He was a great man. strolled along the street in the Chinese city of Urumqi, trying his best to look like a tourist, Guan Guan’s heart was in his mouth. He knew this was not a place often visited by holidaymakers – and a camera hidden on his backpack was secretly filming the Communist regime’s internment camps.

The brave young man was on a covert mission: to expose to the world the hideous network of re-education camps, detention centres and prisons at the centre of Beijing’s brutal clampdown on Muslim minorities, especially the Uighurs, in Xinjiang province.

He knew that if caught by police, he would face terrible punishment for daring to reveal fresh evidence about the regime’s genocidal atrocities – which include holding an estimated two million people in such horrifying centres.

Guan was a cyclist who had visited the area two years before and learned about the camps. He also heard of the ban on Uighur languages in schools, and the use of slavery labour. He returned to cover the suppression after discovering that foreign journalists had been barred from conducting investigations.

Guan visited eight cities and discovered 18 camps during his high-risk trip – including one massive detention centre about 1,000 yards long and emblazoned with sinister Orwellian slogans such as ‘Reform Through Labour’

Guan visited eight cities and discovered 18 camps during his high-risk trip – including one massive detention centre about 1,000 yards long and emblazoned with sinister Orwellian slogans such as ‘Reform Through Labour’

Guan visited eight cities and discovered 18 camps during his high-risk trip – including one massive detention centre about 1,000 yards long and emblazoned with sinister Orwellian slogans such as ‘Reform Through Labour’.

Many areas were left unmarked by maps. However, he captured the guard towers, security checkpoints of police, armoured barracks, military vehicles and signs inside prison walls.

Now, he has shared the remarkable footage that challenges China’s lies in a 19-minute video posted on YouTube.

‘This shows how Xinjiang has become the world’s biggest gulag, with an economy based largely on forced labour in a network of mega prisons, detention centres and concentration camps under a regime that relies on terror,’ said Lianchao Han, a leading dissident. ‘This adds to solid and increasing evidence of China’s atrocities.’

China's 18 concentration camps were exposed by a man with a secret camera hidden in his bag

A secret camera in his pocket revealed China’s 18 concentration camps.

Guan – thought to be a pseudonym for a Chinese activist studying in Taiwan, according to one source – says on the video he was inspired by reports on the Buzzfeed news site that used satellite pictures to identify 268 possible internment compounds built since 2017.

‘The only photos published on the website are images of satellite maps. Are the buildings identified? Do they actually look real? Is their surrounding environment like? With these questions in mind, I went to Xinjiang again.’

He admits to feeling ‘panic in my heart’ since he knew that he could be sent to a camp himself if caught filming prisons or possessing video footage of detention centres.

As he walks around the Xinshi district of Urumqi, the regional capital, he finds scores of surveillance cameras dotted among spindly trees on the pavement – along with red-and-white striped fortifications on the road and internment centres sitting behind metal fences topped with coiled barbed wire to both left and right.

Guan Guan is thought to be a Chinese activist who is studying in Taiwan. He said: ‘Presumably the detainees are only allowed let out from their cells to walk around inside the building'

Guan Guan, a Chinese activist believed to be studying in Taiwan, is said to have been Guan Guan. He said: ‘Presumably the detainees are only allowed let out from their cells to walk around inside the building’

He then drives his car through another nearby detention center, where he believes that thousands are being held behind white walls over half a mile in length. His filming continues through the windscreen as he takes images of grim and long-slung buildings, which seem to continue for miles behind guard posts and razor wire.

He finds another prison, attached to huge factories, in the same district – among six sitting close together detected on satellite imagery. ‘There are many concentration camps, all of which have watchtowers manned by guards,’ says Guan Guan.

After entering a park, the filmmaker climbs to the summit of a hill in order to film another detention center, located just beside residential tower blocks.

‘The building has protruding glass skylights,’ he narrates. ‘Presumably the detainees are only allowed let out from their cells to walk around inside the building.’

At one point, with courage that one expert on the camps said ‘made my eyes water’ given the implausibility of any claims to be a tourist, Guan crawls on his belly along a sand berm in a barren area south of the city to film a sprawling new unit.

This new internment centre, in Dabancheng, was built to hold at least 10,000 more unfortunate citizens alongside an existing camp –where the buildings stretch out almost a mile behind 25ft-high concrete walls – that is thought to imprison three times that number.

