International attention on the question of Xinjiang, the autonomous region in the northwestern corner of China, and the oppression of its native Uyghur population by the Chinese state still lags behind the well-publicized case of Tibet. Yet in the mind of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), Xinjiang, which many Uyghurs call East Turkistan, now outweighs Tibet as a policy priority.

In the name of combating Islamic extremism, the party has embarked on a massive campaign of detention and indoctrination of ethnic minorities. Its goal is to eradicate all possibility of opposition here once and for all and turn this huge territory into a stable platform from which to extend its Belt and Road Initiative and dominate Central Asia.

The emergence in Xinjiang of a new network of political reeducation camps has been a poorly kept secret for some time. But research and reporting is giving us hard evidence of the scale of this new policy. Since the middle of 2017, a major construction boom has thrown up a variety of detention centers and prisons whose inmates number in the hundreds of thousands. These camps combine many of the brute horrors of China’s earlier reeducation-through-labor system with the latest high-tech surveillance and monitoring mechanisms.