 17 media outlets worldwide, show the strict protocols governing life in the network of camps in the far-western region, which rights groups and outside experts say house more than one million Uighurs and other mostly Muslim minorities.
The leak comes one week after The New York Times reported, based on more than 400 pages of internal papers it had obtained, that Chinese President Xi Jinping ordered officials to act with "absolutely no mercy" against separatism and extremism in a 2014 speech following a Uighur militant attack on a train station.
The latest leak consists of a list of guidelines Xinjiang's security chief approved in 2017 for running the detention camps, along with intelligence briefings that show how police use data collection and artificial intelligence to select residents for detention.
Referring to detainees as "students" who must "graduate" from the camps, the guidelines lay out how staff should manage their day-to-day lives, such as by ensuring "timely haircuts and shaves," while also emphasizing that detainees are barred from having cellphones, according to an English translation of the memo posted by ICIJ.