Chinese officials are rushing to cover their tracks — destroying documents, deleting data and arresting government workers — after the release of secret papers on their mass detention camps for Uighurs and other religious minorities.

The regional government in the province of Xinjiang scrambled to lock down its records after secret speeches and documents, including guidelines for operating detention centers, were released to Western media.

Some former prisoners have been told to surrender their old release papers to authorities — and are being threatened with lifetime imprisonment if they don’t comply.

“The fact that they suddenly want this now must mean the pressure on them is very high,” one former detainee said.

More than 1 million Uighurs and others have been held in reeducation camps that Beijing has insisted are “vocational training schools.”

But the leaked documents revealed a deliberate strategy to lock up ethnic and religious minorities even though they had committed no crime.