Satellite images reveal growth of detention sites
As China faced rising international censure last year over its mass internment of Muslim minorities, officials asserted that the indoctrination camps in the western region of Xinjiang had shrunk as former camp inmates rejoined society as reformed citizens.
Researchers at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute on Thursday challenged those claims with an investigation that found that Xinjiang authorities had been expanding a variety of detention sites since last year.
Rather than being released, many detainees were likely being sent to prisons and perhaps other facilities, the investigation found, citing satellite images of new and expanded incarceration sites.
Nathan Ruser, a researcher who led the project at the institute, also called ASPI, said the findings undercut Chinese officials’ claims that inmates from the camps — which the government calls vocational training centers — had “graduated.”
“Evidence suggests that many extrajudicial detainees in Xinjiang’s vast ‘reeducation’ network are now being formally charged and locked up in higher security facilities, including newly built or expanded prisons,” Ruser wrote in the report.
The Chinese government has created formidable barriers to investigating conditions in Xinjiang. Officials tail and harass foreign journalists, making it impossible to safely conduct interviews. Access to camps is limited to selected visitors, who are taken on choreographed tours where inmates are shown singing and dancing.
The researchers overcame those barriers with longdistance sleuthing. They pored over satellite images of Xinjiang at night to find telltale clusters of new lights, especially in barely inhabited areas, which often proved to be new detention sites. A closer examination of such images sometimes revealed hulking buildings, surrounded by high walls, watchtowers and barbedwire internal fencing — features that distinguished detention facilities from other large public compounds like schools or hospitals.
ASPI researchers found and examined some 380 suspected detention sites in Xinjiang. At least 61 of them had expanded between July 2019 and July of this year, and of those, 14 were still growing.
The researchers found signs that some reeducation camps were being rolled back, partially confirming government claims of a shift.
At least 70 sites had seen the removal of security infrastructure such as internal fencing or perimeter walls, and eight camps appeared to be undergoing decommissioning, they wrote. The facilities apparently being scaled back were largely lowersecurity camps, they said.
An investigation by the New York Times last year found that courts in Xinjiang — where Uighurs and other largely Muslim minorities make up more than half of the population of 25 million — sentenced 230,000 people to prison or other punishments in 2017 and 2018, far more than in any other period on record for the region.