The Xinjiang regional government in China’s far west is deleting data, destroying documents, tightening controls on information and holding high-level meetings in response to leaks of classified papers on its mass detention camps for Uighurs and other predominantly Muslim minorities, four people in contact with local government employees said.
Top officials are deliberating how to respond to the leaks in meetings at the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) regional headquarters in Urumqi, Xinjiang’s capital, said some of the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of fears of retribution against themselves, family members and the government workers.
The meetings began days after the New York Times last month published a cache of internal speeches on Xinjiang by top leaders, including Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平).
Photo: AFP
They continued after the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists worked with news organizations worldwide to publish secret guidelines for operating the detention centers and instructions on how to use technology to target people.
In the past few years Beijing has detained at least 1 million Uighurs and other minorities in the camps.
Xinjiang officials and the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs have not directly denied the authenticity of the documents, although Xu Hairong (徐海榮), CCP secretary for Urumqi, called reports on the leaks “malicious smears and distortions.”
The Xinjiang government did not respond to a fax for comment on the arrests, the tightened restrictions on information and other measures responding to the leaks.
The ministry did not have an immediate comment.
Xinjiang’s government had already mandated stricter controls on information in October, before the news reports, said three of the people, all Uighurs outside of Xinjiang.
They include orders for community officials to burn paper forms containing sensitive personal details on residents in their area, such as their detention status, and for various state offices to throw away computers, tighten management of classified information and ensure that all information related to the camps is now stored on databases disconnected from the Internet in special, restricted-access rooms to bar hackers, the Uighurs said.
“They became much more serious about the transfer of information,” one said.
Publication of the classified documents prompted the central government in Beijing to put more pressure on Xinjiang officials, several of the Uighurs said.
Restrictions on information appear to be tightening further.
Some university teachers and district-level workers in Urumqi have been ordered to clean out sensitive data on their computers, cellphones and cloud storage, and to delete work-related social media groups, said one Uighur with direct knowledge of the situation.
In other cases, the state appears to be confiscating evidence of detentions.
Another Uighur who had been detained in Xinjiang years before said that his ex-wife called him two weeks ago and begged him to send his release papers to her, saying that eight officers had come to her home to search for them, then threatened her with life in jail if she could not produce them.
Some government workers have been rounded up as the state investigates the source of the leaks. In one case, an entire family in civil service was arrested.
Abduweli Ayup, a Uighur linguist in exile, said that his wife’s relatives in Xinjiang — including her parents, siblings and in-laws — were detained shortly after the leaks were published, although they had no relation to the leaks as far as he was aware.
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