from Hacker News

The Xinjiang Police Files

by int_10h on 5/24/22, 5:46 AM with 317 comments

  • by tragomaskhalos on 5/24/22, 9:07 AM

    The calls for affirmative action against China had a very low probability of bearing fruit beforehand, but since the Russian invasion of Ukraine I would put them at 0% - no sane politician wants to do anything that will push the Chinese further into common ground with Russia.

  • by sva_ on 5/24/22, 10:36 AM

    Looking through some of those detainee pictures, it is almost all men, and some older women. Gruesome implication. But I only looked through some.

  • by ineiti on 5/24/22, 12:38 PM

    The wayback machine has you:

    https://web.archive.org/web/20220524092913/https://www.xinji...

    Unfortunately the documents haven't been saved before the site went down :(

  • by throwaway290 on 5/24/22, 12:19 PM

  • by rasphino on 5/28/22, 3:35 PM

    I am Chinese. I took a look at some of these "key documents", but I don't know what is wrong.

    1. For the "Education Training Center" or the so-called "Re-education Camp", the intake rules from "Vocational Skills Education Training Center Intake Examination and Registration System"[1] says: "对符合规定条件应予收押的犯罪嫌疑人、被告人，应当对其人身和携带的物品进行严格检查，对女性的人身检查，应当由女工作人员进行。". From Google translation (if you don't understand Chinese lol), it means "Criminal suspects and defendants who meet the prescribed conditions and should be taken into custody shall be subject to strict inspections of their persons and their belongings, and the physical inspection of women shall be carried out by female staff members." (btw the english version of this document is not so accurate).

    I think it is very clear that those detainee are criminal suspects or defendants, so my question is, is it wrong to detain these guys?

    2. About the environment of the "Education Training Center". From "System for Vocational Skill Education and Training Center Detainees Leaving the School for Medical Treatment"[2], the detainees can leave the "camp" for medical treatment, but need to be escorted, and cannot contact with other people. From "Education and Training Center Management System for Calls to Relatives (Trial Implementation)"[3], the detainees can call their relatives every 10 days. What surprises me is the rule 6, which says when the detainee's family is in need, the grassroot (草根, the community office) needs to find a solution to help them and gets back to the detainee.

    Anything wrong about this?

    [1]: https://www.xinjiangpolicefiles.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/...

    [2]: https://www.xinjiangpolicefiles.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/...

    [3]: https://www.xinjiangpolicefiles.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/...

  • by langsoul-com on 5/24/22, 10:05 AM

    Someone is gonna get jailed for this leak.

  • by gullevek on 5/24/22, 11:09 AM

    Host already gone. So China did its work.

  • by TomGullen on 5/24/22, 9:59 AM

    The photo of the woman on the BBC article is very powerful

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/extra/85qihtvw6e/the-faces-from-c...

  • by Sporktacular on 5/24/22, 3:00 PM

    Can anyone suggest a mirror? It's up and down.

  • by dragonelite on 5/24/22, 8:20 AM

    uuhm what a timing just when UN sends a inspector to xinjiang this website shows up xD..

  • by aasasd on 5/24/22, 10:43 AM

    As we saw after the invasion of Ukraine, the West can mount a swift, concerted and effective response, that deals a lot of damage to the offending country's economy. I'm sure that evidence of Xinjiang crimes will invoke the same kind of decisive action.

  • by einpoklum on 5/25/22, 3:46 PM

    Adrian Zenz is a fundamentalist Christian who has declared he is on some kind of quest from god to bring down Communist China. He's made multiple baseless accusations in the past such as there supposedly being a genocide of the Uyghurs. See:

    https://thegrayzone.com/2021/02/18/us-media-reports-chinese-...

  • by shellfishgene on 5/24/22, 7:50 AM

    I'm always surprised how little interest there seems to be from the international muslim community in the Xinjiang situation, given that at least parts of it really blow up over even minor anti-Islam actions by single individuals quite regularly. The actions of China seem at least in part aimed at extinguishing Islam as a religion in the region, which would seem far worse than some person drawing a cartoon. But maybe any reactions just don't make mainstream news.

  • by acgt on 5/24/22, 7:03 AM

    Hard to watch. Reminder me of the torturing at Guantánamo Bay detention camp.

  • by bradleykingz on 5/24/22, 6:57 AM

    The hacker must have trouble walking around... y'know, because of his gigantic balls?

    All jokes aside, I wonder how denialists will react to this. And I'm curious how China will attempt to explain this away.

    Can't wait for more detailed reports to come out. BBC's report [1] has been particularly interesting so far.

    I wonder what happens next.

