Almost certainly as a response to the mounting international criticism, the authorities have begun to double down on this description, with a full-on propaganda drive. We took one of GMV's findings - the increase in building size at the facility in Dabancheng - and showed it to a team with long experience in prison design at the Australian-based Guymer Bailey Architects. On one, we see a notice instructing people how to respond to questions about where their family members have gone. She met and married a British man, took British citizenship and started a family. But it is clear that over the past few years China has been building a lot of new security facilities, at remarkable and increasing speed. The officials, with hands over our camera lenses, tell us that there's important military training taking place in the area today and we're instructed to leave. An analysis of satellite images shows sprawling compounds are rapidly rising from the desert sands. The Yancheng prison in China has installed cameras in every cell in an attempt to use AI or artificial intelligence to govern inmates. Xinjiang accounts for less than 2% of the countrys population but about 21% of all arrests in 2017. One of the images it captured that day just shows a patch of empty, untouched, ashen-grey sand. They have some problems with their thoughts. For all its cushy interiors, Mainstream religious activity, the mildest dissent and any link with Uighurs living in foreign countries appear to be enough to sweep people into the system. Just a few kilometres away lies another giant camp said to hold around 10,000 people. Even so, your dormitory estimate of 130,000 people seems, sadly, quite possible.. Such is life in Chinas reeducation camps, as reported in rare testimony provided by Sayragul Sauytbay (pronounced: Say-ra-gul Saut-bay, as in bye), a teacher who escaped from China and was granted asylum in Sweden. The wide expanse of dusty ground, shown on the satellite image to the east of the site, is empty no more. State-run TV has been showing glossy reports, full of clean classrooms and grateful students, apparently willingly submitting themselves to the coursework. Barbaric torture, brainwashing and forced organ removals: Inside Chinas brutal death camps. In the city of Kashgar, the once bustling, beating heart of Uighur culture, the narrow streets are eerily quiet. The police officers manning the roadblock tell us that surface of the road has melted in the hot sun. A helmeted policeman, some distance away, is cleaning the mosque steps. In its place, a huge extension project is taking shape. The facility he found himself in did not look like a school. The exercise yard can clearly be seen on the satellite photo of the camp where he says he was held, in the oasis town of Hotan in southern Xinjiang. The video, posted anonymously on YouTube last week, shows what appear to be Uighur or other minorities wearing blue and yellow uniforms, with cleanly shaven heads, their eyes covered, sitting in rows on the ground and later being led away by police. Xiamuxinuer Pida, 66, is a well-educated former-engineer with a long service record at a Chinese state company. Our car is stopped - we're told to turn off the cameras and to leave. There is no mention of the grounds on which the students have been chosen for this study or how long the courses last. We leave Kashgar on the highway, heading southwest towards an area dotted with Uighur villages and farms, and a great many suspected camps. Before Communist rule, Xinjiang occasionally slipped from China's grip with brief periods of independence. There is no way of independently verifying these accounts. But when the detainees are released, what then? Not all of Xinjiang's internment camps are the same. On the satellite photo, you can make out the guard towers and the double perimeter fencing of the Han'airike Legal Education Training Centre. The video was posted on YouTube by an account named War on Fear, whose stated goal is to fight fear inspired by hi-tech surveillance. On 12 July 2015 a satellite swung over the rolling deserts and oasis cities of China's vast far west. However, in terms of overall surface area of the facilities being built, there is more this year than last. On Sunday, Australias foreign minister, Marise Payne, described the video as deeply disturbing. Cross-referencing this information with other media sources, Zenz suggests that at least several hundred thousand and possibly over a million Uighurs and other Muslim minorities could have been interned for re-education. There are more than 10 million Uighurs in Xinjiang. There is nothing more miserable than not knowing where your daughter is, if she is alive or dead. Xinjiang is not only beautiful but also safe and stable.. One of them almost certainly relates to the giant site we visited - a July 2017 tender for the installation of a heating system in a transformation through education school somewhere in the district of Dabancheng. She went towards her child, embraced him and started crying. Their minimum estimate for occupancy at Dabancheng assumes that the detainees are held only in single rooms. In Xinjiang going to school has come to take on a meaning all of its own. And they categorised the likelihood of each site actually being a security facility, placing 44 of them in the high or very high category. By Jenny Li and Larry Ong. And they taught us laws. Silivri Prison outside Istanbul, often referred to as Europe's largest, is designed to house 11,000. One road is closed for military training. China's Party leader Xi Jinping is headlining the nationwide crackdown on graft, but unmentioned are at least 16 people known to have been arrested In the silence we can hear the sound of the slop of the water in the bucket and the swish of the mop, echoing across the square. Despite the government's denials, the most compelling evidence for the existence of the internment camps comes from a trove of information from the authorities themselves. Images from Chinese state TV show life inside the "schools". In the square, a few beardless old men sit chatting. Even that minimum estimate would place it alongside some of the biggest prisons in the world. One of them gestures to his mouth, holding his lips together to signal that it's too risky for him to talk to journalists. Using the measurements from the satellite images they calculated that, at an absolute minimum, the facility could provide space for about 11,000 detainees. Other public sources of satellite photography however - like the European Space Agency's Sentinel database - provide much more frequent images, although they're of a much lower resolution. Uighur prisoner footage shown to Chinese Guymer Bailey Architects (GBA) provided us with this analysis of the possible functions of the various buildings on the site. The facilities are exclusively for Xinjiang's Muslim minorities, many of whom do not speak Chinese as their mother