As he strolled along the street in the Chinese city of Urumqi, trying his best to look like a tourist, Guan Guan’s heart was in his mouth.
He knew this was not a place often visited by holidaymakers – and a camera hidden on his backpack was secretly filming the Communist regime’s internment camps.
The brave young man was on a covert mission: to expose to the world the hideous network of re-education camps, detention centres and prisons at the centre of Beijing’s brutal clampdown on Muslim minorities, especially the Uighurs, in Xinjiang province.
He knew that if caught by police, he would face terrible punishment for daring to reveal fresh evidence about the regime’s genocidal atrocities – which include holding an estimated two million people in such horrifying centres.
Guan had cycled around the region two years ago and heard about the camps, along with the banning of Uighur language in schools and use of slave labour.
After discovering foreign journalists were barred from carrying out investigations, he decided to return to document the repression.
Guan visited eight cities and discovered 18 camps during his high-risk trip – including one massive detention centre about 1,000 yards long and emblazoned with sinister Orwellian slogans such as ‘Reform Through Labour’.
Many were unmarked on maps. But he filmed the barbed wire, guard towers, police checkpoints, army barracks, military vehicles, even signs and walkways inside prison walls.
Now, he has shared the remarkable footage that challenges China’s lies in a 19-minute video posted on YouTube.
‘This shows how Xinjiang has become the world’s biggest gulag, with an economy based largely on forced labour in a network of mega prisons, detention centres and concentration camps under a regime that relies on terror,’ said Lianchao Han, a leading dissident.
‘This adds to solid and increasing evidence of China’s atrocities.’
