In August 2024, the parents of Ekpar Asat made a long and difficult journey to a prison in China’s Xinjiang region. Asat, a Uyghur, had been arrested by authorities in April 2016 on charges of “inciting ethnic hatred”. Shortly before his arrest, Asat, the founder of a popular Uyghur-language website, had just returned from the United States after taking part in a prestigious leadership programme.
The visit, which took place in May, was the first time his parents had seen him face to face since his disappearance. He appeared so thin that “it was hard to recognise him”, according to his sister Rayhan.
According to human rights organisations, the meeting lasted only 10 minutes and took place through a glass partition. The family was also forced to speak in Chinese, a language Ekpar speaks fluently, but his parents barely understand. They were also prohibited from showing any signs of sadness or emotion. Rayhan told the Financial Times: “Prisoners have to look happy all the time.”
A decade has now passed since Asat was imprisoned. He is one of around one million people caught up in a sweeping crackdown targeting Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in Xinjiang. Reports by human rights organisations about “re-education” camps and forced labour triggered widespread international outrage, followed by Western sanctions against China.
In late 2019, the Chinese government announced the closure of the camps that had brought it intense international condemnation. Xinjiang’s then governor, Shohrat Zakir, claimed that the detainees had “graduated”.
Yet analysis by the Financial Times suggests that the Chinese state’s repression of Uyghurs, their culture, and their identity has in reality entered a new phase. While many camps have been closed, an extensive network of prisons and detention centres remains in place, alongside a strict surveillance system and coercive mechanisms of social control.
The data shows that Xinjiang now has the highest detention and prison capacity in the world relative to its population. This provides evidence that authorities continue to rely on mass detention. Researchers and human rights groups argue that repression in the region is now aimed at reshaping Uyghur society and engineering its demographic structure over the long term.
Forced Labour and Social Re-engineering
In this context, Beijing has expanded “labour transfer” programmes under which Uyghurs are moved to work in factories across the country. United Nations experts have warned that these schemes may amount to “forced labour”.
This places multinational companies operating in China in a complex moral and legal position, particularly as Beijing imposes strict restrictions that make it difficult and dangerous for companies to conduct independent investigations into their supply chains to determine whether Uyghur rights are being violated.
Adrian Zenz, director of China studies at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, a US-based non-profit organisation, said the compulsory employment programme is Beijing’s new priority.
He added that the former camp system served as a “catalyst” for other policies, including “birth prevention, separating children from their families, mandatory boarding schools, and labour transfers”.
Zenz argues that the state-organised boarding school system amounts to a “dramatic tearing apart of the Uyghur social fabric”. Children are separated from their families at an early age, distancing them from their language and cultural practices, which are now tightly restricted.
Researchers believe the campaign reflects Beijing’s attempt to absorb Uyghurs into the national identity of China’s Han majority, amid rising nationalism under President Xi Jinping.
Historian Hannah Theaker said the Uyghurs’ distinct language, culture, and Islamic faith create for Beijing “a sense of insecurity that has intensified with China’s deep nationalist turn”. Peter Irwin, co-executive director of the Uyghur Human Rights Project, added: “They simply want to force them to be Chinese.”
Xinjiang also holds significant strategic importance for Beijing. It sits along vital trade corridors linking China to Central Asia, the Middle East, and Europe, and contains vast reserves of coal, oil, and gas.
Irwin said: “They view the region as an economic engine for the country.”
China, meanwhile, continues to frame its policies in Xinjiang as necessary measures to guarantee security and stability and to combat terrorism. In a speech last year, Xi Jinping stressed the need to be prepared to “fight terrorism” and called, according to state media, for religions to be adapted to “Chinese reality”. He also urged officials and ethnic groups to adopt a “correct view” of the country’s history, culture, and nationhood.
China imposes strict controls on the flow of information from the region. It blocks online content, restricts travel, and intimidates Uyghurs abroad by threatening their relatives inside China.
Despite this, the Financial Times was able to form a clear picture of current conditions through the testimonies of human rights monitors, members of the Uyghur diaspora, and people who recently left China and witnessed the mechanisms of control imposed there.
