The internal workings of a vast system of Chinese internment camps used to detain at least a million people from the nation’s Muslim minorities are laid out in leaked Communist party documents published on Sunday.

A classified order from a top Chinese security official makes clear the re-education camps in the country’s north-west – which it describes as vocational training centres – are involuntary, secret and used for ideological “education transformation”.

Annotated excerpts from one document, a 2017 “telegram” signed in the name of Zhu Hailun, a top security official and deputy communist party chief for Xinjiang region, are below. It lays out how camps should be built and managed. The full document is at the bottom.

The order was part of a cache – the China Cables – obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and shared with the Guardian and 16 other media partners. The documents have been independently assessed by experts who have concluded they are authentic. China said they had been “fabricated”.





In the “combination boxing” and “three battles and one war” struggle to fight against terrorism and maintain stability, it is a strategic, critical and long-term measure to focus on free vocational skills education and training for key personnel.

China insists that its campaign is not against Islam, Uighurs or other minorities. Instead it has insisted, since the camps became known, that it is fighting terrorism and extremism.

Officials appear to have known from the start how controversial the campaign would be and have always publicly insisted that the re-education internment camps are “vocational training camps”. That Orwellian language is used even in internal documents like this, which talk about education, classrooms, dormitories and “students”.



It is strictly forbidden for police to enter the student zone with guns, and they must never allow escapes, never allow trouble, never allow attacks on staff, never allow abnormal deaths, never allow food safety incidents and major epidemics, and they must ensure that the training centre is absolutely safe and free of risk.

The real nature of the training centres is exposed a couple of paragraphs into the order. First managers are warned that they must “never allow escapes”, underlining that people are being held against their will.

The prohibition “never allow abnormal deaths” suggests authorities fear extreme mistreatment in the camp could cost detainees their lives. Former inmates have reported deaths among fellow detainees after torture, abuse or withholding of medical treatment. It also underlines the presence of armed police in camps, although barred from the “student zone”.



Strictly manage door locks and keys – dormitory doors, corridor doors and floor doors must be double-locked, and must be locked immediately after being opened and closed. Strictly manage and control student activities to prevent escapes during class, eating periods, toilet breaks, bath time, medical treatment, family visits etc. Strictly manage students requesting time off, if they really need to leave the training centre due to illness or other special circumstances, they must have someone specially accompany, monitor and control them.

There are multiple layers of security in the camps, with “dormitories” – which former inmates have described as cells – corridors and floors all locked separately. On the rare occasions inmates are allowed out because of illness or other “special circumstances”, they do so under constant guard.



Students are not allowed to participate in labour outside class, and may not contact the outside world apart from during prescribed activities. It is strictly forbidden for the students to have their own cellphones or for staff to hand over cellphones to students, so as to prevent the staff from interacting with students and collusion between inside and outside. There must be full video surveillance coverage of dormitories and classrooms free of blind spots, ensuring that guards on duty can monitor in real time, record things in detail, and report suspicious circumstances immediately.

People inside the camps are totally cut off, by design, from the outside world. People who have come out of the camps and relatives of those interned say contact is infrequent and sporadic. Inside the camp, detainees have no privacy at all, with every moment of their day captured on CCTV. Former detainees have mentioned constant surveillance, even covering toilets in shared cells.



For training centres with more than one thousand people, special personnel must be stationed to do food safety testing, sanitation and epidemic prevention work.

A section on food safety provides incidental confirmation that the government is planning detentions on a massive scale; it lays out separate requirements for camps with more than 1,000 inmates, suggesting such large facilities are common or at the very least not unusual.



Adhere to the daily concentrated study of the national language (Mandarin), law, and skills, make remedial Mandarin studies the top priority, and ensure time, content, and quality.

Mandarin-language skills are at the heart of the training. Despite being called vocational schools, there is no evidence of job training or planning for it in this order – no workshop or other practical construction. Also many of those detained are professionals already, including teachers, lawyers and doctors who have no need of job training, former inmates have said.



Efforts should be made to solve the problem of an insufficient number of classrooms, speed up the construction and renovation of classrooms, and ensure that students attend class every day.

The current large-scale internment campaign began in 2017, although there were camps open before that. This order to speed up “classroom” construction because of shortages highlights how fast people were being rounded up and sent to camps.

Actively organise and concentrate on activities such as presentations, form a healthy and inspirational atmosphere, promote the repentance and confession of the students for them to understand deeply the illegal, criminal and dangerous nature of their past behaviour.

Many former inmates said they did not know why they had been rounded up. “Crimes” are thought to include behaviour that would be completely innocuous in most countries, such as owning a Quran. The crackdown has been so harsh that around the time this order came out, a Uighur man who badgered colleagues at work to pray more and not watch porn was tried for inciting ethnic hatred and jailed for 10 years. The “offences” of those in the camps will not even have been judged serious enough to go through the judicial system.



Through letter-writing, phonecalls, video chats, visits, meetings, meals, etc, establish a mechanism for students and relatives to interact with each other, to ensure that the students will have a phone conversation with their relatives at least once a week, and meet via video at least once a month, to make their family feel at ease and the students feel safe.

