Leaked Chinese police data is giving Uyghurs answers about missing family members

For years, this dystopian system of governance has been a reality in China’s far western Xinjiang region, where authorities have built a vast surveillance apparatus designed to detain, monitor and silence its population of Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities.

Now, the scale of that system is being exposed as a major leak of Chinese police documents enters a new phase.

The giant cache of files has been made accessible to the public by a new online search tool that enables people to discover what details the Chinese state has about their loved ones in Xinjiang, according to a report published by the CNN.

A smaller subset of this data — known as the Xinjiang Police Files — was published last May. Further examination of the files then revealed their full extent, uncovering approximately 830,000 individuals across 11,477 documents and thousands of photographs.

The police files were hacked and leaked by an anonymous individual, then obtained by Adrian Zenz, a director of China Studies at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, a US-based non-profit.

Zenz and his team spent months developing the search tool, which they hope will empower the Uyghur diaspora with concrete information about their relatives, after years of separation and silence.

The new website represents the largest data set ever made publicly available on Xinjiang. It allows people to search for hundreds of thousands of individuals in the raw files, using their Chinese ID card numbers.

The US government and UN estimated that up to two million Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities were detained in a giant network of internment camps, described by the Chinese government as “vocational training centers” designed to combat extremism.