Kashgar's Camps, What the Xinjiang Police Files Reveal About Detention in Konasheher County

Beijing's word for them was "vocational skills education and training centres". The people inside were students, the official line went. They studied Mandarin and law, learned a trade, and graduated. In December 2019 officials announced that all of them had.

Kashgar is where that story falls apart, because Kashgar is where the files came from.

In May 2022 an anonymous hacker passed the anthropologist Adrian Zenz more than 10 gigabytes taken from police servers in two Xinjiang counties. One was Tekes, in the north. The other was Konasheher, Shufu in Chinese, a farming county that wraps around Kashgar city. Zenz shared them with fourteen news outlets, including the BBC, Der Spiegel, Le Monde and the Washington Post. They became the Xinjiang Police Files.

Map: US National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, ASPI data, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Five thousand faces from one county

The files hold 5,074 police photographs taken between January and July 2018, showing 2,884 people. The youngest detainee was 15. The oldest was 73. Spreadsheets list some 8,000 detainees in Konasheher and more than 10,000 residents flagged for detention or closer watch. A separate list names 330 people sentenced for religious activity. One man got ten years in 2017 because, in 2010, he had spent a few days studying scripture with his grandmother.

From those records Zenz worked out that more than one in eight Uyghur adults in Konasheher was in a camp or a prison in 2017 and 2018. That's a calculation from leaked spreadsheets and Beijing rejects it. It has never published detention figures of its own.

The files also show what kind of school this was. A January 2018 plan for the county's facilities told armed guards to fire a warning shot at a detainee trying to escape, then shoot. Watchtowers had machine-gun posts and sniper rifles. People being moved, even to hospital, were hooded, handcuffed and shackled. In a June 2018 speech in the leak, Xinjiang's then party chief Chen Quanguo ordered guards to shoot escapees.

Nobody writes a shoot-to-kill protocol for a vocational college.

Graduation day was a building site

Earlier leaks pointed the same way. The China Cables, published by the ICIJ in 2019, included an order from Xinjiang's security chief to prevent escapes, to never allow "abnormal deaths", and to keep people for at least a year. A police bulletin in the same set recorded one week in June 2017 when the region's predictive policing system flagged 24,412 "suspicious persons" in southern Xinjiang. 15,683 were sent to the camps.

Then came the announcement that everyone had graduated. The Australian Strategic Policy Institute, working from satellite images, found a new 60-acre camp in Kashgar finished in January 2020, a month after that claim. It had 13 five-storey buildings, a 14-metre wall and watchtowers. Across Xinjiang, ASPI counted more than 380 suspected detention sites in 2020, with dozens under new construction or expansion.

How many people from Kashgar prefecture went through them is still not known. A local security official told Radio Free Asia in early 2018 that about 120,000 people were being held across the prefecture, more than 30,000 of them from Kashgar city's villages. It's one anonymous source, and it's the best figure there is, because the state that holds the real number won't publish it.

From camps to prisons

After 2019 the system changed shape. Many camps closed or were converted, some into factories. Many detainees were moved into formal prisons on long sentences. A study for the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in February 2025 estimated that more than half a million Turkic people were in prisons or extrajudicial detention between 2022 and 2024. Fewer camps, more convictions. The cells are now legal on paper.

In August 2022 the UN human rights office concluded that the detentions in Xinjiang may amount to crimes against humanity. The US government called it genocide in January 2021, and several parliaments followed. Beijing called the UN report invalid and the Police Files a smear by anti-China forces.

Where Beijing's argument ends

China's defence is that it faced real terrorism, that the camps were preventive, and that the attacks stopped. There were deadly attacks in Xinjiang before 2017. That much is true. But the files from Konasheher don't list bombers. They list a man who studied the Quran with his grandmother, a 15-year-old girl, a 73-year-old woman, and thousands of farmers from the villages around Kashgar.

Look at their faces. They're in the files.