A new Chinese Communist Party document revealed details about the scope and size of labor and reeducation camps for Uighur Muslims in the Xinjiang region, The Guardian reported Friday.
The CCP document called such facilities "vocational training centers" and strived to explain the positive benefits they have had on their occupants. "Through its proactive labor and employment policies, Xinjiang has continuously improved the people’s material and cultural lives, and guaranteed and developed their human rights in every field," the document reads.
Figures detailed by the report give a baseline sense of the scale of the program. According to the document, the labor camps in Xinjiang host on average 1.29 million workers every year.
While China maintains no wrongdoing occurs in these labor programs, detailed reporting in the media and public statements from the current administration draw a different conclusion. As part and parcel of China's efforts to control demographics and maintain cultural homogeneity in China, Beijing has imposed severe measures on the Uighur population.
Some of these measures run afoul of American and international commitments to human rights and religious liberty. Uighurs are regularly forced to renounce their faith, frequently are subject to late-term abortion and even infanticide, and are likely victims of the largest violation of human-rights abuses on an ethnic minority since World War II, National Security Council spokesman John Ullyot told the Washington Free Beacon.
Uighurs themselves have not stayed silent on the brutal conditions the CCP has subjected them to. Earlier this month, two Uighur advocacy organizations accused Beijing of genocide and crimes against humanity under international law.
The Trump administration is aware of the ongoing calamity in Xinjiang and has taken significant steps to obstruct the genocide. In August, a senior administration official detailed to the Free Beacon 13 different measures the current White House has taken to limit China's economic and political capacity to operate the concentration camps.
This week, Washington doubled down on this pressure through new sanctions on five enterprises using Uighur labor to produce their products. According to acting deputy secretary of Homeland Security Ken Cuccinelli, the new order will cost China as much as $250 million.
"This order is intended to disrupt trade," Cuccinelli told the Free Beacon. "The president strongly believes the American people are more than supportive of absorbing those sorts of disruptions in exchange for being able to interrupt the use of slave labor."