In a far corner of northwestern China, a car drives along a wall lined with barbed wire, heading towards what looks like a standard apartment complex. Access here is restricted, and the cameraperson is filming secretly … … because this is no ordinary residence. It’s part of a contentious labor resettlement program run by the Chinese government to extend state control over Muslim minorities, mostly Uighurs, by moving them from one part of China to work in another. This covert, low-quality footage that we’ve adjusted to reveal some details, and obscure others, gives us some rare insights into how people in this program live and are indoctrinated. Over the last few years, the mass incarceration of more than a million Uighurs and Kazakhs by the Chinese government has led to international outrage. These labor programs are part of that larger story. Let’s take a closer look at the compound we showed you at the beginning. It’s in Xinjiang, in the northern city of Kuitun, where the population is mostly China’s Han ethnic majority. But the workers in the compound are Uighurs, and other minorities transferred there from their homes in Hotan and Kashgar, hundreds of miles away. At the Kuitun complex there are multiple dormitories. We see that right around the time the transfer started in 2017, a security checkpoint and another building, a cafeteria, were built at the site. The cameraperson is now shooting inside of the cafeteria. We can see the compound’s residents. They all work as street cleaners. A sign describing the program calls them Kashgar and Hotan surplus labor. It also lists instructions for how they should conduct themselves. And another poster offers guidelines on how to interact with the local population. This program and others like it have led to the relocation of hundreds of thousands of Uighurs away from their homes and families. But government propaganda openly promotes these as poverty alleviation initiatives. What’s at stake here is about more than just putting people into labor programs. The bigger goal is to turn Uighurs and other ethnic minorities away from their own heritage, to be more in line with the rest of Communist China. Back at the compound, the rules strictly limit when and where the workers can go. We hear about this as a cameraperson meets residents in the sleeping quarters. This man was pressured to come here a year earlier, leaving his family, a wife and young child, behind. His life here includes mandatory Mandarin classes in the evenings. And despite the government’s claim that they are lifting these workers out of poverty, he says he’s only making a third of what he did back home. Yarkand County is the home he left behind. For Uighurs in towns like these, the future is becoming increasingly uncertain because the decision, whether to stay or go, is often no longer in their hands.