Hot on the heels of last week’s blockbuster exposé of secret Xinjiang documents in the New York Times, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists has just released a set of reports of its own, based on a different set of documents (also secret). The Chinese government did not actually deny the authenticity of the documents used by the New York Times; let’s see what they say about these ones.
There’s a lot there, and I don’t have time to summarize. From my quick skim the documents confirm what has been pretty obvious for a long time now: that the camps are coercive (i.e., you can’t just leave if you feel like it), and that people are getting sent away for long prison stretches — ten years, in one case — for nothing more than urging people not to smoke, drink, or watch porn (the allegation was that this “stirred up ethnic conflict” — the nationalist youth would have been especially upset about the last one).