Thread by @BuzzFeedNews

EXCLUSIVE: For the first time, we can reveal the scale of the prison and detention camps for Muslims China has built in the Xinjiang region: enough room to detain over one million people.

Read the latest entry in our Pulitzer Prize-winning series. buzzfeednews.com/article/meghar…

We’ve found 347 compounds that were constructed or saw significant renovations since 2016, the year the campaign to lock up Muslims in Xinjiang started.

Combined, those buildings cover more than 206 million square feet, the equivalent of a third of Manhattan.

We also obtained China’s own prison construction standards, which lay out how much space is needed for each prisoner or detainee.

Using that information, we found there's enough space to detain 1,014,883 people across Xinjiang, more than one in every 25 residents of the region.

China’s Foreign Ministry did not respond to a detailed list of questions for this story. It has previously called estimates of a million Muslims detained in Xinjiang a “groundless lie,” and has said that its facilities in Xinjiang are designed to “root out extreme thoughts.”

It's possible this number is an undercount. Dozens of former inmates have described overcrowding in the prisons and camps.

Whether overcrowding continues is less clear, because most of the ex-detainees who have been able to escape China were locked up early in the campaign.

But our analysis reflects what researchers, UN officials, and Western governments have long held: that China’s detention campaign in Xinjiang is the largest against a religious minority since the Nazi camps during World War II. buzzfeednews.com/article/meghar…

Read the previous installments of our Xinjiang series:

Part 1: buzzfeednews.com/article/meghar…

Part 2: buzzfeednews.com/article/alison…

Part 3: buzzfeednews.com/article/meghar…

Part 4: buzzfeednews.com/article/alison…