Their accounts, alongside the newspaper’s analysis, indicate that authorities continue to rely on large-scale detention, short-term arrests, and intimidation, even as the campaign enters a new phase focused on forced cultural assimilation, particularly in southern Xinjiang, where Uyghurs form the majority.
Five years after the United States classified Chinese practices in the region as “genocide”, Yalkun Uluyol of Human Rights Watch said Uyghur identity and culture continue to face an “existential threat”.
For its part, China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement that the allegations in the article were “completely inconsistent with the facts”. It claimed that its policies had lifted millions out of poverty and raised life expectancy, winning the “wholehearted support” of Xinjiang’s residents, “including the Uyghur people”.
The World’s Largest Detention System
When hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs were arrested in mass raids across Xinjiang beginning in 2017, international attention focused on “vocational training centres”, which became the symbol of state repression. But experts say many others, classified by the state as “more dangerous”, were quietly transferred into the formal prison system.
These penal facilities expanded across the region alongside the camps and away from global scrutiny. Leaked data from one county in southern Xinjiang showed that around one in every 25 people had been imprisoned on terrorism-related charges.
Human Rights Watch says many detainees were not charged with clear legal offences. Some were even sentenced without formal trials. Although most “re-education” camps have been closed, the wider detention system remains largely active.
Using satellite imagery, government documents, local media reports, and eyewitness testimony, the Financial Times assessed the total area of 579 detention compounds in Xinjiang and tracked whether they had expanded, closed, or remained operational from 2011 to the present.
The analysis concluded that the region currently has the capacity to detain around 627,000 people without overcrowding, equivalent to one in every 40 local residents. This makes it the largest detention system in the world relative to population.
To assess whether these facilities remain operational, the Financial Times examined indicators of ongoing activity, including vehicle movement and night-time light emissions. Witness testimony and local reporting also helped determine whether facilities had been closed or remained active.
Human rights researchers believe many of these facilities remain filled with detainees. Figures compiled by the Uyghur Human Rights Project from official data show that more than 578,000 people were prosecuted in Xinjiang between 2017 and 2022.
Given that China’s court conviction rate exceeds 99.9 per cent, alongside the harsh and long sentences handed down during the crackdown, researchers believe most of those sentenced are likely still behind bars.
These figures suggest that if Xinjiang were an independent country, it would have the highest incarceration rate in the world, at 1,944 prisoners per 100,000 people. By comparison, the overall rate across China is 119 prisoners per 100,000 people, according to the World Prison Brief.
Irwin, of the Uyghur Human Rights Project, said: “The camps received most of the international focus, but the formal prisons were always the backbone of the detention system.”
China tightly restricts journalism and media coverage inside Xinjiang. Journalists report systematic harassment or detention by security personnel, while Uyghurs abroad say they have lost contact with relatives due to communications surveillance and because contacting the outside world is itself treated as a suspicious act that may trigger punishment.
As a result, most reporting on the region relies on satellite imagery analysis, leaked documents, and testimonies from exiles or people who have recently left the region.
Accounts from former officials and residents living abroad indicate that detentions continue, though at lower levels than during the peak of the campaign in 2017 and 2018.
Former police officer Chang Yapu, who served in Xinjiang from 2014 to 2023, told the Financial Times that security officials in the region were ordered to implement a quota-based system of “short-term preventive detention”. Under this system, people are taken to local centres for days or weeks at a time.
Zenz, who analysed Chang’s testimony, said the account shows that Beijing is “recalibrating the system of repression” by using temporary detention as a preventive mechanism.
In interviews with the Financial Times, Uyghur citizens said large sections of their families had been affected by detention. Nur Ali Abliz, a former telecommunications worker in the region, estimated that around 70 per cent of his extended family remains under restriction or prosecution.
Chang, the former police officer, said police justifications for detention include possession of materials classified as “sensitive” inside homes, such as maps or even certain personal fitness equipment.
Exiled activists continue to receive reports of former neighbours disappearing at night after religious items were found in their homes, or simply because they fasted during Ramadan. Others have faced arrest immediately after returning from travel abroad.
