XINJIANG REGION, CHINA — China has built the capacity to simultaneously imprison at least 1.01 million people in Xinjiang, according to Buzzfeed News analysis.


This may suggest previous estimates of around a million Uyghur and other ethnic minority Muslims being detained over the last five years are too low.


Three hundred and forty-seven facilities have been identified as being built since 2016, and as of April 2021 these facilities covered an area of more than 206 million square feet, or around 19.2 million square meters — enough to cover a third of Manhattan.


Within the facilities, government documents from 2010 and 2013 indicate cells are designed to hold between eight and 16 people, allowing between 5 and 7 square meters per person.


Those specifications, combined with the total area allocated for detention centers, are how the estimated capacity of more than one million people was arrived at. However, previous accounts of overcrowding, plus the existence of 100 detention facilities built before 2016 and not included in the report, could indicate a still larger capacity.


According to the Buzzfeed News report, the coordinated campaign to imprison Muslims in Xinjiang began in 2016, initially with schools, hospitals and other public buildings repurposed to become detention centers.


This process solidified into something more sophisticated in the following years as more and more purpose-built facilities were constructed, peaking between 2017 and 2019.


As of April 2021, Buzzfeed News estimates this amount of detention space provides the capacity to imprison one in 25 of the population of Xinjiang, a relative detention capacity seven times higher than that of the United States, the country with the highest official prison population in the world.