Looks like a standard domestic intelligence sweep in an area with an active terrorist insurrection (Bulletin 20 indicates via a quick estimate that at least 10,000 active islamist insurrectionaries exist in the region.)

The only document I see that posits any major concern is bulletin 14, but I'd need to know if those are actual standard weekly numbers or the number of suspicious persons caught up in the initial sweep (I suspect the latter looking at the numbers in bulletin 20.) A lot also depends on if "sent to vocational training" means generally detained for a year or applied to one of the day facilities we know exist, and in what proportion.

Additionally, the described camp conditions, if adhered to, are actually better than I had expected. Equal to a low security reformist prison in Europe. Note for example that communication with family is mandated.

Now I'm not saying that this is a good thing. China has clearly detained at least fifty thousand people for at least a year in a re-education camp, and is going about this in a way I'd deeply criticise if it was, say, coalition forces in Iraq (oh wait, they did far worse).

There are serious issues here about forced cultural assimilation and labour with people who might be extremist but not active politically. Additionally I have no doubt that Han Chauvinism drives wrongful arrests and police excesses take place in these facilities because even in China ACAB.

I think there's a lot of room to criticise these facilities for what they are, an overly authoritarian and wrong-headed way to secure a population that is ripe for CIA and Saudi radicalisation (And which has been badly managed by CPC administration in the area, these things never appear in a vacuum ) while acknowledging that this isn't a genocide and is a better and more humane counter-insurgency strategy than the US has ever done

Nothing really bad in those cables anyway