Human rights monitors say authorities continue to detain people using the same arbitrary pretexts that have been used since the campaign began more than a decade ago.
Asat was among them. He was sentenced to 15 years in prison and remains detained in Aksu. His family only discovered his whereabouts four years after his disappearance, after his sister Rayhan, asked US lawmakers to send an official letter to the Chinese embassy in Washington.
Speaking of her parents, Rayhan said, “Every time they return from visiting him in Aksu, it takes them many long weeks to recover.”
China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs denied the existence of any unlawful detention system or short-term detention system in Xinjiang. It claimed that “vocational education and training centres” were introduced for a limited period to counter terrorism and religious extremism, adding that “China is a country governed by the rule of law.”
However, the ministry did not respond to questions about the existing prison and detention centre network or its scale.
Education and Boarding Schools
The campaign to absorb Uyghurs into the dominant culture of China’s Han majority is increasingly focused on reshaping an entire generation. It especially targets children who are separated from their families through Xinjiang’s extensive boarding school system.
Boarding schools have long existed in the region, with authorities usually justifying them as a way to provide education in remote rural areas. However, official documents also describe them as a tool to teach children Mandarin Chinese and to “[block] the influence of the family’s religious atmosphere”.
Zenz’s research shows that this system has expanded rapidly since 2018. Government documents issued in 2021 and 2022 called for boarding education to be expanded to include preschool-aged children under the slogan “enrol all who should be enrolled”.
Researchers estimate that by 2024, around 90 per cent of children in one southern Xinjiang county will be enrolled in boarding schools.
Uyghur activists argue that isolating children from their families and communities creates a deep “generational gap” that threatens to erode children’s understanding of their original language and culture.
Lessons are taught entirely in Mandarin, and families say children are forbidden from speaking Uyghur.
Abduweli Ayup, a Uyghur linguist and activist, said: “Young children lose their language skills extremely quickly.”
He cited the case of one family in which siblings learned different Chinese dialects from their teachers. He said: “Now, the children cannot communicate with each other.”
At the same time, Uyghur child population growth has declined compared with previous levels. Activists attribute this to the legacy of a programme that targeted 80 per cent of women of childbearing age for sterilisation by 2019.
As a result, birth rates in Xinjiang dropped sharply, according to Zenz, who described the policy as an “organised and systematic atrocity”.
China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs rejected these accusations as “entirely false”. It claimed that the Uyghur population growth rate was higher not only than that of other ethnic minorities combined, but also higher than that of the local Han population.
It added that boarding schools in Xinjiang operate on an entirely voluntary basis and are designed to help children from remote pastoral areas receive education.
The pressures aimed at cultural integration do not stop in childhood. They extend into adulthood, with Uyghur students in Chinese universities subjected to strict surveillance, according to a former university employee who provided new details about the levels of monitoring imposed on students and staff alike.
At the university where he worked, one Uyghur supervisor was assigned to every 50 Uyghur students. The supervisors’ role was to monitor students around the clock. Official university documents justified this as a way to prevent “extremism” and ensure that students adopted the “correct political orientation”.
Supervisors searched student dormitories for Uyghur-language books and tracked students’ movements through personal identification cards.
The former employee said Uyghur students were prohibited from gathering in groups, their access to foreign media was tightly restricted, and speaking Uyghur was suppressed through various means.
If a supervisor lost contact with any student, they were required to immediately inform the counterterrorism police. These details are supported by official university documents outlining supervisors’ responsibilities.
Religious practice was also restricted. During Ramadan, supervisors monitored whether Muslim students were fasting by checking electronic payment records in university restaurants and cafeterias.
One teacher was ordered to eat daily meals with a student suspected of religious inclination, photograph every meal, and send the images to university administration.
The supervisors themselves were not spared scrutiny. Police questioned Uyghur staff weekly about their work, personal lives, and political views. Unmarried female staff members were even questioned about why they were not married or dating Han men.
Even attempts to help financially struggling students were treated with suspicion. Many students were living in extreme poverty because their family breadwinners had been detained.
