China blanks out map to hide vast network of Uighur detention camps

The Chinese government has been accused of blanking out images of Uighur internment camps from one of the most popular map services in the country.

China is currently under fire for the detention of Uighurs, Kazakhs and other Muslim minorities in the far western Chinese state of Xinjiang, in what the New York Post labels the “largest-scale detention of ethic and religious minorities since World War II”.

By comparing Western and Chinese mapping applications, BuzzFeed this week revealed that Beijing is blocking images of camps, prisons and military facilities when viewed through the Baidu mapping service.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Baidu, which offers a satellite service much like Google Maps, is based in China and is frequently subject to rigorous censorship. But by checking the blanked out spaces, BuzzFeed found a vast network of “268 newly-built compounds”, many of which contain multiple detention facilities.

“Once we found that we could replicate the blank tile phenomenon reliably, we started to look at other camps whose locations were already known to the public to see if we could observe the same thing happening there,” BuzzFeed says.

“Having established that we could probably find internment camps in this way, we examined Baidu’s satellite tiles for the whole of Xinjiang... In total there were five million masked tiles across Xinjiang.

“They seemed to cover any area of even the slightest strategic importance - military bases and training grounds, prisons, power plants, but also mines and some commercial and industrial facilities.”