We don’t just follow stories, we follow up. A year ago, our reporter Isobel Cockerell traveled to Istanbul, where she spent time with a community of Uyghur refugees, mostly women, who managed to escape the mass detention of Muslims in China’s Xinjiang province. Here, she follows up with them in the wake of a huge document leak revealing how China orchestrated its mass detention program. 

Last week, a cache of documents leaked from deep within the Chinese government was published by the New York Times, exposing the architecture of China’s brutal repression of its Uyghur population in Xinjiang, where more than a million have been imprisoned in concentration camps. 

My thoughts turned to what the documents meant for Uyghurs living in exile around the world, many of whom still have relatives trapped in Xinjiang. I called Uyghur poet and scholar Abduweli Ayup, who I first met in Istanbul. Ayup now lives in Norway, which has granted asylum to a small group of Uyghur refugees. 

Ayup told me he was shocked by the documents. What disturbed him particularly, he said, was the revelation that President Xi Jinping was the driving force behind the policy in Xinjiang. He explained he had nursed the hope that the Uyghur crisis was the brainchild of the region’s top official, Chen Quanguo – who’s been described as the architect of the camps – and would be discontinued when Chen left office. Ayup had envisioned going home “as soon as possible” once the policy ended. “I read that the designer of this policy is Xi Jinping. I realized things will not change, even if they replace the governor. It made me very very disappointed,” he said.