    1. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/extra/85qihtvw6e/the-faces-from-c...

  • by throwaway4good on 5/24/22, 7:48 AM

    Both Zenz and “Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation” are colored by heavy ideology and this campaign is obviously timed with the UN human rights chiefs current visit in Xinjiang.

    The latter has some promise of shining light on the actual situation and provide some marginal improvements on the ground, whereas the former … well … won’t rest until China is split into a million pieces post soviet style.

  • by ma_advertising on 5/24/22, 5:42 PM

    i wonder how religion is still a thing amoung the presumably educated people of HN

  • by throwawaywig on 5/24/22, 8:08 AM

    What China doing is wrong. But there is no doubt it is not anti-Islam. It is a xenophobic act.

    China has another big community of Muslims known as the Hui Muslims. They practice Sufism, a much more non-radical version of Islam.

    They practice Chinese culture, they build their mosques in Chinese architectural styles.

    They do not face any kind of "re-education" camps.

    Read more:

    [1]: https://thediplomat.com/2014/08/a-tale-of-two-chinese-muslim...

    [2]: https://www.dw.com/en/the-hui-chinas-preferred-muslims/a-366...

    [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hui_people

    [4]: https://time.com/3099950/china-muslim-hui-xinjiang-uighur-is...

  • by 1vonzhang on 5/24/22, 10:11 AM

    1. The populated of "genocided" Uyghur ethnic group has increased from 10.17 million to 12.71 million from 2010 to 2018. This sort of contradicts with the concept of genocide. The increase rate of ~25% is higher than Xinjiang ~14% and much higher than the main ethnic group Han ~2%.

    2. I personally tried really hard to track down a source that DOESN'T ULTIMATELY LEAD TO ADRIAN ZENZ but has failed to do so. As GameOfFrowns commented earlier, he is at a position with many reasons to fabricate/exaggerate negative facts against China. If hundreds of articles from many different organizations/countries are based on one single person, it's hard for me not to regard this Adrian Zenz as a pretense. Even interviews with so-called family relatives are connected to this magical Zenz.

    Many BBC reports/articles claims a resource of "some investigation" or "some research" that either leads to nowhere or to Adrian Zenz. If one claims that it's barely possible to know what's really happening in an authoritarian country, these reports are at least as untrustworthy as China's claims. It's even more amazing that Adrian Zenz has this power to do the investigation that all other organizations/governments cannot do.

    3. My personal option: China started this so-called educational camp because of the peak of terrorism in Xinjiang in 2009. And it's very possible that the anti-terrorism action went beyond what it should have. Investigations, evidence etc. should be encouraged to correct any mistake that have happened and prevent them from happening in the future. That being said, if this motive also goes beyond what it should be and turns into a means against China, the accusation makes no difference from what's accused of.

  • by __alexs on 5/24/22, 7:26 AM

    Every great nation is built on unspeakably evil things like this. It seems almost like it's part of the cost of entry to being a super power.

    This isn't an apology for China. It's about time they moved to the 'maturity' stage of an empires life.

  • by 4ggr0 on 5/24/22, 7:41 AM

    I hope that this is a genuine leak showing what's going on there.

    Just don't like the organisation behind this leak, at all, and don't really trust them. But as long as this leak is objective I can ignore this aspect.

    Really sickening to see what's going on in Xinjiang.

    EDIT: I said it's sickening to see what's going on and i strongly oppose what China is doing in Xinjang, am I really getting downvotes just because I don't like the "Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation"?

  • by dontbenebby on 5/24/22, 12:15 PM

    Hi int_10h,

    Thanks for posting this interesting link!

    I'm surprised Cloudflare is blocking me from viewing this site via Tor Browser from one of my favorite cyber cafés. Instead I need to load a domain that's going to put me on all sorts of... radar... and enable Javascript?

    Feels bad man.

    Oh, look, now as I try to access it I'm getting a 520 error, let's throw a !wayback shebang into the search bar since I already made sure to set my search engine as... uh... not Bing.

    Ahhh, here we go.

    https://web.archive.org/web/20220524110417/https://www.xinji...

    For context, I'm from the suburbs of Pittsburgh, and seriously considered joining the FBI when I left college, but ironically the reason I didn't was because they never sorted out how to handle to the duality of the counter intel mission with the more traditional stuff like... busting bank robbers.

    I'm going to get up every morning and make posts like this on the internet, with the same damn defcon bag next to me I have for over ten years.

    - Greg from Troop 262

    PS: And Mike Nelson, if you're reading this, sorry I called you while you're driving, you could have let it go to voicemail rather than pick up then being angry you're talking on the phone while you're driving -- you know I'm always willing to reply :-)