Adrian Zenz, perhaps the one person more responsible than any other for bringing the Xinjiang detentions to the attention of the world through his careful and impeccable research, has just published a new article: Adrian Zenz, Brainwashing, Police Guards and Coercive Internment: Evidence from Chinese Government Documents about the Nature and Extent of Xinjiang’s “Vocational Training Internment Camps”, Journal of Political Risk, vol. 7, no. 7 (July 2019) [https://perma.cc/3GU2-X2T9].
Among other things, he states:
Together with the new data presented in this article, the author considers it is necessary to increase the estimate of those who are and have been directly affected by Xinjiang’s extrajudicial internment and re-education drive from the previous speculative upper limit of up to 1.06 million.[63] Although speculative, it seems appropriate to estimate that up 1.5 million ethnic minorities, equivalent to just under one in six adult members of a Turkic and predominantly Muslim minority group in Xinjiang, are or have been interned in some form of extrajudicial internment (excluding formal prisons).
By contrast, the incarceration rates for African-Americans in the US, which has the highest known per-capita incarceration rate in the world (possibly exceeded by North Korea, although that’s not exactly comforting) and whose criminal justice system is widely acknowledged to be beset by huge problems of racism, is about 2.3%.