The International Coalition of Investigative Journalists on Sunday released leaked documents revealing Chinese practices against Uighur Muslims in concentration camps in East Turkistan.
The documents, published by the Washington-based Coalition, contain information about the conditions in which China is holding more than a million Uighurs in the region and how to manage the details of their daily lives, including "cutting hair and shaving" and preventing them from owning mobile phones.
The leak comes a week after the New York Times published information based on more than 400 pages of Chinese internal documents that President Xi Jinping ordered officials to act "ruthlessly" against separatism and extremism.
Change of thought
The documents showed that the aim of the Chinese authorities in the concentration camps is to absorb the Muslim minority and change their minds, not to provide vocational training to detainees as claimed by Beijing.
The memorandum states that students are only entitled to contact the outside world during scheduled activities, and detainees are assessed on a point system to measure their ideological transformation, study, training and compliance.
The memorandum stresses the need for strict control of locks and keys, and that the doors of dormitories, corridors and floors must be locked double and immediately after opening and closing.
She added that there should be full video surveillance covering dormitories and classrooms without any exception, to ensure that the guards alternate monitoring moment by moment and record everything in detail and immediately report suspicious things.
According to the memorandum, students should remain in detention for at least one year, but this is not always complied with, according to former detainees, the Union of Investigative Journalists.
In this regard, Zhou Hailun, deputy secretary-general of the Communist Party of the Region, sent a letter to the camp officials.
"Do not allow anyone to flee. They have doubled the penalties and discipline for those who act wrongly, and encourage remorse and confession," he wrote.
The leaks include a list of directives released by the Xinjiang security official in 2017 for the management of detention centers, and transcripts of intelligence meetings that reveal how police use data and artificial intelligence to identify people they consider to be held in such centers.
New Frontiers
Since 1949, Beijing has controlled the territory of East Turkestan, home to the Turkish Muslim Uighur minority and calls it Xinjiang, the new border.
According to official statistics, there are 30 million Muslims in China, including 23 million Uighurs, while unofficial reports estimate the number of Muslims about 100 million, or about 9.5% of the population.
Since 2009, the region has been plagued by bloody violence, with about 200 people killed, according to official figures.
Since then, Beijing has deployed army troops in the region, especially after rising tension between the Han Chinese and Turkish Uighurs, especially in the cities of Urumqi, Kashgar, Khetn and Turvan, which are the majority Uighurs.
In March, the State Department noted in its annual report on human rights in 2018 that China held Muslims in detention centers to erase their religious and ethnic identity.
Beijing claims that the centers described by the international community as concentration camps are vocational training centers designed to purge the minds of detainees from extremist ideas.