From the New York Times, I'm Michael Barrow. This is The Daily.

Today, a secret trove of government documents offers an unprecedented look inside China's

highly organized crackdown on Uighur Muslims. In one of them, China's president orders his

subordinates to show quote, absolutely no mercy. It's Tuesday, December 10th.

On out the New York Times, as obtained leaked Chinese government documents, it says,

revealed new details about the crackdown on Muslim Uighurs in the Xinjiang region.

They include instructions to local authorities.

Paul Moser, tell me about these leaked documents from inside the Chinese government.

Troves of classified documents reportedly leaked from within China's Communist Party.

So the thing you have to understand is China is one of the most powerful countries in the world,

but we know very little about the top politics and how the country works in so many ways. It's a

great secret. You have the Chinese Communist Party which kind of rules over the country,

but doesn't really let anybody get behind the curtain to understand what's going on.

And so this leak, you just don't see this kind of thing happen. So somebody took a tremendous risk

in making these documents available to the Times. Yes, untold risk not just to themselves,

to their family, to their friends.

And beyond the unusualness of the scale of this leak, what is significant about the fact that

this is coming directly from the government? So prior to this, the best proof we had of what

was happening was mostly anecdotal. So you would talk to relatives of people who had been

imprisoned, like, for instance, Faircat, and maybe you'd be able to talk to somebody like his

mother who had been through the system. But you had no real hard proof. And Beijing used that to

its benefit to basically come up with a very different version of reality, one in which this was

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