As China faced growing international censorship last year for the mass internment of Muslim minorities, officials claimed that indoctrination camps in the western region of Xinjiang had shrunk as former inmates from the camp reincorporated into society as citizens. refurbished.
Researchers from the Australian Institute for Strategic Policy on Thursday challenged those claims with an investigation that found Xinjiang authorities had been expanding a variety of detention sites since last year. Rather than being released, many detainees are likely to be sent to prisons and perhaps other facilities, the investigation found, citing satellite images of new and expanded places of incarceration.
Nathan Ruser, a researcher who led the project at the institute, also called ASPI, said the findings undermined claims by Chinese officials that inmates in the camps, which the government calls vocational training centers, had “graduated.” .
“Evidence suggests that many extrajudicial detainees in Xinjiang’s vast ‘re-education’ network are being indicted and locked up in higher security facilities, including newly built or expanded prisons,” Ruser wrote in the report.
The Chinese government has created formidable barriers to investigating conditions in Xinjiang. Officials follow and harass foreign journalists, making it impossible to conduct interviews safely. Access to the camps is limited to select visitors, who are taken on choreographed tours where inmates are shown singing and dancing.
The researchers in the new report overcame those barriers with long-distance research. They pored over satellite images of Xinjiang at night to find telltale clusters of new lights, especially in sparsely inhabited areas, which often turned out to be new places of detention. Closer examination of such images sometimes revealed massive buildings, surrounded by high walls, watchtowers, and internal barbed wire fences – features that distinguished detention facilities from other large public complexes such as schools or hospitals.
“I don’t think this moment is a mere coincidence,” Timothy Grose, associate professor of China studies at the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, who was not involved in the ASPI project, said of the accumulating evidence of the expansion of the imprisonment.
“In my opinion, we are witnessing a new stage of the crisis,” he said. “Some detainees have been released, others have been sent to factories, while others have still been sentenced.”
China has repeatedly refused to reveal the number of places of detention and detainees in Xinjiang and elsewhere. ASPI investigators found and examined about 380 suspected detention sites in Xinjiang. At least 61 of them had expanded in area between July 2019 and July this year, and of those, 14 were still growing, according to the latest available satellite images.
The researchers divided the sites into four levels of security and said that about half of the expanding sites were higher security facilities.
Investigators found signs that some reeducation camps were backing down, partially confirming the government’s claims of a change. At least 70 sites had seen the removal of security infrastructure, such as internal fences or perimeter walls, and eight camps appeared to be in the process of being dismantled, they wrote. The seemingly small facilities were largely lower security camps, they said.
Under Xi Jinping, the Chinese leader, the authorities carried out a major crackdown in Xinjiang, with up to 1 million or more people imprisoned in recent years, according to estimates by academics. The ASPI report came a day after the sixth anniversary of a key moment in the increasingly tough campaign, the sentencing of Ilham Tohti, a prominent Uighur academic, to life in prison.
At the end of last year, Shohrat Zakir, president of the Xinjiang government, told reporters in Beijing that the re-education sites now housed only people who were there voluntarily, and that other people who had been in the facilities had “graduated. “. Where, he did not say.
The ASPI report builds on previous research that also pointed to an explosive growth of the prison population in Xinjiang in recent years, even as the construction of indoctrination camps appeared to be peaking.
Last month, BuzzFeed News found 268 detention sites in Xinjiang built since 2017. The news organization identified the sites with the help of points deleted from the online map service of Baidu, the Chinese technology company.
An investigation last year by The New York Times found that courts in Xinjiang, where Uighurs and other majority Muslim minorities make up more than half of the 25 million population, sentenced 230,000 people to prison or other punishment in 2017 and 2018, much more than in any other period recorded for the region.
No official sentencing statistics for 2019 have been released. But a report released by authorities in Xinjiang earlier this year said prosecutors indicted 96,596 people for criminal trial in 2019, suggesting that the flow of trials, which nearly always lead to convictions, it was less than in the previous two years, but still much higher. than in the years before the repression took off.
“Although the internment camps are obviously the most striking aspect of what is happening, there has been a much larger effort from the beginning that has also included significant incarceration” in prisons, said Sean R. Roberts, professor. associate of George Washington University. and author of “The War Against the Uyghurs: China’s Campaign Against the Muslims of Xinjiang.”
The United States has begun to take a more confrontational stance toward China over the crackdown in Xinjiang. This year, the Trump administration imposed sanctions on officials responsible for policy in the region, as well as the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, which is an agricultural conglomerate and a quasi-military security institution. It also imposed restrictions on imports of Xinjiang clothing, hair products and tech products, but fell short of banning all cotton and tomatoes, two of the region’s top exports.
This week, the House of Representatives passed legislation that would ban any imports from Xinjiang unless it is shown that they were not produced through forced labor.
Chris Buckley and Austin Ramzy c. 2020 The New York Times Company
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