Where Did the One Million Figure for Detentions in Xinjiang’s Camps Come From?

An Explainer

By Jessica Batke on January 8, 2019

As journalists and scholars have reported in recent months on the campaign of religious and cultural repression and incarceration taking place in the Chinese region of Xinjiang, a central question has emerged: How many people has China’s government detained as part of the campaign? In the absence of officially reported numbers or other hard evidence, researchers of various stripes have converged on the figure of one million as a common estimate of the people the Chinese government is detaining in Xinjiang’s camps. But where does this figure come from, and how is it formulated?

Registrations and Filings: A Look Back at 2017 and 2018

on January 3, 2019

The China NGO Project has just completed an analysis of representative office registrations and temporary activity filings during the first two years of Foreign NGO Law implementation. 

While office registrations have slowed, the number of temporary activities initiated every month is still on an upward trajectory. Beyond this noticeable difference, both representative office and temporary activities tend to focus on the same set of issues and cluster in several key provinces. 

Two Years of the Foreign NGO Law: How Did 2018’s Registrations and Filings Stack up against 2017’s?

By Jessica Batke on January 3, 2019

As we greet 2019, we have now seen two full years of Foreign NGO Law implementation in China. If foreign NGOs thought that 2017 had a “crossing the river by feeling for stones” sense to it, 2018 was the year that registration and filing processes became more regularized, for better or worse. Looking back to compare registration and filing data for the first two years of implementation, it is clear that the biggest difference between 2017 and 2018 was simply the number of foreign NGOs engaged in either process. New foreign NGO representative office registrations declined and levelled out in 2018, while temporary activity filings rose significantly. Other than these changes in overall numbers of new offices and activities, the profile of foreign NGOs working in China remained much the same—largely the same several provinces host most of the representative offices or temporary activities, and largely NGOs from the same several countries make up the bulk of foreign NGOs working in China—and they are largely working in the same several sectors favored by the Chinese government.