Baloch House

Pierre Crom—Getty Images Supporters of the People’s Republic of China with flags attempt to block an activist from Amnesty International holding a protest board reading ‘China: Up to 1 million people detained in camps in Xinjiang,’ in The Hague, Netherlands, October 16, 2018. An Explainer by Jessica Batke January 8, 2019 As journalists and scholars have reported in recent months on the campaign of religious and cultural repression and incarceration taking place in the Chinese region of Xinjiang, a central question has emerged: How many people has China’s government detained as part of the campaign? In the absence of officially reported numbers or other hard evidence, researchers of various stripes have converged on the figure of one million as a common estimate of the people the Chinese government is detaining in Xinjiang’s camps. But where does this figure come from, and how is it formulated? An August 2018 United Nations session appears to have first popularized the number. At

SupChina.com The Wall Street Journal has a  bombshell story  (paywall) about China’s overseas influence, based on recently uncovered meeting minutes of the previous Malaysian government led by Najib Razak, and interviews with “people in position to know the events, among them a former official of Mr. Najib’s government.” The documents reportedly show  that “Chinese officials told visiting Malaysians that China would use its influence to try to get the U.S. and other countries to drop their probes of allegations that allies of then-Prime Minister Najib Razak and others plundered the fund known as 1MDB.” This included surveilling WSJ reporters in Hong Kong  who had been investigating 1MDB, the Journal reports, including by “full scale residence/office/device tapping, computer/phone/web data retrieval, and full operational surveillance.” But that’s not all: Chinese-funded infrastructure  projects were reportedly planned in Malaysia at “above market profitability,” with the excess fu