For years Beijing has insisted that Xinjiang's mass internment camps were a temporary counter-terrorism measure, now concluded, with happy Uyghurs living ordinary lives under a benevolent government. That story has now been shattered from the inside. Zhang Yabo is a Han Chinese man — not a Uyghur, not a dissident, not a foreign critic — who spent nearly a decade as a police officer in Xinjiang's Hotan region and resigned in late 2023, fleeing China with documentation of what he witnessed. His testimony, verified by Foreign Policy and the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, is the most detailed insider account ever obtained from within the Chinese security apparatus. Between 2014 and 2016, working as a detention center correctional officer, Zhang witnessed Uyghur detainees routinely beaten and tortured, including being suspended from ceilings for 24 hours straight. A colleague raped a female detainee during an interrogation. Zhang saw detainees die from the abuse. At the height of the mass internment campaign in 2017, he worked a two-week stint at a detention center where fatalities occurred with alarming frequency amid severe overcrowding and what he described as abysmal conditions. He estimates that roughly 25% of the adult population in his village was interned in reeducation camps — not counting those separately transferred to formal prisons. In early 2020, he personally received and carried out orders to destroy every file related to the reeducation camps. When a new regional party secretary took over in late 2021 and the most visible camps were wound down, the world assumed the worst was over. Zhang's testimony confirms it wasn't. Beijing simply recalibrated. The new system runs on short-term rotating detentions — up to 15 days, designed to instill fear without triggering international attention — triggered by infractions as minor as missing a weekly flag-raising ceremony, owning dumbbells, or refusing unpaid communal labor. Uyghurs who resist state-mandated labor transfers are summoned to village committee meetings that run until 2 or 3 in the morning, then detained if they still refuse. Reading the Quran, praying at home, and fasting during Ramadan are strictly forbidden. The state compels Uyghur government employees to eat pork as a loyalty test. Most mosques in Zhang's area of deployment have been demolished; one remaining mosque is guarded around the clock to keep villagers out. Children are forbidden from learning or speaking the Uyghur language in school. As working-age adults are continuously extracted into forced labor transfers — which hit a record 3.4 million instances in 2025 — villages have emptied out so severely that unsupervised children have drowned in nearby bodies of water, prompting local officials to issue warnings about children playing near water. Since Zhang fled, the Chinese government has frozen his bank accounts and threatened his family still in China.
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| Former Hotan police officer Zhang Yabo pictured standing in front of a local prison and during police training in an undisclosed location in Xinjiang province, China, in 2015. Photos provided by Zhang Yabo |
Commentary: Beijing's masterstroke was understanding that the world has a short attention span. Close the most photogenic camps, swap the barbed wire for bureaucracy, and the international community will move on. Zhang Yabo didn't move on. He watched colleagues rape detainees, watched people die in overcrowded cells, watched an entire civilization get systematically erased one mosque demolition and one forbidden prayer at a time — and then he left and told the world exactly what he saw. Beijing's response was to freeze his bank accounts and go after his family. That tells you everything you need to know about who's lying.
📰 https://foreignpolicy.com/2026/04/16/china-xinjiang-uyghur-camps-repression/
⚠️ This content was researched and written with AI assistance and may be fully AI-generated. All facts are sourced from the linked Foreign Policy investigation by Adrian Zenz, Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, and corroborating HRW World Report 2026.
