Xinjiang Police Hack Reveals Horrors of Uyghur Camps

Xinjiang Police Hack Reveals Horrors of Uyghur Camps

Xinjiang Police Hack Reveals Horrors of Uyghur Camps

The West has long known about the camps in China’s Xinjiang region where the regime has imprisoned Uyghurs. However, a recent hack into the Xinjiang police reveals material directly from inside the camps. The information is damning.

 

The Hack Into the Xinjiang Police

Adrian Zenz, Director and Senior Fellow in China Studies at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation in Washington, DC, released news about the hack in a Twitter thread:

https://twitter.com/adrianzenz/status/1528989272031772672?s=20&t=aBkicV8rfAUtNrijqMRnSQ

 

Zenz continues:

The material is unprecedented on several levels:

1. High-level speeches, implicating top leadership and containing blunt language.

2. Camp security instructions, far more detailed than China Cables, describe heavily armed strike units with battlefield assault rifles.

3. Vivid image of police drills, and over 5,000 images of persons taken at detention centers/police stations, 2,884 of them are interned.

4. Spreadsheets showing vast scale of internments: over 12% of adult population of Uyghur county in 2018 shown in camps or prisons.

Here’s more in a report from CBS News, which also features comments from Zenz:

 

Validity of Information from the Hack

You might be wondering how a reader might be able to verify the accuracy of this hack.

Zenz tells how he obtained the material from Xinjiang:

“The Xinjiang Police Files were obtained by a third party from the outside through hacking into computer systems operated by the Public Security Bureau (PSB) of the counties of Konasheher, located in Kashgar Prefecture, and Tekes in Ili Prefecture, both regions traditionally dominated by non-Han ethnic groups. The person who unexpectedly reached out to the author to provide the files acted on a solely individual basis, attached no conditions to their provision or publication, and wishes to remain anonymous due to personal safety concerns.”

Certainly veracity is a logical concern, considering the amount of bogus information that floats around the internet. However, Zenz’s report has been peer-reviewed and authenticated by the Journal of the European Association for Chinese Studies. Moreover, the BBC has also reported it here and here.

But that’s not all: 13 media outlets from 10 countries also reviewed the material using open-source material and their own investigative teams. This includes the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, who wrote their own article about the leak.

If you wish to read the report, you can find the original research article here.

 

Damning Evidence From Xinjiang

Meanwhile, here are some damning bits of information, like this from a retired Han police officer:

“Wang Leizhan (pseudonym), a retired Han police officer who was sent to Xinjiang in 2018 along with thousands of other police officers from other provinces, testified that they were “immediately sent out to arrest” suspects. Wang stated that “[t]here was a national Chinese policy to arrest Uyghurs because they are automatically considered enemies/terrorists by this national policy.” 
What kind of person did the Chinese consider as a “terrorist.” This girl, whose name was Rehile Omer. She hadn’t yet reached her 15th birthday when police took her picture and placed her in a re-education camp.
Xinjiang camps
Screenshot: @adrianzenz/Twitter.
In 2017, then-Xinjiang Party Secretary Chen Quanguo gave these orders:
“Chen then tells police forces to “shoot dead” anyone who even attempts to escape by running a few steps. Similarly, if there is a security incident, police must “shoot all terrorists dead” so that not one police officer or member of the public will be injured or killed. .  . . . Chen argues that these “annihilating blows” must be struck “without any mercy.”
Plus, then there were the weapons the police used. These included the QBZ-95 assault rifle, which is the standard assault rifle of the People’s Liberation Army and the People’s Armed Police. Other weapons included handguns and anti-riot guns with non-lethal rounds, plus batons, shields, or U-shaped forks. However, the head of the camp police station would have a QBB-95 machine gun.
What has been Xi Jinping’s involvement in this? A leaked 2018 speech by Minister of Public Security Zhao Kezhi shows that Xi strongly supported “re-education” of the population of Xinjiang, along with continued spending on the camps and staff.

 

Reaction from Around the World

As I wrote above, the BBC in the UK wrote two extensive articles on the Xinjiang hack. In addition, UK Foreign Secretary Liz Truss issued a statement:

Meanwhile, German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbrock is demanding an investigation.
But Hillel Neuer, international attorney and executive director of United Nations Watch, showed how the Chinese have co-opted the UN’s human rights commission and its director, Michelle Bachelet:
Xinjiang

Meanwhile, at the time of this writing, Bachelet should be visiting Xinjiang as part of a six-day tour. Uyghurs living outside China are urging her to ask hard questions about the camps. As one woman said:

“I request them to visit victims like my family members, not the pre-prepared scenes by the Chinese government.”

But since China has never come clean about its role in the Covid pandemic, do you think they’ll come clean now about the Uyghur camps? Not on a bet.

 

Welcome, Instapundit readers!

Featured image: Openclipart/cropped/public domain. 

Written by

Kim is a pint-sized patriot who packs some big contradictions. She is a Baby Boomer who never became a hippie, an active Republican who first registered as a Democrat (okay, it was to help a sorority sister's father in his run for sheriff), and a devout Lutheran who practices yoga. Growing up in small-town Indiana, now living in the Kansas City metro, Kim is a conservative Midwestern gal whose heart is also in the Seattle area, where her eldest daughter, son-in-law, and grandson live. Kim is a working speech pathologist who left school system employment behind to subcontract to an agency, and has never looked back. She describes her conservatism as falling in the mold of Russell Kirk's Ten Conservative Principles. Don't know what they are? Google them!

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