They’re pretty unambiguously concentration camps. The Uyghurs aren’t getting gassed yet, and maybe China never plans to go that far, but if you watch the BBC’s footage from inside, the sanitized version China wants to show the world is still very bad. They don’t even bother pretending that everyone in the camps has done something wrong.

(But that doesn’t mean China fabricated the underlying issue; they really do face a large problem with Uyghur terrorism, with many attacks having multiple casualties in the past decade.)