More secret Xinjiang documents revealed

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).

Posted in: Law