The Xinjiang Person Search Tool was launched in February 2023 to provide information to relatives, friends, and supporters of Uyghurs and other ethnic groups who are victims of Beijing’s campaign of mass internment in China’s Xinjiang region.

This search tool parses 5 million records contained in the Xinjiang Police Files, a cache of confidential files obtained from directly inside Xinjiang police computers and partially published by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation in May 2022 in partnership with a media consortium of 14 world leading outlets including the BBC, Der Spiegel, Le Monde, El Pais, and USA Today (read more). The Files and Search Feature contain information on approximately 750,000 persons from 48 Xinjiang counties, drawing from over 11,000 spreadsheets from the Files. Of these, 290,000 are from Konasheher county (疏附县) in Kashgar prefecture (喀什地区) and around 176,000 are from Tekes county (特克斯县) in Ili Kazakh Autonomous Prefecture (伊犁哈萨克自治州).

You can search using a person’s ID number or name. Search results are the raw output of information from each Excel file that contains that ID number or name. If a police image is associated with that identity, the image is displayed at the top. The data are mostly dated from 2017-18, though some results may be from earlier years. The most recent evidence is from the end of 2018. Data from search results are displayed in chronological order based on when a file was last saved.

OTHER TECHNICAL NOTES:

• The Xinjiang Police Files contain spreadsheets from several different years, hence the data they contain for a person may change over time. For example, a person may be shown as “at home” (not detained) in 2017, but then may have been detained later on, and subsequently may have been sent to a prison. Alternatively, a person may have been in a camp and later been released. For this reason, we show the full original file name, as well as providing the Excel metadata.

• All fields visible in the search results come directly from the original Excel files, except three (“File last saved on,” “File last modified on,” and “File author”) which were pulled from the Excel file metadata. Not every file had metadata. The timestamp in the photo caption was extracted from the file name of the photo. Two files in the data (“Uyghur_file_xls_1.xlsx” and “Uyghur_file_xls_2.xlsx”) were created from extracting raw text data from the police database and programatically importing that data to Excel files. The last modified date for these files has been removed.

• Please note that government data is not always accurate. The displayed data is solely derived from police computers and networks within the government of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. An error rate of a few percent is not uncommon for this type of data. While care has been taken in compiling this search function, the information is provided ‘as is’, with no guarantee of completeness, accuracy, timeliness, and without warranty of any kind, express or implied. For privacy reasons, we cannot provide the full original files that provide the basis for this search feature for purposes other than academic research.

• This search feature may later be expanded in terms of functionality and scope of data provided. Unfortunately the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation cannot provide any further information beyond this search feature or to respond to individual inquiries about persons at this time. Exceptions are inquiries by journalists for related media reporting. We welcome feature requests and bug reports. Please direct all inquiries to [email protected] with the subject line “Xinjiang Police Files Person Search” to ensure your email is properly forwarded.

 To learn more about the Xinjiang Police Files visit Xinjiang Police Files.