Pierre Crom—Getty ImagesSupporters 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 Explainerby Jessica Batke January 8, 2019As 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 the session…
An Explainerby Jessica Batke January 8, 2019As 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 the session…