Pre-trial detention centers are one of the most notorious forms of detention, both in China at large and in Xinjiang particularly. Nominally intended for holding criminal suspects prior to their sentencing and transfer to prison, they have been the source of countless reports of torture, police brutality, and general mistreatment, and it is from these facilities that some of the worst testimonies of detention in Xinjiang have frequently originated. With between 100 and 200 active in the region – many of them new or newly expanded – they are also believed to be the most common form of detention, with many camp inmates and essentially all court-sentenced prisoners having been held in one prior to transfer.
In this first part of a five-part series, we look at the role that pre-trial detention centers play in Xinjiang specifically and how they’ve interacted with other detention forms.
The pre-trial detention center (看守所) in itself is nothing special or unique to Xinjiang, let alone China. Intended for holding criminal suspects in custody following their detention by the police and throughout the length of the criminal-litigation process, they are analogous to such institutions as the American jail, the British remand centre, or the Soviet SIZO (СИЗО).
As in many countries, an alleged criminal offender often remains in the detention center throughout the length of the criminal-litigation proceedings, though those in very poor health, those who are very old, and mothers who are breastfeeding can often be released on bail pending investigation (取保候审). Release on bail for others, even those held for non-violent “offenses”, tends to be a rare exception, which in Xinjiang frequently leads to such stark contrasts as a soft-spoken and generally law-abiding person detained for praying being cellmates with previously convicted murderers, thieves, and drug traffickers.
Going by the Criminal Procedure Law, the litigation process in China typically looks as follows:
- The person is criminally detained (刑事拘留), being taken to a pre-trial detention center within 24 hours.
- The police initially have 3 days to submit a request for formal arrest (逮捕) to the local procuratorate (检察院). They may apply for an extension, with a maximum limit of 30 days.
- The procuratorate has up to 7 days to approve or not approve the arrest. (The person is released immediately if approval is not given, though sometimes to residential surveillance or on bail, if investigation is still warranted.)
- Eventually, usually within weeks or months, the police submit an indictment opinion (起诉意见书) to the procuratorate, with the recommendation to indict.
- The procuratorate may reject and send the case materials back, if deemed insufficient, usually prompting additional investigation, amendments, and resubmission from the police.
- After the procuratorate accepts, it decides on the charges, drafts an indictment (起诉书), and proposes a sentence, sending it to the local court (法院).
- As in the previous step, the court may reject, prompting revisions and resubmission from the procuratorate.
- The court may first hold a pre-trial evidence exchange (庭前交换证据) session, and then, some time later, the main (first-instance, 一审) hearing to sentence the person.
- The person may appeal (上诉) within 10 days, with the appeal (second-instance, 二审) hearing usually concluded within a few months.
- Some time after the sentence, usually a few months at most, the person leaves the pre-trial detention center and is transferred to prison (监狱) to serve their term.
Regarding terminology: Because the majority of the time at the detention center is indeed “pre-trial”, we will maintain “pre-trial detention center” as the translation of 看守所 throughout this series and the general Xinjiang Victims Database documentation. Other variants, such as “criminal-detention center”, may be more inclusive however, as they account for the inmate frequently remaining at the center for months after trial, in addition to including the particular cases where (a) less than 3 months are left on the sentence at the time of sentencing, or (b) the person is sentenced to death. No transfer to prison takes place in either of these two scenarios, with the detention center essentially serving as both a prison and death row, respectively.
While the standard criminal-detention procedure has also been employed in Xinjiang, the large-scale advent and use of camps between 2017 and 2019 gave the pre-trial detention centers there additional functions. Notably, instead of just being a precursor to formal prison, the detention center was often a temporary holding facility for those inmates who would later be transferred to camp. As per the latest data, the Xinjiang Victims Database has documented 547
cases of people being held in prolonged police custody (typically a pre-trial detention center) prior to camp transfer, with an average holding period of 66.79 days
reported for those cases where this information is available.
In the absence of specific directives, there are two probable explanations for why detention centers – typically intended for criminal suspects to be sentenced – would hold detainees before sending them to camp.
The first, blunt and unlikely to ever be official, could be the lack of camp space. Most of the earlier camps that have been documented were makeshift facilities converted from various government structures, such as schools, hospitals, housing complexes, and administrative buildings. In many counties, it was not until 2018 that dedicated camp facilities with large holding capacities were finished. It is therefore possible that some of the camp detainees who were taken in 2017 were initially held in pre-trial detention centers simply because there wasn’t anywhere else to put them.
