China Didn’t Want Us to Know. Now Its Own Files Are Doing the Talking.; The New York Times, November 24, 2019

Adrian Zenz, The New York Times;

China Didn’t Want Us to Know. Now Its Own Files Are Doing the Talking.

More disclosures reveal the full impact of the government’s repression of ethnic minorities — well beyond re-education camps.

"This Sunday, the contents of two more sets of documents — all of which I have reviewed — are being disclosed. Among the first batch, also leaked, is a confidential telegram signed by Zhu Hailun, Xinjiang’s deputy party secretary, which details how local authorities should manage and operate the “vocational skills training centers” — a euphemism for the internment camps. (All translations here are mine.) The second set of documents, a large cache of files and spreadsheets from local governments, reveals the internment campaign’s devastating economic and social impact on the families and communities it targets...

Thanks to these new document disclosures, we now have hard evidence — and the government’s own evidence — that in addition to implementing a vast internment program in Xinjiang, the Chinese Communist Party is deliberately breaking up families and forcing them into poverty and a form of indentured labor. For all its efforts at secrecy, the Chinese government can no longer hide the extent, and the reach, of its campaign of repression in Xinjiang.

Some important elements are still unknown. The total internment figure remains a well-guarded secret. (Based on the new evidence, I have revised my own estimate: I think that between 900,000 and 1.8 million people have been detained in Xinjiang since the spring of 2017.) Also missing from the official documents that have surfaced so far are precise records of how the detainees are treated and how, exactly, the process of re-education works. (About those things, however, we have witness accounts.) The confidential telegram and local files do not mention the use of physical violence — but for one notable exception. The telegram states that people who resist brainwashing must be singled out for “assault-style re-education.” Yet another sinister understatement, and it suggests that force and torture may, in fact, be widely used."