The Xinjiang Police Files are leaked documents from the Xinjiang internment camps, forwarded to anthropologist Adrian Zenz from an anonymous source. On May 24, 2022, an international consortium of 14 media groups published information about the files, which consist of over 10 gigabytes of speeches, images, spreadsheets and protocols dating back to 2018.
The Xinjiang Police Files were published at the same time as the UN Human Rights Commissioner Michelle Bachelet started her visit to China on May 23. Her briefing included exploring the situation of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang as part of the visit.
Background
According to estimates by U.N. and U.S. officials, one million Uyghurs and other Turkic groups were held in Chinese government camps in 2018. The existence of China's "re-education" and an extrajudicial program for mass detention were first detected in satellite photos, and testimonies from Uyghur refugees. The documents of the leak were collected during the mass detention program's highest level of intensity.
Initially, China denied the existence of Xinjiang camps; in 2018, the Chinese government started referring to the camps as "vocational training schools", and that attendance was voluntarily. China has also referred to the system as a "de-radicalization" program.
A previous investigation into Xinjiang by a large group of media organisations occurred in 2019, and was released under the name China Cables. This leak, based on classified Chinese government documents, exposed the operations manual for Xinjiang detention camps and the region's system of mass surveillance. The Xinjiang Police Files leak is the second major data leak related to Xinjiang, after more than 400 pages of internal documents were leaked in 2019.
The Xinjiang Police Files documents were obtained by Adrian Zenz, a senior fellow at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, who subsequently shared the documents with a group of 14 news organizations. According to Zenz, the files were made available through a "hacking attack directly on police computers and even computers in detention camps" and from public security bureau computer systems in Ili and Kashgar governorates in Xinjiang. The data was evaluated over several weeks by joint research by the media consortium and partially checked for authenticity.
The leak coincided with the first visit by a U.N. human rights diplomat since 2005. According to Zenz, the timing was not intentional.
Contents
The Xinjiang Police Files contain thousands of pictures and documents from the Xinjiang counties of Konasheher and Tekes, and contains details of the internment of more than 20,000 Uyghurs. The files contradict China's official reading that the mass internment facilities are "professional training facilities" visited voluntarily, which served to fight poverty and were directed against extremist ideas.
According to media reports, these Chinese government data, classified as "confidential" or "internal," including thousands of analyzed documents, photos, transcripts of speeches by senior party officials, official orders, and training materials, showed the extent of the persecution and mass detentions in Xinjiang in 2018.
As of May 2022, the Xinjiang Police Files were the most comprehensive publicized leak on the state re-education camps in Xinjiang. Zenz wrote a journal article based on the contents of the files, titled The Xinjiang Police Files: Re-Education Camp Security and Political Paranoia in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region published in the Journal of the European Association for Chinese Studies on May 24.
Documents
The documents in the leak include confidential government documents, as well as speeches by top Chinese officials, and internal police documents and tutorials.
Two documents from June 2018 are transcripts of speeches by Zhao Kezhi and Chen Quanguo. One document, marked "confidential", outlines what surveillance measures are to be implemented in Yili during a visit of European diplomats, and directed security officers to "strictly" monitor their contacts and work. The files include details of protocols governing policing at the facilities, making it clear that there are armed officers throughout the camps, and that watchtowers contain machine gun posts and sniper rifles.