China cables

The China Cables are a set of classified Chinese government documents leaked to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and published in November 2019. They consist of an operations manual ("telegram") issued by Zhu Hailun, then deputy-secretary of the Xinjiang Communist Party, and four intelligence bulletins. Together they offer one of the most detailed internal accounts of how the Xinjiang internment system for Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims is run.

Key contents include:

• Explicit instructions to operate the camps as prisons with strict secrecy, including double-locked doors, video surveillance with no blind spots, and prevention of escapes.
• A points-based behavior scoring system governing detainees' ideological transformation, Mandarin study, and discipline, which determines length of detention.
• Guidance that detainees must serve at least one year before being assessed for release.
• Use of the Integrated Joint Operations Platform (IJOP), a predictive-policing data system, to flag individuals for investigation, including those who had simply travelled abroad or used certain apps.
• One bulletin recorded that 15,683 "suspicious" people from southern Xinjiang were sent to "education and training" in a single week in June 2017.

The leak followed the earlier New York Times publication (16 November 2019) of the separate "Xinjiang Papers." Beijing dismissed the China Cables as "fabrication," while researchers including Adrian Zenz and James Leibold authenticated the documents.

The cables have been cited in policy debates leading to sanctions under the US Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act (2020) and Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (2021), EU Global Human Rights Sanctions Regime designations in March 2021, and the UN OHCHR Xinjiang assessment released 31 August 2022, which found possible crimes against humanity. For MUN and research purposes the China Cables are typically treated as primary-source evidence of state policy rather than mere allegations.