Everyone has a score, based on things like how well they’re learning Mandarin and adopting what the state sees as the correct ideology. If they’re good, their score increases, and they have a better chance of getting out. If they’re bad, they’re punished. They must attend classes, where they are told how to be model Chinese citizens — and repent for extremist thoughts the state believes to be rampant among its Muslims.

As many as 1 million Chinese Muslims are believed to have been sent to “re-education” schools in the region of Xinjiang over the past three years. The “students” are interred in highly-secure, prison-like facilities with double-locked doors and surveilled 24 hours a day. They are allowed little or no contact with the outside world. There are informants among them to prevent people from organizing.

“This document is the smoking gun that tells us these vocational training centers are in fact prisons,” said James Millward, a China scholar and historian at Georgetown University.

The document is believed to have been leaked by an official working for the Chinese government in Xinjiang. It was sent by this official to a VICE News source on the situation in Xinjiang who lives outside the country. The official said the world needed to see the document, and expressed their desire for an end to the difficult times facing Uighurs, a Muslim ethnic minority being sent to the camps.

The classified, eight-page document was apparently written by the internal Party Political and Legal Affairs Commission in a subregion of Xinjiang and dated 2017 — around when China began running the camps. It provides detailed directives on “standardizing the work” of the re-education camps, essentially serving as an operating manual.

A leaked manual for the implementation of these re-education camps reviewed by VICE News lays out in specific, brutal detail exactly how the Communist Party of China is instructing local officials to run the re-education camps. The goal is to assimilate long-marginalized religious and ethnic minorities into Han Chinese culture, language, and beliefs — including unquestioning support for The People’s Party.

The camps, which hold ethnic Uighurs and Kazakhs, are shrouded in secrecy. China has framed them as voluntary training centers designed to curb extremism, but survivors, including a number who have spoken to VICE News, have described conditions in line with what these documents mandate. They’ve also recounted physical and psychological torture.

The handbook is the latest leak of internal documents related to the mass incarceration of China’s minorities. Last week, the New York Times published a report on more than 400 pages of internal papers on how the program began and how it continued, despite resistance from within government ranks. Beijing’s foreign ministry condemned the report and accused the authors of misinterpreting the documents, but they did not deny that the papers were real. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not reply to a VICE News request for comment by time of publication.

It is incredibly dangerous for Chinese officials to leak documents — if caught, they would likely face imprisonment. The fact that classified documents are getting out suggests that some officials are deeply disturbed by Xinjiang’s camps.

VICE News has since been told by two sources that government officials have been instructed to burn all paper documents linked to Xinjiang, and to restrict access to the remaining digital copies that should now only be held on one computer per locality.

“This is the most comprehensive description I have seen of the prison aspect of the camps, making it clear that these are not schools and not students,” said Darren Byler, an anthropologist and researcher on the Uighur crackdown and dispossession at the University of Colorado. “The level of detail in this writing points to a level of intimate knowledge with the workings of the camp infrastructure.”

Inside China’s re-education camps

The re-education camps were opened about three years ago as Beijing's latest response to discontent over Chinese authority in the region, and now hold as many as 1 million people according to organizations cited by the United Nations. That tension has led to occasional clashes and violent incidents over the last decade, including riots in 2009 that killed nearly 200 people, most of them reportedly Han Chinese, and a 2014 attack on a market that killed 39 people. Beijing blames this unrest on Islamic extremism and ethnic separatism, and has responded with a widespread crackdown on Uighur people.