The former employee recalled that one supervisor who gave financial assistance to students was taken away for police questioning and told: “You are showing excessive loyalty to your own people.”
Looking back on that period, the employee said: “The psychological pressure was unbearable.”
Years of systematic repression have radically changed the details of daily life for Uyghurs, according to researchers and recent departures from Xinjiang.
People now avoid religious phrases that were once common in daily conversations and monitor their language and behaviour with extreme caution, fearing that small mistakes may be interpreted as punishable crimes.
One woman living abroad said Uyghurs inside the region now correct the cultural and religious phrases used by relatives overseas during phone calls out of fear of surveillance.
Ron Steinberg, an anthropologist specialising in the region, said: “Because of the extreme violence they experienced in the camps, Uyghurs today are far more terrified of crossing any red lines, or failing to comply with rules, regulations, and even government recommendations.”
Electronic surveillance has also become more advanced and complex, according to Abliz, the former telecommunications worker who helped build police monitoring infrastructure in Xinjiang.
He explained that advances in AI-powered translation tools and the development of mobile phone monitoring software mean that almost no communications now escape surveillance.
Steinberg added: “Surveillance relies on the philosophy of the panopticon, where a person feels they may be watched at any moment.”
China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said it uses modern surveillance technologies to combat crime, provide services, and “enhance social governance”, as any other country does. It insisted that “this measure does not in any way target a specific ethnic group”.
Forced Employment Programmes
Forced labour practices, which prompted the United States to sanction dozens of Chinese companies and ban imports of their products, continue under a new cover, with more industrial sectors involved and increasing numbers of Uyghur workers transferred to other parts of China.
In recent years, thousands of Uyghurs have been moved hundreds or thousands of miles under state-organised employment schemes that Beijing claims are designed to reduce “extreme poverty” in southern Xinjiang.
During a visit to the region in August 2023, President Xi Jinping instructed authorities to guide Xinjiang residents towards jobs in other Chinese provinces.
Government programmes linking China’s wealthy eastern provinces with counties in Xinjiang help drive these flows by supplying companies with labour and providing financial subsidies to participating businesses.
In 2022, Shenzhen offered one-off subsidies of 5,000 yuan, roughly equivalent to a month’s salary, to employers who hired workers from Xinjiang. Another city in Guangdong province offered annual transport subsidies of 1,000 yuan per worker from the region in 2025.
While poverty alleviation programmes have helped increase incomes in other parts of China, United Nations experts warned in January that these programmes may amount to forced labour and may be used as a tool for the “re-engineering of cultural coercion” targeting Uyghur identity.
Many of these workers are closely monitored. Mandarin lessons and political ideological training are central and recurring elements of these programmes.
Official documents reveal a procedure requiring Communist Party cadres to be appointed inside companies that employ workers from Xinjiang. Their role is to supervise and monitor.
The former university employee said Uyghur workers living in an eastern Chinese city were required to regularly report to the police, provide precise details of their movements, and have periodic photographs taken.
As a result of these strict measures, many Uyghurs lost their jobs because employers found the constant police visits alarming and disruptive for other staff.
The same source added that a Uyghur worker who loses their job automatically loses the right to remain in other Chinese provinces and is immediately handed over to Xinjiang police to decide their fate.
This creates widespread fear among many workers that they may be sent to mass detention facilities.
The former university employee said he knew of a case in which a man expressed frustration during a police meeting and was immediately deported from eastern China to Xinjiang, where he began serving a nine-year prison sentence.
The labour transfer programme is also expanding sharply. Between 2017 and 2019, Xinjiang sent around 25,000 workers annually to other parts of the country. By 2024, Kashgar prefecture alone had transferred more than 20,000 people into state-imposed jobs, either inside Xinjiang or in other Chinese regions.
Zenz said the total number transferred reached three million, the vast majority from deep inside the Uyghur homeland in southern Xinjiang.
Researchers and human rights groups view these systematic transfers as part of a wider plan to re-engineer Uyghur society.
