New reports are revealing how Chinese prisons and detainment camps in Xinjiang, China are so vast that they can cater to up to over a million inmates at a time.
Recent investigations into the prison system of the communist regime in China under President Xi Jinping showed that since 2016, the Chinese Communist Party had been investing in infrastructure to build facilities such as prisons and detainment camps to house political detractors and people who were heavily persecuted for their religion by the Chinese government.
Buzzfeed analyzed satellite images, documents, and testimony to come to a conclusion that there were up to 268 compounds that were "bearing the hallmarks of camps and prisons." Most recent analysis found an additional 79 facilities that appeared to look like Chinese prisons and detainment camps, most of which were built between 2017 and 2018.
By April 2021, analysis showed compounds occupying up to 206 million square feet or about 19.2 million square meters. The cells in these Chinese prisons and detainment camps were designed to house about eight to 16 prisoners, providing each of them about five to seven square meters each.
Based on these computations, all of the compounds could house about 1,014,883 prisoners and detainees across Xinjiang, discounting over 100 other Chinese prisons and detention camps which were already established before 2016. Researchers believe that more than a one million people are currently being held in these Chinese prisons and detainment camps due to reports of overcrowding.
According to LifeSite, the CCP began developing a "permanent mass detention infrastructure" in Xinjiang in 2020 to target religious minorities such as the Muslim Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and others. CCP's "draconian campaign of detention, surveillance, forced labor, and repression" aimed at these religious minorities were carried out in these fairly new Chinese prisons and detainment camps, as back in 2016, Chinese authorities had to imprison them in schools, hospitals, and apartment buildings that served as makeshift camps.
Now, Xinjiang is littered with a network of actual Chinese prisons and detainment camps, facilities that were designed for the primary purpose of holding political detractors and those who are persecuted for their religion.
It was also in 2020 when the U.S. government reported a sharp increase in religious persecution rates in China. According to the National Review, the CCP has "issued rules covering every aspect of religious life, from the formation of groups to daily activities involving worship and prayer, all of which need to be approved by the communist government." Those who do not obey face intense persecution.
"We're moving from a police state to a mass incarceration state. Hundreds of thousands of people have disappeared from the population," anthropologist Darren Byler of the University of Colorado, who studies Uyghurs, told Voice Of America. "It's the criminalization of normal behavior."
The proliferation of massive Chinese prisons and detainment camps for the sole purpose of religious persecution has been repeatedly denied by CCP authorities and state-sponsored Chinese media.
An article published in the state-run outlet Global Times once again denied the findings of the reports and said that the "vocational education and training centers established in Xinjiang in accordance with the law are all schools in nature" and are no different than the U.K.'s DDP (Desistance and Disengagement Programme), a counter-terrorism strategy introduced in 2016.
