When police arrested a middle-aged Uighur woman at the height of China's COVID-19 outbreak, she was crammed into a cell with dozens of other women in a detention centre. There, she said, she was forced to drink a medicine that made her feel weak and nauseous. She and the others also had to strip naked once a week and cover their faces as guards hosed them and their cells down with disinfectant "like firemen."

"It was scalding," recounted the woman by phone from Xinjiang, declining to be named out of fear of retribution. "My hands were ruined, my skin was peeling." Furthermore, in what experts call a breach of medical ethics, some residents are being coerced into swallowing traditional Chinese medicine.