Secret memo on how to run China’s prison camps – annotated
The internal workings of a vast system of Chinese internment camps used to detain at least a million people from the nation’s Muslim minorities are laid out in leaked Communist party documents published on Sunday.
A classified order from a top Chinese security official makes clear the re-education camps in the country’s north-west – which it describes as vocational training centres – are involuntary, secret and used for ideological “education transformation”.
Annotated excerpts from one document, a 2017 “telegram” signed in the name of Zhu Hailun, a top security official and deputy communist party chief for Xinjiang region, are below. It lays out how camps should be built and managed. The full document is at the bottom.
The order was part of a cache – the China Cables – obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and shared with the Guardian and 16 other media partners. The documents have been independently assessed by experts who have concluded they are authentic. China said they had been “fabricated”.
In the “combination boxing” and “three battles and one war” struggle to fight against terrorism and maintain stability, it is a strategic, critical and long-term measure to focus on free vocational skills education and training for key personnel.
China insists that its campaign is not against Islam, Uighurs or other minorities. Instead it has insisted, since the
