Amid allegations of abuse and involuntary detention, officials from China's northwestern Xinjiang region said on Tuesday that most of the people who were in the area's controversial re-education centres had left the facilities and signed "work contracts" with local companies.
At a press briefing in Beijing, Shohrat Zakir, Xinjiang's Uighur governor, declined to say how many people were being held in the centres, but defended the system as an effective and "pioneering" approach to counter "terrorism".
"Most of the graduates from the vocational training centres have been reintegrated into society," Zakir said. "More than 90 percent of the graduates have found satisfactory jobs with good incomes."
The United States, human rights groups and independent analysts estimate that around one million Muslims have been arbitrarily detained in Xinjiang's heavily-guarded internment facilities, which the Chinese government calls vocational training centres.
The region is home to Uighurs, Kazakhs and other predominantly Muslim ethnic minority groups.
Xinjiang Vice Chairman Alken Tuniaz said accounts of mistreatment in the camps had been concocted by a few countries and media outlets.
People were allowed to "request time off" and "regularly go home", and while they were not permitted to practise their religion during their "period of study," they were able to do so once they were at home, he said.
The officials did not address whether the programme was voluntary or how often people were allowed to go home.
Testimony from people who have escaped the centres provides a much darker picture, however.
In July 2018, a former teacher at one of the centres told a court in Kazakhstan that "in China, they call it a political camp but really it was a prison in the mountains".
