‘Absolutely No Mercy’: Leaked Files Expose How China Organized Mass Detentions of Muslims (NY Times)

More than 400 pages of internal Chinese documents provide an  unprecedented inside look at the crackdown on ethnic minorities in the  Xinjiang region.

The students booked their tickets home at the end of the semester, hoping for a relaxing break after exams and a summer of happy reunions with family in China’s far west.

Instead, they would soon be told that their parents were gone, relatives had vanished and neighbors were missing — all of them locked up in an expanding network of detention camps built to hold Muslim ethnic minorities.

The authorities in the Xinjiang region worried the situation was a powder keg. And so they prepared.

The leadership distributed a classified directive advising local officials to corner returning students as soon as they arrived and keep them quiet. It included a chillingly bureaucratic guide for how to handle their anguished questions, beginning with the most obvious: Where is my family?

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/11/16/world/asia/china-xinjiang-documents.html