tongue. As in the Cultural Revolution, a society is being told that it needs to be taken apart in order to be saved. We asked the Chinese government about the allegations of abuse but have received no reply. A massive, highly secure compound had materialised. One by one, they measured the growth of new sites and the expansion of existing ones. I don't know anything about prayer times.. They have some problems with their thoughts.. And then, after asking her to send them via a Chinese mobile chat service, Xiamuxinuer said something that sent a chill down Reyila's spine. In response to such criticisms, the Chinese authorities point to rising living standards for Xinjiang's residents. While still a few hundred metres away, we see something unexpected. The note urged whoever purchased the cards to contact a British man who had been imprisoned in China With our cameras rolling we try to capture the extent of the construction, but before we can go much further one of the police cars swings into action. Over the past four years, Xinjiang has been the target of some of the most restrictive and comprehensive security measures ever deployed by a state against its own people. Having initially denied the existence of the camps, China has described them asvocational education centresin the face of mounting evidence in the form of government documents, satellite imagery and testimonies from escaped detainees. Some 1.5 million people are kept in a huge network of prisons across China. Loading Unsubscribe from Sir Reddit? Ruser said the detainees were most likely being transferred to prisons in Korla from Kashgar, where the crackdown has been particularly severe. The following year, 31 people were slaughtered by knife-wielding Uighur attackers at a train station in the Chinese city of Kunming, more than 2000km away from Xinjiang. Lily Kuo in Beijing. Satellite images have also suggested that more than two dozen Islamic religious sites have been partly or completely demolished since 2016. And it is just one of many similar, large prison-type structures that have been built across Xinjiang in the past few years. China has consistently denied that it is locking up Muslims without trial. Bilkiz's daughter Sekine, whom she has not seen for more than two years. Although relatively small in terms of fatalities it rattled the foundations of the Chinese state. A wall poster in Xinjiang reads: Stability is a blessing, instability is a calamity. Their potential is undeniableas are their risks. Footage shows hundreds of blindfolded and shackled prisoners in China video, more than two dozen Islamic religious sites have been partly or completely demolished, campaigned against the treatment of their families, China's UK ambassador denied abuse of Uighurs. But 440 hectares represents a lot of additional space. But history holds many troubling precedents about where such a project might end up. She has since lost contact with the rest of her family and now has no idea where her daughter is. In remote parts of the world, Google Earth images can take months or years to update. Mon 23 Sep 2019 02.56 EDT. For Uighurs outside Xinjiang news has almost completely dried up. Their analysts went through a list of 101 facilities located across Xinjiang - drawn up from the various media reports and academic research about the re-education camp system. Each morning, when 29-year-old Ablet Tursun Tohti was woken an hour before sunrise, he and his fellow detainees had one minute to get to the exercise yard. Much of the focus of international criticism of Chinas far-reaching anti-terrorism campaign in Xinjiang has centred on the extrajudicial detentions of more than 1 million ethnic Uighurs and other Muslim minorities in internment and political re-education camps. This article is more than 8 months old. China 5 Chinese Prisons That Are the Size of Small Towns. In the middle of the night, after my other children have gone to bed, I cry a lot, she says. We try to find out when the next prayer time is but no-one seems to be able to tell us. There were two men there, one to beat with a belt, the other just to kick.. And since there has now been a mass recall of passports, Ablet was one of the last Uighurs able to leave China. Sauytbays testimony is even more extraordinary, because during her incarceration Instead, we telephoned random numbers in the town. Pages of local government tendering documents inviting potential contractors and suppliers to bid for the building projects have been discovered online by the German-based academic, Adrian Zenz. And the world has yet to hear from anyone who has spent time in facilities like Dabancheng, the sinister and secretive facility of such immense proportions. I'm just here to deal with tourists, one official tells us. Cancel Unsubscribe. October 2013: Tiananmen Square sealed off after a car attack which killed two people. Last year, her mother came for her usual summer visit, spending time with her daughter and grandson and doing a bit of London sightseeing. The BBC has conducted lengthy interviews with eight Uighurs living overseas. He describes the same routine of exercise, bullying and brainwashing. But we've discovered something of significance - a huge amount of extra activity that has so far gone unnoticed by the outside world. They provide details about the construction or conversion of dozens of separate facilities across Xinjiang. It places the site just outside the small town of Dabancheng, about an hour's drive from the provincial capital, Urumqi. Uighurs are now subject to ethnic profiling at thousands of pedestrian and vehicle checkpoints while Han Chinese residents are often waved through. Resentment among Uighurs over the perceived uneven distribution of the proceeds of that growth has simmered. The city's main mosque is more like a museum. As far as I know, the Chinese government wants to delete Uighur identity from the world.. Using only publicly available, open-source satellite data, it's possible to shed light on Xinjiang's dark secret. To try to avoid the suffocating police scrutiny that awaits every visiting journalist, we land at Urumqi airport in the early hours of the morning. They speak a Turkic language and resemble the peoples of Central Asia at least as much as they do China's majority population, the Han Chinese. A high, solid blue steel fence now surrounds the site and there's heavy security on the front gate. One prisoner, Kevin Smith, saw one of his videos go viral on the platform, it featured Smith explaining how he uses an electrical wire from a light fixture and a metal bucket to heat water. Secret footage shows Uighur mans detention inside Chinese prison. About This measurement refers to the whole site within the external security walls, not just the buildings. Wired reports that prisoners in the United States have begun posting to the Chinese-owned social media app TikTok, with many detailing their day to day lives inside the prison.