What we found out about the Xinjiang camps. Thread wsj.com/articles/china…
It’s still hard to know how conditions are in many of the camps, and if they contributed to deaths. Five people told us a close relative died in a camp or soon after release, with ages of the deceased ranging from 24 to 72. More reported that friends or acquaintances died
My colleague @JNBPage spoke to former camp inmates in Kazakhstan who reported harsh treatment such as getting tied to a chair for hours, and some people getting beaten, amid the hours of daily patriotic training. It’s still hard to say how many of the camps have such conditions
My colleague @joshchin confirmed in person the existence of this camp in Turpan, close to where Murat Harri Uighur’s lived before they were taken away. We haven’t been able to find any official documentation of it yet, and it is visible on Google but not Baidu maps 
Through satellite images, @paullibat and his team established that that Turpan camp had been rapidly built last year. That tags with the de-extremification regulations going into effect on April 1, 2017 (around the time many overseas Uighurs lost contact with their families)
We had a huge amount of help along the way from @adrianzenz @shawnwzhang @mhanham in analyzing public records and satellite images. Like everyone else looking at the camps, we owe an immense intellectual debt to Adrian and Shawn for documenting them with hard evidence
@HalmuratU bravely shared details of how his parents were taken away. One troubling detail: A Finnish citizen, he said at the Shanghai airport last yr he was strip-searched and forced to record his voice speaking in Uighur, and was denied the right to call the Finnish embassy
From the print story, here’s how one camp in Kashgar expanded over the last year. The first image is from when the “de-extremification” campaign was beginning in April 2017
The big questions remain. How many people are in these camps now and how many have passed through? What portion of the centers are truly vocational and how many are just extrajudicial prisons? Are the deaths natural? No clear answers yet. /end of thread
