China said Monday that it will continue to "train" Uighur Muslims in northwest China's Xinjiang province within what it considers "vocational training centers", while human rights organizations see them as "detention centers."
The announcement comes after government documents leaked detailing Beijing's control and control of Uighurs in Xinjiang, and after the US Congress approved a bill calling for sanctions against Chinese officials in connection with this file.
The Chinese government has launched a propaganda campaign to justify its security campaign, while the head of the region in the far western region of China, Zakarat Zakir, has rejected the estimates of human rights organizations and foreign experts that more than a million Uighurs and others - mostly Muslim minorities - are being held in these centers.
Zakir said that those currently in the centers "have all completed their courses, and students with the help of the government have achieved stable employment and improved their quality of life."
He added that the next step for the Xinjiang government is to "go ahead with daily, routine, regular and open educational training for village cadres, rural party members, farmers and herders and the unemployed", without providing further details.
Documents obtained by the International Federation of Investigative Journalists and published by 17 media outlets at the end of last November show that the system adopted in detention centers in Xinjiang is strict, and that Beijing controls every detail of life in the camps, where nearly a million Uighurs and other minorities are detained. Most of them are Muslims.
The US newspaper The New York Times also published mid-last month information based on more than 400 pages of Chinese internal documents that Chinese President Xi Jinping ordered officials to act "without mercy" against separatism and extremism.
Former detainees described the facilities in Xinjiang as "indoctrination camps" as part of a campaign to erase the Uighur culture and religion.
Human rights groups and foreign media have also reported that official documents and satellite imagery show that facilities are equipped and managed like prisons.
After Beijing long denied the existence of re-education camps, it acknowledged that it had opened "vocational education centers" in the region aimed at preventing extremism by teaching Mandarin (the most widely used language in China) and job skills.