By Nathalie Guibert
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InvestigationThe Xinjiang Police Files, thousands of Chinese police documents handed over to researcher Adrian Zenz and released by an international media group including Le Monde, tell from the inside out the security mania in the detention camps of the Muslim minority that Beijing is presenting as a training center.
“If the students don’t listen to the instructions, the armed police can fire warning shots. If the students don’t give in to deterrence, if they continue to escalate the tension, try to escape, or confiscate the agents’ weapons, they will be killed. Such is the discipline at a “vocational training center” reserved for Muslim minorities in Shufu in the “Uyghur Autonomous Region” in Xinjiang, China.
This 2018 “Instruction on Eliminating Disturbance and Escape Attempts During Class” comes from a pirated pile of some 100,000 police documents, a large portion of which is dedicated to the Uyghurs’ “educational transformation” (jiaoyu zhuanhua)—that is, their mass detention for purpose of “re-education” as defined by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
Satellite photo from January 15, 2022 (Maxar). New Shufu District Vocational Education and Training Center. The latest extensions are visible. XINJIANG POLICE FILES
These “Xinjiang Police Files,” released on May 24, were supplied to German anthropologist Adrian Zenz by a source that asked for nothing in return, and were reviewed outside of China by a group of fourteen international media outlets. They shed crucial new light on the Beijing-organized repression in the region, following a series of revelations published since 2019 by the same researcher and NGOs.
The documents – several thousand computer files from 2000 to 2018, 452 registers with more than 20,000 names of arrested Uyghurs, countless directives, directives and police work reports – come from the computers of the Public Security Bureau (BSP) of two districts, Konasheher – Shufu in Mandarin – in Kashgar Prefecture and Tekes in Ili Prefecture. The documents, often written in very bureaucratic and abstract language, describe from the inside out the armed and forced organization of the new so-called “vocational training camps” and the deployment of police forces on site. Either the concrete implementation of the security apparatus to “stabilize” Xinjiang, which according to the CCP is threatened by the Muslim “separatists”.
“Konasheher’s internal files contain the personal information of 286,000 district residents, indicating that between 12.1% and 12.5% of adults from ethnic minorities are in some form of detention, re-education, detention or imprisonment in 2018 ‘ notes Mr Zenz, who publishes his research in the Journal of the European Association for Chinese Studies. At that time, Konasheher’s new “vocational training center” (CFP) held 8,000 people – a register whose personal details also contained all the data. This substantial incarceration rate exceeds that of Stalinism. And “it’s 64 times higher than China’s national incarceration rate,” as reported by Leander von Kameke in Asia’s 2021 prison data, writes Adrian Zenz.
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