No place to hide

Sitting on the terrace of a Paris cafe, a young Chinese woman glances nervously at her mobile phone as a message from a police officer in her native Xinjiang region pops up.

A member of China's Muslim Uighur minority, Mariem travelled halfway around the world to study in France, but has found herself pulled into a mass security crackdown under way back home.

"They want to know where I live, what I do, how I spend the weekend. They want me to give them information about Uighurs here. They threaten my family who beg me do do what they ask," she said, visibly stressed.

Mariem is one of several ethnic Uighurs in France who shared accounts of harassment by Chinese authorities and expressed concern for missing family members caught up in sweeping security operations back home.

All their names have been changed to protect their identity.

AFP saw messages several Uighurs received from the authorities on China's messaging application WeChat.

"Do you have your degree now?" one officer asks a student. "Send me your address and tell me who you work for and what your degree is," reads another message.

"Why don't you send photos?" another person returning from holidays is asked.

On Monday, Chinese officials were grilled by a UN human rights committee in Geneva over reports that it is holding up to one million Muslims, mostly Uighurs, in camps under cover of a massive anti-terrorism drive.

China has pointed to a series of attacks in Xinjiang by suspected Islamist radicals in recent years as justification for a draconian clampdown in a region with a long history of tensions with Beijing.

But it has called the reports of internment camps "completely untrue", saying that the "education and training centres" to which "minor criminals" are assigned serve merely "to assist in their rehabilitation and reintegration".

Several NGOs and China experts believe that what is under way is far more sinister, saying accounts from former detainees and official documents point to a massive programme of political and cultural indoctrination.

Last year, China banned "abnormally long" beards and Muslim veils in Xinjiang and ordered all car owners in the region to install GPS tracking devices.

In December, New York-based Human Rights Watch reported that Xinjiang authorities were planning to collect biodata from all residents.

"An Orwellian society has been put in place in Xinjiang," Thierry Kellner, a politics professor at Belgium's Universite Libre de Bruxelles specialising in China and the Muslim world, told AFP.

A report published by US-based security analysis group Jamestown Foundation in May estimated that "at least several hundred thousand and possibly just over one million" people had been interned as part of a "pacification drive".

"This is unprecedented and exceeds anything that China has done in any other region including Tibet," the report's author, Adrian Zenz, told AFP.