https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/meghara/inside-xinjiang-detention-camp
This massive detention center, the size of 13 football fields, is a cog in the largest-scale detention of ethnic and religious minorities in the world since World War II, in which 1 million or more Muslims, including Uighurs, Kazakhs, and others, have been rounded up and detained in China’s western region of Xinjiang. Publicly, China has claimed that Muslim detainees have been freed. Yet an ongoing BuzzFeed News investigation, based on dozens of interviews with survivors and thousands of satellite images, has exposed how China has built a vast and permanent infrastructure for mass detention in Xinjiang, marking a radical shift away from the government’s makeshift use of preexisting public buildings at the beginning of the campaign. Using the same techniques that revealed the scale of China’s expanding network of detention centers, BuzzFeed News can now expose the inner workings of one such compound. The Mongolküre facility is one of at least 260 newly built sites bearing the hallmarks of long-term detention centers capable of holding hundreds of thousands of people in total servitude to the state.
Until now, relatively little has been known about what happens inside these forbidding compounds. Rarer still have been details about any single detention center. One reason is terror: The overwhelming majority of camp survivors still live in Xinjiang under constant surveillance and the threat of incarceration, as do their families and the wider Muslim population in the region. Many of those detained who have been able to speak out simply don't remember where they were held, having been taken from home with hoods around their heads and shuttled from camp to camp.
BuzzFeed News initially learned of the Mongolküre site thanks to three former detainees who have fled the country and have spoken about the conditions inside despite the risk to themselves and their families. That testimony, combined with an architectural analysis of satellite photos dating back to 2006, allowed BuzzFeed News to digitally reconstruct the prison to understand its purpose and scope.