A more involved explanation is that the detention centers served as de facto “sorting stations” between criminal and camp detention. Given how the numbers of documented individuals sentenced to prison have generally been comparable to those sent to camp (see “detention rates”), and given how so many of the detentions were driven by the predictive IJOP system and its often abstract tags, it would make sense that – in a significant number of cases – the police themselves didn’t know where a given detainee would ultimately end up (sent to “study” at camp, or sentenced to a long prison term). In its white paper on detention in Xinjiang, the Chinese government has essentially described this mechanism at work, drawing a line between criminal offenses, which are subject to prosecution, and “unlawful” ones, where the public security and procuratorate bodies decide not to pursue judicial action against the individual, sending them to “education” instead. While the white paper does not mention where a person is to be while this decision regarding “criminal vs. unlawful” is being made, the pre-trial detention center appears to be the natural choice given the non-absence of criminal suspicion, and limited empirical evidence suggests this also. Consulting a detailed list of pre-trial detention center detainees from Ili Prefecture in 2017 (sourced from the hacked cache of Xinjiang police files), one finds 48 individuals who were taken out of the pre-trial detention center because of the decision “not to prosecute” (不予起诉). 37 of them, however, were then sent to the local “rectification center” (矫治中心), “vocational skills education and training center” (职业技能教育培训中心), or “transformation through education” (教育转化) – all euphemisms for camp.
A nuanced irony of holding someone in pre-trial detention while deciding their “potential threat to society” is that it often triggered a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy, where the very fact of detention then turned the person into a “threat” and served as reason for more detention. While absurd from the point of view of justice, the mechanism is logical in a closed and repressive system where political opposition or discontent are readily criminalized: even if someone were held in a detention center but found innocent, the experience had not only already made them privy to the detention centers’ inner workings (potential “state secrets”) but would also increase the likelihood of them harboring negative views of the authorities, possibly leading to open criticism, petitioning to higher authorities for compensation, or, in extreme cases, violent reprisal. From the logic of “stability maintenance”, it is thus safer and better to keep them detained in “education”.
Empirical evidence suggests that such self-perpetuating detention was both a common occurrence and a feature of the system, with those held in detention centers routinely targeted for further detention. Specifically:
- In the “Aksu List“, a leaked document of over 2000 individuals sent to camp by IJOP, 10 are specified as being sent there for being “pre-trial detention center individuals” (看守所人员) or having been held in pre-trial detention.
- Similarly, IJOP instructions previously posted online define the “dig, reduce, shovel” (挖减铲) IJOP tag as pertaining to individuals with some connection to pre-trial detention centers or “terrorism” and who could pose a “threat to society”. (To date,
3982
victims who were tagged this way and detained have been documented – although, given the high frequency of the tag, it’s unlikely that all were previously in detention.) - Police reports from Urumqi note several instances where specific individuals were sent to camp for having been criminally detained in the past.
- More generally, there are
130
documented victims who were held in camp and for whom a previous detention was attributed as a detention reason.
While less frequent among documented cases, the flow in the opposite direction – from “unlawful” to “criminal”, where those already in camp were transferred to pre-trial detention – has also been observed. In some instances, it appears that camp was only a place of temporary detention while police prepared the formal charges, as seen by the case from the Qaraqash List where three siblings – Qelbinur Metnuri, Nurmemet Metnuri, and Ablet Metnuri – were sent to camp in April-May 2017 for either studying in Egypt or sending their children there, but would be transferred to criminal detention just 1-2 months later, with all getting heavy sentences of 14-18 years.
Occasionally, transfer from camp to pre-trial detention was prompted by the detainee’s behavior in camp. The list of pre-trial detainees in Ili Prefecture provides several examples:
- Ruqiye Tohti, who was taken out of camp and put in pre-trial detention for having “declared her religious extremist thinking” in camp, but would be sent back to camp after 3 months.
- Shohret Ablikim, who was taken out of camp and put in pre-trial detention after swallowing “foreign substances” while at the No. 1 Power Plant camp in Ghulja City.
- Nurmemet Tursun, who was taken out of camp and put in pre-trial detention for using “threats” to “obstruct” the camp staff from carrying out their duties.
- Juri Tash and Qahar Niyaz, who were both put in pre-trial detention for not “cooperating” with the camp staff.
- Abdurahman Qari and Hamitjan Jume, who were both taken out of camp and put in pre-trial detention for swallowing screws, refusing to “study”, and “severely disturbing social order” while at the “Chapchal County Rectification Center“.
Given the observed close relations between camp and pre-trial detention, practical considerations would imply a certain degree of formal integration and streamlining, and the data available suggest this to be the case. Specifically, the term “two detention centers, one camp” (两所一中心) is encountered now and again in various primary sources, with one court verdict explicitly defining it as referring to a pre-trial detention center, an administrative-detention center (拘留所, usually 10-15 day detention for misdemeanors), and a “training center” (培训中心, or camp). A police file from Tekes County, titled “‘Two Detention Centers, One Camp’ County-Level List of Names for Thorough Inspection” (“两所一中心”县级摸排名单), also provides details of numerous individuals interned in one of these three facilities, in addition to noting “transfer to training” (转培) dates, typically from a detention center, for some of them.
