In response to a detailed list of questions about this article as well as a list of GPS coordinates of facilities identified in this article, the Chinese Consulate in New York said “the issue concerning Xinjiang is by no means about human rights, religion or ethnicity, but about combating violent terrorism and separatism,” adding that it was a “groundless lie” that a million Uighurs have been detained in the region. At 121 of these compounds, they also show guard towers, often built into the perimeter wall. Many compounds in the region are walled, but the facilities identified by BuzzFeed News have much heavier fortifications. The images frequently show thick walls at the perimeter, and often, barbed wire fencing that creates pens and corridors in the courtyards. Ninety-two of these facilities have been identified or verified as detention centers by other sources, such as government procurement documents, academic research, or, in 19 cases, visits by journalists.Īnother 176 facilities have been established by satellite imagery alone. These compounds often contained multiple detention facilities. “I wanted to die inside the camp.”īuzzFeed News identified 268 newly built compounds by cross-referencing blanked-out areas on Baidu Maps - a Google Maps–like tool that’s widely used in China - with images from external satellite data providers. As she watched the younger women get dragged away to solitary confinement, “I lost my hope,” she said. “Some of the younger people were not as tolerant as us - they cried and screamed and shouted.” But Berdibek, a cancer survivor, couldn’t muster the energy. “People are living in horror in these places,” said 49-year-old Zhenishan Berdibek, who was detained in a camp in the Tacheng region for much of 2018. Construction was still ongoing as of this month. The government has also added more factories within camp and prison compounds during that time, suggesting the expansion of forced labor within the region. Prisons often take years to build, but some of these new compounds took less than six months, according to historical satellite data. Then, as the number of detainees swelled, in 2018 the government began building new facilities with far greater security measures and more permanent architectural features, such as heavy concrete walls and guard towers, the BuzzFeed News analysis shows. To detain thousands of people in short order, the government repurposed old schools and other buildings. They are also subject to many other abuses, ranging from sterilization to forced labor. That year Chen Quanguo, the region’s top official and Communist Party boss, whom the US recently sanctioned over human rights abuses, also put Muslim minorities - more than half the region’s population of about 25 million - under perpetual surveillance via facial recognition cameras, cellphone tracking, checkpoints, and heavy-handed human policing. These forbidding facilities - including several built or significantly expanded within the last year - are part of the government’s unprecedented campaign of mass detention of more than a million people, which began in late 2016. During that time, the investigation shows, China has established a sprawling system to detain and incarcerate hundreds of thousands of Uighurs, Kazakhs, and other Muslim minorities, in what is already the largest-scale detention of ethnic and religious minorities since World War II. There is at least one in nearly every county in the far-west region of Xinjiang. In the most extensive investigation of China’s internment camp system ever done using publicly available satellite images, coupled with dozens of interviews with former detainees, BuzzFeed News identified more than 260 structures built since 2017 and bearing the hallmarks of fortified detention compounds. The construction of these purpose-built, high-security camps - some capable of housing tens of thousands of people - signals a radical shift away from the country’s previous makeshift use of public buildings, like schools and retirement homes, to a vast and permanent infrastructure for mass detention. This project was supported by the Open Technology Fund, the Pulitzer Center, and the Eyebeam Center for the Future of Journalism.Ĭhina has secretly built scores of massive new prison and internment camps in the past three years, dramatically escalating its campaign against Muslim minorities even as it publicly claimed the detainees had all been set free. This is Part 1 of a BuzzFeed News investigation.
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