Leaked papers link Xinjiang crackdown with China leadership

In the documents, the highest levels of the Chinese Communist party (CCP) leadership call for Uyghur re-education and relocation to rectify an imbalance in the Uyghur and Han population in Xinjiang.

Zenz said the top secret and confidential documents are significant because they show multiple links between the demands of the Chinese leadership of 2014 and what subsequently happened in Xinjiang, including mass internment in re-education camps, coercive labour transfers and optimising the ethnic population by increasing Han population shares.

Instead transcripts from some of the documents, lengthy quotations, summary and analysis have been published. The transcripts were peer reviewed by Dr James Millward, professor of inter-societal history at Georgetown University Washington and Dr David Tobin lecturer in east Asian studies at the University of Sheffield. Some have been redacted to remove reception stamps. The leak covers 11 documents and 300 unique pages. They range from April 2014 to May 2018.

Zenz said some of the documents were drawn upon by the New York Times in a report in 2019, but that the leak also comprises previously unseen information.

The fresh leak was first mentioned at a special session of the UK-based tribunal on Saturday.