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The punitive nature of the new detention facilities springing up in the desert, ringed by high walls and barbed wire and flanked by guard towers and police boxes, became apparent from photos and reporting by the fall of 2017. Our best sense of what is happening inside the camps comes from former prisoners, one writing anonymously in Foreign Policy, and others interviewed in Kazakhstan by Shih and Emily Rauhala for The Washington Post: detainees must sing anthems of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), disavow Islam, criticize themselves and their family’s beliefs, watch propaganda films, and study Chinese language and history. They are told that their culture is “backward.” Some must memorize the moralizing Three-character classic (San zi jing), a classical Chinese children’s primer in trisyllabic verse, abandoned as a pedagogical text elsewhere in China for over a century. Cells are crowded and food is poor. Those who complain reportedly risk solitary confinement, food deprivation, being forced to stand against a wall for extended periods, being shackled to a wall or bolted by wrists and ankles into a rigid “tiger chair,” and possibly waterboarding and electric shocks.

Shohrat Zakir, chairman of the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, said in an October 2018 interview with Xinhua that internees must learn Chinese,

gain modern science knowledge and enhance their understanding of Chinese history, culture and national conditions…learn legal knowledge, including the content of the Constitution, Criminal Law and Xinjiang’s Counter-extremism regulations, as well as acquire at least one vocational skill…to suit local conditions and the job market.

Given this imposing curriculum, it is not surprising that we know of almost no one who has been released after being interned in the Xinjiang prison camps, and that we don’t know what internees will face if and when they are let go. There is growing evidence from relatives’ accounts, satellite photos, and internal documents that following a course of indoctrination, internees are forced to work in factories in or near the camps.

Research by Adrian Zenz of the European School of Culture and Theology confirmed the frightening extent of the camps and provided an estimate of how many people are confined in them. Zenz has tracked the discussion of Xinjiang “de-extremification” and “transformation through education” in Chinese media and party journals for several years. He identified seventy-eight bids by contractors to build, expand, or upgrade internment camps; several of them were planned to exceed 100,000 square feet in area, and one was nearly 900,000 square feet. Documentary evidence for the rush of camp construction is corroborated by satellite photographs of the sites—many first compiled from Google Earth as a remarkable personal project by Shawn Zhang, a law student at the University of British Columbia, and since confirmed and expanded by professional remote-imaging firms working with the BBC and other media. Another indication of the breadth of the internment comes from visitors to Xinjiang, who have commented on the shuttering of Uighur shops and a noticeable lack of people, especially Uighurs between fifteen and forty-five, on the streets.

Comparing data from leaked documents and statements by local officials with population data, Zenz and other researchers estimated that between several hundred thousand and over a million people are interned in the reeducation camps. In February 2018 a Uighur activist media outlet in Turkey released a document it says was leaked by a “believable member of the security services on the ground” in Xinjiang. The document, dating from late 2017 or early 2018, tabulates precise numbers of internees in county-level detention centers, amounting to 892,329 (it excluded municipal-level administrative units, notably the large cities of Urumqi, Khotan, and Yining). Though the document’s provenance cannot be confirmed, if genuine it supports the estimates of a million or more total internees. (The US State Department estimates that between 800,000 and two million Xinjiang Muslims are interned in the camps.) These estimates do not include the rapidly increasing numbers of people in ordinary prisons: according to PRC government data, criminal arrests in Xinjiang increased by 200,000 between 2016 and 2017, and amounted to 21 percent of total arrests in China in 2017, even though Xinjiang has only 1.5 percent of China’s population. It is believed that the PRC has so far locked up over 10 percent of the adult Muslim population of Xinjiang.

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