A journalist team travelled to Xinjiang posing as tourists and filmed in secret. They say surveillance is very tight. There are checkpoints, face and body scans, and about 100,000 new police officers were hired in the region in 2016 and 2017.

The report says China has detained over 1 million people, mostly Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities, in facilities the government calls “vocational training” or “re-education.” The government says these centers fight extremism. The US Defense Department has called them concentration camps.

The team also reports on children. They say they found a video from social media that showed a school-like building, then tracked similar buildings to kindergartens in Hotan prefecture. Local government records showed the number of kindergartens more than doubled in 2017. A former detainee’s husband is serving a ten-year sentence, and she has lost contact with five of her children.

Conclusion from the reporters: the evidence points to a large social engineering program meant to cut Uyghur ties to their culture, religion, and families