DURING the past year campaigners, academics and journalists have been shedding light on the detention for “re-education” of vast numbers of ethnic-Uighur Muslims in China’s far-western province of Xinjiang. On August 13th the topic was raised at the UN, when experts undertaking an audit of China’s policies towards ethnic minorities said they had heard that as many as 1m Uighurs are being locked away. Hu Lianhe, a Communist Party official flown in for the hearing, said allegations that the party was sending Uighurs to indoctrination camps were “completely untrue”. He explained that some petty criminals in Xinjiang were being assigned to “vocational education” facilities for “rehabilitation and reintegration”, but did not say how many.

The party appears to think that obligatory periods of forced instruction, sometimes lasting weeks or months, are a good way to tackle the Islamic extremism and secessionist thinking that it says threaten Xinjiang’s stability. People who have worked or been detained in the centres say that inmates have had to sing Communist Party songs. According to the Washington Post, a few have been made to consume pork and alcohol. In some cases they have been subjected to physical abuse. But Mr Hu’s rebuttal nonetheless provided slightly more detail than has previously been volunteered by officials. In May China’s foreign ministry told reporters who had visited Xinjiang that it simply “had not heard” of the situation they described.

As it becomes harder to keep the mass detentions under wraps, Chinese officials will probably grow both franker and pricklier about their behaviour. In an editorial published on August 13th, Global Times, a tabloid with close links to the party, accused the West of trouble-stirring. It insisted that the party’s strategies had successfully prevented Xinjiang from turning into “China’s Syria”. It declared that “all measures” were acceptable in the name of ensuring peace and stability, which it called “the greatest human right”. This month Radio Free Asia, an American-backed broadcaster, published the transcript of an audio recording, which it said that Xinjiang’s branch of the Communist Youth League had produced in order to help explain the detentions to the province’s residents. The recording asserts that people who are selected for re-education are “infected by an ideological illness” that could “manifest itself at any moment”. It says that inpatient treatment at a “hospital” is necessary to “restore their normal mind”.

In addition to its indoctrination efforts, the party has deployed a vast surveillance apparatus in Uighur areas of Xinjiang, making many aspects of daily life more complex (police are pictured outside a mosque in Kashgar, a southern Xinjiang city). In early August police in Henan, a province more than 2,500km from Xinjiang, said they had imprisoned and fined a man who rented rooms to three Uighur bakers (his crime, it appears, was not asking police permission first). The Uighurs themselves were transported to Xinjiang, according to the notice. A citizen who had alerted police to their presence was reportedly given a 2,000 yuan ($290) reward.

Muslims elsewhere in China are also growing nervous. As part of a broader project to “sinicise” religions such as Christianity and Islam, authorities in the province of Ningxia—home to many Hui people, a well-integrated Muslim minority—have been dismantling mosques’ domes and minarets and stifling their calls to prayer. This month officials in the town of Weizhou abandoned plans to demolish a big mosque they said had been built illegally, after a large crowd of angry Huis mounted a vigil outside. It is difficult to see how such stand-offs help promote the peace and stability China’s leaders claim to crave.