Uluyol of Human Rights Watch said the core objective is to “isolate Uyghurs from their heritage, traditional way of life, and families, and politically indoctrinate them to adopt Han Chinese culture”.
Experts broadly agree that the labour transfer programme, alongside birth control policies and encouragement of Han settlement in the region, forms part of the state’s effort to “optimise the demographic structure” of the population, particularly in southern Xinjiang.
The scale of the programme, combined with China’s central role in global industrial supply chains, places multinational companies at growing risk of importing or purchasing goods linked to forcibly transferred Uyghur labour.
Daniel Murphy, of supply chain analysis firm Pamir, said: “It is no longer simply about whether goods originate from Xinjiang or not. It is now about whether factories in other parts of China receive ethnic minority workers under state-run labour transfer programmes.”
According to research by Laura Murphy, an academic at Sheffield Hallam University commissioned by the Centre for Strategic and International Studies to prepare a report on forced labour in Xinjiang, the affected sectors include clothing, automotive parts, critical minerals, and solar energy.
Daniel Murphy added: “The electronics and electrical appliances sectors top this list, and that is highly significant because their outputs enter many industries, from consumer electronics and household appliances to industrial infrastructure, trains, and cars.”
Despite this, for some young Uyghurs, these schemes represent one of the few available ways to escape the poverty and climate of fear that dominate Xinjiang.
Anthropologist Ron Steinberg said, “There is a massive unemployment crisis affecting Uyghurs from all social classes.”
He quoted people who recently left China as saying, “Because of our ethnic background, we simply cannot get the jobs we would normally be qualified for. There is intense suspicion around us, making it almost impossible to remain and settle.”
China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs reiterated that the purpose of the programme is to raise incomes and eliminate extreme poverty. It stressed that “Xinjiang has never forced anyone to move for work” and added that forced labour is completely prohibited under Chinese law.
Erasing Cultural Landmarks
Over the past decade, the face of southern Xinjiang has changed entirely.
Zenz argues that the absence of working-age adults due to detention and labour transfers has emptied villages across the region, leaving behind only the elderly, the sick, and young children.
With strict controls imposed on the flow of information from Xinjiang, new details continue to emerge about the mechanisms authorities use to erase Uyghur culture.
Anthropologist Ron Steinberg said there used to be around 10 different publishing houses producing Uyghur-language books, but they have now disappeared completely.
He said those works were “removed from commercial bookstores, confiscated from people’s homes, and taken out of public libraries in massive piles”.
Ayup added that even the books held by Xinjiang University, which was known for containing one of the largest collections of Uyghur-language works and manuscripts, were not spared destruction.
He said they were disposed of by being fed into wood-chipping machines over the course of an entire month in early 2018.
Steinberg said: “They are very good at hiding these practices.”
He explained that the Uyghur-language books that remain today are mostly translated Chinese works and fall within the framework of state-directed political propaganda.
He added that the same methods are used to erase identity in other cultural fields: “There are still Uyghur-language television dramas, but if you look at their content, they are simply Chinese comedies dubbed or translated into Uyghur.”
This year, authorities also began removing Uyghur letters and inscriptions from public places and facilities, according to Ayup, although they are sometimes retained in tourist areas and attractions.
Mosques also remain under strict surveillance, according to the former university employee.
He described how authorities ordered residents to attend prayers simply so photographs and videos could be taken as documentation.
He added that mosque administrators, including someone he knew personally, would go door to door collecting signatures to falsify attendance records and present them to officials as proof that there was no religious persecution in the region.
China categorically denies seeking to “erase” the Uyghur language, culture, or religious practices, and insists they are cared for, protected, and promoted across Xinjiang.
However, Beijing’s official rhetoric focuses on strengthening what it calls “ethnic unity”. A new law reduces the status of other languages in favour of Mandarin, encourages interethnic marriage, and requires parents to raise their children to “love the Chinese Communist Party”.
A Uyghur man who recently visited the region from the United States described what he saw by saying: “Everything that once reflected the details of Uyghur civilisation, our confidence, our culture, and our language, has been completely erased.”
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