The source claims that he hacked, downloaded and deciphered them from a number of police computers in Xinjiang before handing them over to Dr. Adrian Zenz, a scientist with the US-based Foundation for the Memory of the Victims of Communism, which was previously sanctioned by the Chinese government for his influential study of Xinjiang.
Dr. Zenz then shared them with the BBC, and although we were able to contact the source directly, they did not want to reveal their identities or whereabouts.
None of the hacked documents is dated after the end of 2018, probably as a result of a directive issued in early 2019 to tighten Xinjiang’s encryption standards. This may have put all subsequent files out of the hacker’s reach.
Dr. Zenz has written a peer-reviewed document on Xinjiang’s police files for the Journal of the European Association for Chinese Studies and has released the full set of images of detainees and some of the other evidence online.
“The material is unedited, it is unprocessed, it does not soften, it is diverse. We have everything, “he told the BBC.
“We have confidential documents. We have transcripts of speeches where leaders are free to talk about what they really think. We have spreadsheets. We have images. This is completely unprecedented and destroys Chinese propaganda. ”
Xinjiang’s police files contain another set of documents that go even further than photos of detainees in revealing the prison nature of re-education camps, which China insists are “vocational schools.”
Xinjiang Police Files: Inside a Chinese Internship Camp
A set of internal police protocols describes the routine use of armed officers in all areas of the camps, the positioning of machine guns and sniper rifles in observation towers, and the existence of a killing policy for those trying to escape.
Blindfolds, handcuffs and shackles are mandatory for any “student” who moves between institutions or even a hospital.
For decades, Xinjiang has witnessed a cycle of boiling separatism, sporadic violence and tightening of government control.
But in 2013 and 2014, two deadly attacks on pedestrians and travelers in Beijing and the southern Chinese city of Kunming, blamed by the government on Uighur separatists and radical Islamists, caused a dramatic change in policy.
The state began to see Uighur culture itself as a problem, and within a few years, hundreds of giant re-education camps began appearing in satellite images in which Uighurs were sent without trial.
Xinjiang’s official prison system has also been widely expanded as another method of controlling Uighur identity – especially in the face of growing international criticism of the lack of legal process in the camps.
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