Australian National University professor Michael Clarke has condemned China’s escalating crackdown on Uyghurs, one of the nation’s ethnic Muslim minorities. In the far western province of Xinjiang, the Chinese government has forced up to one million people into re-education camps. Professor Clarke has told Sky News that China is using manpower, surveillance and hi-tech policing to enable the ‘most systematic form of cultural cleansing’, moulding them away from their own ethnic identity. He says any mosques that haven’t already been shut down are heavily monitored.

China has opened up its Xinjiang “re-education” camps to the Western media, allowing journalists to film inside and speak to workers and detainees for the first time.

The workers deny the camps are prison-like, saying all attendees are there of their own free will.

The Chinese government initially denied the camps existed, dismissing concerns from foreign media and international human rights organisations that up to a million Uighur and other minority citizens were held against their will.

They later confirmed the camps were real but said they were “re-education” facilities rather than prisons or concentration camps.

They’ve now opened the camps up to foreign media to prove this, portraying them as recreational learning houses where people can sing, dance, paint, improve their Mandarin and learn about the politics of China.

But when a BBC film crew went inside, they soon found a number of things didn’t add up.

INSIDE THE XINJIANG DETENTION CAMPS

The BBC was given access into the camps with a camera crew as part of the Chinese government’s efforts to convince the world they’re not the torturous facilities people have claimed them to be.

Journalists were shown classrooms where people smile, sing and dance, take part in painting classes, improve their reading and writing in Mandarin and play tennis on the courts outside.

But inconsistencies soon became obvious. For example, satellite images show the sporting facilities were recently just large concrete slabs; their transformation coinciding with the media arrivals.

Satellite images also revealed parts of the camp were initially boxed in with barbed wire and watchtowers, which were removed before the journalists visited.

The footage showed inmates sharing a squalid room of 10 people to a dormitory, all sharing the same toilet.

Large areas of the camps remained sealed off, and the reporters were not allowed inside those.

Workers at the facilities claim everyone is inside of their own free will; that they’re not “prisoners” but “students who are willingly being guided away from extremism”.

“We’ve never encountered people that don’t want to come,” one worker said.

Another said the purpose was to teach them about Chinese laws, life skills and help them improve their Mandarin so they could graduate and get jobs in the outside world.

Chinese officials also believe they can determine a person’s guilt in advance — even if the person in question has not been convicted of a crime and has no history of criminal activity.

Camp trainers say they teach “pre-criminals” how to clean and make beds in programs that can take up to four months.

“We aim to change their thoughts so they can find work after graduation,” one worker said. When challenged as to whether this was brainwashing, she said: “We’re not completely changing their thoughts, only removing the extremist elements.”

But people who have been inside the camps tell a different story.

Rakhima Senbay, who now lives in Kazakhstan but says she spent a year in the camp — simply because she had WhatsApp on her phone — said she was beaten and threatened.

“They put cuffs on my legs for a week. There were times when we were beaten. Once, I was struck with an electric baton,” she told the BBC.

She ended up taking part in the art and dance classes towards the end of her time there but said she was warned anyone who spoke out about the reality of the camps would face consequences.

“They warned us ahead of the journalists’ visits, ‘If any of you speak out, you will go to a place worse than this’. That’s why everyone is scared and does what they’re told, including the dancing and singing.”

Other former inmates have given similar — if not worse — accounts of life in the camp.

Bekali, a Kazakh Muslim, described the torture he endured in an interview with Associated Press last year.

He said if he refused to follow orders each day, he was forced to stand at a wall for five hours at a time. Then, he was sent to solitary confinement and deprived of food for 24 hours straight. After 20 days in the camp, he wanted to commit suicide.

“The psychological pressure is enormous, when you have to criticise yourself, denounce your thinking — your own ethnic group,” Bekali said. “I still think about it every night, until the sun rises. I can’t sleep. The thoughts are with me all the time.”

After a torturous interrogation program, in which he was hung by his wrists and mined for information, he was taken to a re-education camp.

He said inmates would wake up together before dawn, sing the Chinese national anthem and raise the Chinese flag at 7.30am. They gathered back inside large classrooms to learn “red songs” like “Without the Communist Party, there is no New China” and study Chinese language and history.

Before meals of vegetable soup and buns, the inmates would be ordered to chant: “Thank the Party! Thank the Motherland! Thank President Xi!”

Bekali was kept in a locked room almost around the clock with eight other internees, who shared beds and a wretched toilet. Cameras were installed in toilets and even outhouses.

Inmates were forced to criticise themselves and their religion in front of each other and apologise for wearing Islamic clothing and teaching the Koran. Praying was strictly forbidden.

Chinese officials continue to deny the camps are a crackdown on the country’s Muslim ethnic groups.

Last month, Chinese ambassador to Kazakhstan Zhang Xiao denied any wrongdoing by Beijing, rejecting the allegations as “false information”.

“The situation there is stable and normal. Measures conducted in Xinjiang are exclusively about fighting against radicalism and extremism and have nothing to do with Kazakhstan,” Mr Zhang told reporters.