One of the most worrying aspects of the camps for Uighurs is the way inmates and their family are almost totally cut off, with no visiting rights. Children of couples who have both been detained have reportedly been taken by the state to institutions. The schedule laid out in this order is generous compared with the amount of contact many former detainees and relatives of inmates say they were allowed.



Behaviour management. The trainee’s study, life, and activity management system should be formulated in detail, and the students should have a fixed bed position, fixed queue position, fixed classroom seat, and fixed station during skills work, and it is strictly forbidden for this to be changed. Strengthen the student’s daily life behaviour norms, and implement behavioural norms and discipline requirements for getting up, rollcall, washing, going to the toilet, organising and housekeeping, eating, studying, sleeping, closing the door and so forth.

Every aspect of an inmate’s life is minutely controlled; they have no choice even over their position in the lunch queue. The order also infantilises inmates, treating them like children in need of training in basic hygiene and socialising.

Establish assessment evaluation and point management systems, and break down scores and manage and assess individually the students’ ideological transformation, study and training, and compliance with discipline. Maintain monthly assessments, and calculate monthly and annual total scores, and record it in the student’s school files. Take the student’s score as the basic basis for measuring the effectiveness of education and training, and link it directly to rewards, punishments, and family visits. Implement level management and differentiate treatment according to the score, and encourage students to obey management, earnestly study, and truly transform.

The order lays out a scoring system that rates students for their “ideological transformation”, learning (probably of Mandarin) and their ability to follow the centre’s strict rules. It is very clear that this opaque points structure determines most aspects of inmates life in the camp, from their ability to contact family to possible punishments. Overall, they are expected to show Orwellian levels of compliance: “to obey management, earnestly study, and truly transform”.

Conditions for completion. Define uniform standards based on the students’ education and training points, strictly and seriously strengthen the management of students’ completion. Completion needs to meet the following conditions: (1) Their problem is lighter than when they were first received for education. (2) They were educated and trained in the training centre for at least one year. (3) Students classified in the general management area. (4) The total score for education and training and scores for ideological transformation, academic achievement, compliance and discipline, etc all meet the prescribed standards.

These requirements to “complete” courses show how detention is both arbitrary and indefinite. They mandate a minimum stay of a year in the camps, but no upper limits. It does not lay out standardised levels of Mandarin, or other requirements that if reached, would allow inmates – or “students” – to leave.



If a check on the public security “integrated” (IJOP) platform system does not find new problems, their case should be reported up level by level to the county (city, district) vocational skills education and training service bureau, then reevaluated by the county (city, district) vocational skills education and training leading group, and finally reported to the prefecture (state, city) vocational skills education and training service bureau for final evaluation, and according to the examination and approval of the comrades of the local committee, it will be determined whether the trainees will enter the skills improvement class before completion to receive intensive training.

Release of each of the hundreds of thousands of detainees should go through checks by multiple layers of the Chinese bureaucracy. Even if they are approved, they must go on to other camps.



Skills improvement. All students who have completed training will be sent to vocational skills improvement class for intensive skills training for a school term of three to six months. All prefectures should set up special places and special facilities in order to create the environment for trainees to receive intensive training. Training should be based on the students’ employment aspirations and the needs of society, and labour skills training should be carried out in a targeted manner to enable them to achieve employment as soon as possible after training.

After release from the re-education camp they face further three to six months’ internment for “vocational skills improvement”, even though many had jobs before being detained. That implies a minimum stay in the camps of at least 15 months, if regulations are followed. Reports from former inmates suggest stays can be longer, but some are also shorter.



The two levels of the prefectures and counties should formulate employment assistance resettlement plans in accordance with the requirements of “completion of one batch, employment of one batch”, and every effort should be made to fix employment work for completed graduates to ensure the smooth employment of students with employment aspirations.

There have been multiple reports of forced labour at re-education camps in Xinjiang. It is unclear where the “students” are expected to work after finishing their re-education, particularly if the focus of their training has been Mandarin-language rather than technical skills. Several former inmates told researchers they were sent to work on factory production lines after leaving re-education camps.

Strict secrecy. The work policy of the vocational skills education and training centres is highly sensitive. It is necessary to strengthen the staff’s awareness of staying secret, serious political discipline and secrecy discipline. It is strictly forbidden to bring video and video equipment such as mobile phones and cameras into the teaching and management areas and uploading pictures on to the internet at will. Relevant important data should not be aggregated, not be disseminated, and not be open to the outside, outside staff coming in.



Even when setting up the camps, and while insisting that they were simply a form of college, Chinese officials were apparently aware that the project could be incendiary. This strictly bans officials from aggregating or sharing data – which might give a sense of the scale of the campaign – as well as ordering “secrecy discipline” and a ban on video and phones in the camps.

In response to the China Cables reports, China’s embassy in London said in a statement “the so called leaked documents are pure fabrication and fake news” and added: “There are no such documents or orders for the so-called ‘detention camps’. Vocational education and training centres have been established for the prevention of terrorism.”

It also said that “trainees could go home regularly”, including to care for children, and that “religious freedom is fully respected in Xinjiang”. The full statement can be found here.

Translation and transcription of Chinese provided by ICIJ

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