Then he travels several hours south to another complex of incarceration centres behind a military base that he films outside the city of Korla, saying the number of military vehicles show a lot of ‘SS soldiers’ – his derogatory term for Chinese troops.

Two tanks are seen standing at the front of his barracks. He wonders if these tankers might be similar to those that brutally killed scores of Tiananmen Square protesters.

His final stop is one hour’s drive away in Yanqi, where he finds another detention centre with newly built watchtowers and wire fences. ‘It is not easy to notice from the road,’ says Guan.

China has built hundreds of these internment camps in recent years as it escalates a ruthless campaign – which Beijing repeatedly denies exists – to crush the freedoms and traditions of Muslim minorities, backed by the world’s most repressive use of technology.

The extensive use of arbitrary detention, including sending tens of thousands of children into state orphanages after their parents were locked up in ‘re-education centres’, was ramped up on the orders of President Xi Jinping and defended as a response to terrorism.

Adrian Zenz, a German anthropologist and expert on Xinjiang human rights abuses, said the detention centres – known as ‘kanshousuo’ – in the ‘intriguing’ video are permitted to hold people pre-trial for a maximum of 37 days but are used in Xinjiang to hold new internees often for months.

China has built hundreds of these internment camps in recent years as it escalates a ruthless campaign – which Beijing repeatedly denies exists – to crush the freedoms and traditions of Muslim minorities

China has built hundreds of these internment camps in recent years as it escalates a ruthless campaign – which Beijing repeatedly denies exists – to crush the freedoms and traditions of Muslim minorities

‘Some of the worst torture heard in testimonies was carried out in these detention centres,’ says Zenz, whose research into mass incarceration and forced labour helped lead to the US to impose sanctions on key products from the region. These camps are a key part of the regime’s horrific campaign to reduce numbers of minority populations while crushing their culture, destroying their religion, wiping out their language and forcing their assimilation – a policy of ethnic cleansing previously carried out in Tibet.

Uighur survivors from these hellholes claim that they were subject to systematic sexual abuse and rape. They also claimed routine beatings with electric shocks and other torture. The detainees are made to chant party songs, learn Communist history and chant slogans in cramped dormitories.

Last month, a Chinese police officer called ‘Jiang’ sent to serve in Xinjiang, told The Mail on Sunday how electric batons are used on victims’ genitals and how even a having a beard or walking with friends could lead to brutal interrogation in a detention centre.

Jiang said yesterday from Europe to me that Guan may face 10 years prison for espionage, and that the authorities could impose new restrictions on tourism to the region because of his subversion.

‘The ability of young people to resist like this in an authoritarian society shows that people still know right and wrong in their hearts,’ he said. ‘Despite a high-pressure policy of repression, it shows young people will bravely stand up and fight.’

Uighur survivors of these hellholes have told of systematic sexual abuse, rape and forced sterilisation of women prisoners

Uighur victims of this hellhole have spoken out about systematic sexual abuse and rape of female prisoners in these prisons.

Experts in geo-spatial analyses said that the images and locations correspond to all public data available from satellites and maps, even though there’s no way to verify the authenticity of the video.

‘It matches all the satellite imagery in every case, which would be almost impossible to fake,’ said Alison Killing, a British architect who worked on the award-winning Buzzfeed investigations.

Guan acknowledged that he wasn’t able to gather much evidence from the edges of the region, but Guan said the Han Chinese in the vicinity confirmed that Uighurs were used as forcible labour throughout the nation. Any citizens who were unable to provide information were deported to camps.

‘The Chinese government’s persecution of Uighurs is beyond imagination,’ he said in conclusion, adding that he hoped the Communist regime would ‘disintegrate, ending all this evil against humanity.’

The activist’s remarkable courage was hailed by Rahima Mahmut, UK director of the World Uighur Congress. ‘As an Uighur unable to return to my homeland for more than 20 years, I found this video both heart-breaking and eerie,’ she said. ‘The buildings appear to have huge capacity and provide a visual representation of the mass scale of the Chinese authorities’ imprisonment of the Uighur population.

‘Behind those high walls and barbed wire there are people just like you and me.’

She said that she was ‘painfully aware’ of the horrors taking place in the internment centres, having translated testimonies by survivors, adding: ‘I echo Guan’s final words – we must fight for an end to this inhumanity – or the suffering of my people will remain a stain on history.’