Every now and then, when credulous Western observers aren’t fawning over China’s high-speed rail network or calculating the precise moment when its economy will become the world’s largest, a news story breaks through to remind us that the People’s Republic remains what it has always been: a place of fear and cruelty. One such story, by the Times’s Chris Buckley, is worth particular attention.

Writing from Hotan, a city in the western province of Xinjiang, Buckley describes a system of internment camps, brainwashing programs, and pervasive surveillance, all aimed at the region’s Muslim majority, mostly ethnic Uighurs. The overall approach, he writes, is “reminiscent of Mao’s draconian rule — mass rallies, public confessions and ‘work teams’ assigned to ferret out dissent.”

As with so much in China, the scale is vast. Hundreds of thousands of Chinese Muslims have been hauled into re-education camps for weeks or months at a time, often indiscriminately, with no clear idea of when, or if, they’ll get out. The city itself “feels as if under a siege by an invisible enemy,” with ubiquitous surveillance cameras, metal detectors, checkpoints, police outposts, biometric data collection, and local residents assigned to spy on their neighbors.

As with so much else in China, too, the government lies about what it’s doing. It flat-out denies the use of arbitrary detention, the targeting of an ethnic minority, or the existence of the re-education camps, which it described as job-training centers. That these denials are contradicted by the government’s own documents, some of them publicly available, is a useful reminder that repressive regimes are frequently incompetent, too.