The source of the files claims to have hacked, downloaded and decrypted them from a number of police computer servers in Xinjiang, before passing them to Dr Adrian Zenz, a scholar at the US-based Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation who has previously been sanctioned by the Chinese government for his influential research on Xinjiang.

Dr Zenz then shared them with the BBC, and although we were able to contact the source directly, they were unwilling to reveal anything about their identity or whereabouts.

HAHAHAHAHAHA

Still waiting for documentation of even a single death.

Meanwhile referring to the thousands of documented deaths in the Donbass since 2014 as a genocide is criminalized in Australia.

There is a lot of the same Zenz talking points in here and a focus on images, but I think the interesting parts of the story are the written docs

I have no reason to think that any of the documents are fake, nor any of the photographs. But why would someone send them to Adrian Zenz, someone who does not even read or speak Chinese?

The photographs don't show anything particularly bad, in my opinion. Sure there are people detained for re-education, lots, even. China has never claimed this was a voluntary school, it was always framed as detention and re-education. Of course there are going to be armed guards. I don't see any evidence of excessive violence or even or mass incarceration. I see 2,500 detainees.

What does concern me is the presumably authentic reasons for detention, as some of them seem harsher than they need to be. Like 10 years for reading scripture - that actually does seem like something worth reporting on. That may be purposely mistranslated or incorrect, but I think it's not.

The other piece is the shoot-to-kill order in the documents. I assume that's either a lie or mistranslated on purpose.

Is there anyone here who can read Chinese interested in looking into any of the written document claims? Or provide context?

thisuyghurdoesnotexist.com and it's just ai- generated images of people who never existed in the first place

they need a distraction from the pics of bojo at a party during lockdown so they run a nothingburger story about how someone hacked a chinese police database.

Nature is healing or we are still trapped in 2020?

Interesting timing for this given that the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet has arrived in China only yesterday.

The BBC are actively trying to undermine news about that and about the things she may say and report on while there. It's a pure media distraction away from CURRENT Xinjiang news by using 4 year old images hacked ages ago.

Zenz

instant disregard

The article does not allege genocide and the alleged police files do not present really any new significant information. We already knew that people sent to de-radicalization were overwhelmingly not doing it voluntarily. The notion of extremists just suddenly deciding to willingly sign up for de-radicalization was always asinine. The article tries to dig up and highlight the worst cases for detention that they could find with listed reasons that lack much context. There were certainly cases that appear to display a disregard for due process during this re-education campaign under Chen Quanguo (party secretary of Xinjiang from 2016-2021 who had also developed a reputation for repressive security crackdowns in Tibet) and Shohrat Zakir (Uyghur governor of Xinjiang from 2015-2021) with heavy-handed enforcement of vague ”anti-extremism” measures by local officials (much of the government bureaucracy and law enforcement being Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities in areas of southern Xinjiang while mostly Han in areas of northern Xinjiang like Urumqi). Unsurprisingly, the end results are at least some false positives. Clearly not every single detainee that was sent to re-radicalization centers/re-education camps was necessarily a salafi terrorist or violent separatist. There was also very likely at least some sporadic abuse as you see in many prison contexts. The article fails to mention that the re-education camps were closed down in late 2019. Imo it's reasonable to say that the Xinjiang regional government under Chen Quanguo and Shohrat Zakir overreacted with overzealous counter-terrorist and anti-separatist policies even with the active presence of violent terrorist threats. Hopefully the repression will continue to ease with Chen Quanguo being recently replaced by Ma Xingrui as party secretary in Xinjiang and Erken Tuniyaz being the new governor.

The photographs give human form to a policy designed to deliberately target Uyghur families as a repository of identity and culture and - in China’s own words - to “break their roots, break their lineage, break their connections, break their origins”.

This quote is from a religious affairs official of Turkic heritage that was taken out of context by BBC and a large number of other western media outlets. Maimuer was referring to “two-faced people”:

Break their lineage, break their roots, break their connections, and break their origins. Completely shovel up the roots of “two-faced people,” dig them out, and vow to fight these two-faced people until the end.

The term “two-faced people” in Xinjiang refers to party or government officials who claim to be opposed to extremism while refusing to adequately support and enforce anti-extremism policy. This includes Han officials like Wang Yongzhi, who was removed from his government position for not sufficiently implementing anti-extremist measures. A state media outlet in Xinjiang attacked him as being a typical example of “two-faced people”:

Wang Yongzhi lost his ideals and convictions. He is a typical ‘two-faced man.

• there are 5,000 police photographs, but 2,884 are "shown to be" detained. the remaining 2,116 are not detained.

• 5,000 police mugshots over an unknown amount of time in a province of 25 Million people is of course not remarkable. there is no statement that these are photos from just one county, which still would not be remarkable.

• It's not established that these are police mugshots and not pictures for photo IDs.

• most of the photos are ordinary, but a dozen out of the 5000 have crying or upset expressions or police officers in frame, which are featured front and center in the article of course.

• many of the pictures look deepfaked, but actually the experts BBC consulted said they're real photos ran through an auto-crop and auto-rotate program, which I believe, and sounds like a process that makes more sense for photo IDs than mugshots.

https://twitter.com/Cinqscories/status/1529035481203154945

Thread questioning details in the claimed leaked documents, such as what seems to be a cursor in the photo, mismatched characters that should be simplified but appear to be traditional chinese characters that are only really used in Taiwan and HK apparently and other inconsistensies.

Some in the replies suggest that the documents are authentic but have been downloaded/opened by someone without the simplified chinese font properly installed, which seems suspicious on its own since it suggests somewhere in the chain of anonymous Chinese leaker, China specialist Adrian Zenz and BBC Beijing Correspondent John Sudworth, someone of these people do not have a simple font that should be a base requirement for their work or daily life installed on wherever they took the screenshots from.

just scrolled down to the pictures

and yeah, the police famously always makes sure to include armed guards in mugshots. how else can you make clear that the person is under duress? the guard standing ominously behind the detainee is the most important part.

https://www.reddit.com/r/GenZedong/comments/uwlml2/whats_your_opinion_on_the_recently_dropped/

They are so credulous of Adrian Zenz. At least they mention the ridiculous "Victims of Communism" foundation he works for.

I thought they quietly admitted it was all made-up and just let redditors keep running with the propaganda