- Guanguan visited several places in Xinjiang, including Fukang, Kazakh Autonomous County, Yunqi, Urumqi (Wulumuqi) and the outskirts of Korla (Kuerle), where the camps are located. About 1.8 million Uyghurs and other minorities are allegedly held without trials in these camps, which the government claims to be re-education and vocational training schools.
- The documentary shows that most of these compounds share similar features, such as watchtowers and razor-wire walls; however, the compound in Korla appears to be a military complex with barracks and army trucks.
- During his investigation, Guanguan noted that he could not give comments while filming in the locations, because he could “end up in a concentration camp if he were stopped by a police and the footage were discovered.”
- He also noted that some of the locations he visited were not listed on any online maps, such as those on Baidu, a prominent search engine in China.
- “In the past couple of years BuzzFeed has been also at the forefront to report on the camps,” Seytoff said. “He traveled from mainland China to Qumul, to Turfan, to Urumchi, to Korla – these major cities, and outskirts of major cities, using the BuzzFeed report as a guide to locate the camps.”
- Seytoff then noted that Guanguan managed “to find nearly 20 concentration camps throughout his travels,” and he even discovered some camps that were not mentioned in the BuzzFeed article.
- Alison Killing, an architect and geospatial analyst who helped with the BuzzFeed report, applauded Guanguan’s bravery in investigating the alleged camps.
- “The first thing that should be said is just how brave that guy was to head off to Xinjiang and to go and look for those camps,” Killing told RFA in November. “It’s really useful to have that ground-level imagery that helps us to corroborate what we’re seeing in the satellite images and helps us to confirm that what we thought we were looking at from above really is vast.”
- Killing, along with BuzzFeed reporter Megha Rajagopalan and programmer Christo Buschek, won a Pulitzer Prize for their stories that exposed “a vast new infrastructure built by the Chinese government for the mass detention of Muslims.”
- China reportedly denied all the assertions by international media about the camps and declared that the purpose of these establishments is to “reeducate” the Uyghur people to Chinese values].