Regarding terminology: In our translation of 中心 in 两所一中心, we have decided to use the word “camp”, as 所 was already translated as “center” (administrative-detention center, pre-trial detention center), and using the standard translation of “center” for 中心 would lose the contrast (“two centers and one center”). This is a slight abuse, since formal Chinese government and police terminology never uses the word “camp” (营), but is seen as permissible given the context and the fact that 培训中心 were camps de facto. Alternatives, such as “two jails and one center”, are of course possible.
It is not entirely clear if the proximity implied by “two detention centers, one camp” is purely organizational, with the facilities potentially located in different places but operating in close coordination to implement transfers of detainees. This appears to have been the case in at least some areas, and so we will interpret the term more generally. However, a comprehensive review of pre-trial detention center facilities does show the proximity to be physical in over a third of the cases, with there being 35 documented “two detention centers, one camp” compounds where a county’s pre-trial detention center, administrative-detention center, and (often central) camp are concentrated together, presumably making transfers between them very cheap and convenient for the authorities. As a general rule, the camps in these compounds seem to be of the dedicated type – large and newly constructed – as opposed to the makeshift camps repurposed from other government facilities.
(The identities of all of the pre-trial detention centers in the images above have been confirmed. For the identities of the camps, many have been confirmed through procurement documents or other sources, with the identity being an educated guess in a minority of cases, as based on general structural elements and security features. For administrative-detention centers, the identity has been confirmed via documents in around a third of the cases, and has been assumed by virtue of their structural nature in others – administrative-detention centers are often much smaller and 口- or 凵-shaped, located inside the same compound as the pre-trial detention center, and have less security.)
Zooming out further, we can also look at how “two detention centers, one camp” complexes – and the pre-trial detention centers in them – interact with the overall detention system. This is summarized in the schematic below.
While not accounting for all possible nuances, this schematic is believed to cover the vast majority of cases and detention types, and illustrates how detainees usually flow between them (in cases where adjacent arrows are of different sizes, a larger arrow indicates the direction to be much more common). Estimates for detention lengths are approximate and based on empirical data, with pre-trial detention belonging to the mid-term category and the majority of detainees being held for 3-9 months, often being transferred elsewhere afterwards.
The empirical data and official directives used to build the schematic are summarized in the more detailed table below (where hovering over a given cell should bring up the relevant notes).
Finally, some pre-trial detention centers in Xinjiang have also functioned as camps themselves.
In what was likely the most common scenario, former pre-trial detention centers that had already been succeeded by new facilities but not yet demolished were repurposed into makeshift camps. This was the case in Maralbeshi County, where a new pre-trial detention center was built outside the city in 2015, with the old one (since demolished) being turned into a camp in 2017. The same happened in Altay City, where both a local hospital and the old pre-trial detention center behind it (since demolished) were repurposed into camps.
An anonymous source who experienced these developments both as government staff and as a camp detainee has described this phenomenon as resulting from the general scramble after directives to establish camps were passed down – the local governments, unprepared, had to rush to turn whatever they could into camp facilities, with old pre-trial detention centers likely requiring the least effort from a security viewpoint (despite being poorly equipped for “education” and “skills training”).
In rarer cases, pre-trial detention centers that were under construction appear to have changed function midway, being temporarily used as camps prior to returning to the original role they were intended for. This is believed to have been the case for the famous facility in Dabancheng, which had all the structural elements of a pre-trial detention center while being built in early 2018, but would ultimately serve as a camp later that year (notably, the bridges that typically link armed-police barracks to the detention compound in pre-trial detention centers and prisons were present in early 2018 but were later removed). At some point in 2019-2020, it was rebranded as Urumqi’s No. 3 Pre-Trial Detention Center, succeeding the previous facilities in the city’s Tianshan and Liudaowan districts, with international reporters told during a tour that the facility had never been a camp.
In Tacheng City, a number of Kazakhstan citizens were held together in a camp that was originally supposed to be the new Tacheng City Pre-Trial Detention Center, as evidenced by a procurement document that predates the mass-incarceration campaign. In their testimonies, they talk about being transferred to the recently finished facility (a “real prison”) in early 2018, at which point some of the utilities – such as heating – were not yet fully functioning.
Altogether, former and current pre-trial detention centers number approximately 200 across Xinjiang. In the next part, we will present their locations, how they may be classified, and how they have changed (and expanded) over the past decade, together with an estimate on total capacity.