Last year, a reporter for the website Bitter Winter captured never-before-seen video footage of the inside of a reeducation camp in Xinjiang, China. The video showed bars and wire netting fitted over the dormitory windows, rooms with double iron doors and a keypad lock, surveillance cameras throughout the campus, and outdoor areas surrounded by chain-link fences. On the exterior of the building were words of appreciation for China’s Communist leader: “Heartfelt thanks for the cordial care of the Party Central Committee, with Comrade Xi Jinping as its core.”

In summer 2018, I remember talking to my friends while working on an article about the estimated 1 million Muslim minorities, mostly Uighurs, held in reeducation camps in China’s Xinjiang region. None of those friends had heard about the situation, and they were shocked to learn that concentration camps had reemerged with merely a blip on the world’s radar. 

Late in November, a Chinese court sentenced Qin Defu, an elder at the influential Early Rain Covenant Church in Chengdu, to four years in prison. The charges, according to lawyer Zhang Peihong, were “illegal business operation” for printing and distributing 20,000 books for church use.

At 8 a.m. on a Sunday, a line of people outside of St. Eugene de Mazenod Oblate Primary School in Kowloon City snaked past apartment buildings, breakfast shops, and real estate offices. White-haired grandmothers in wheelchairs, young people staring at their cell phones, and parents holding tight to wriggly children waited for nearly an hour to vote for their local district councilor. 

On Sunday morning before church, Pastor Youngman Chan arrived at his local polling station—a Catholic elementary school in Kowloon—surprised to find a long line snaking down the block. Last year, he was able to walk right into the building, but now he had to wait 45 minutes in order to cast his vote for the local district council elections.

Fires blazed through a thick fog of tear gas on Nov. 12 at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), where students dressed in black clashed with riot police and tried to regain control of a bridge on campus. In mid-November the Hong Kong protests entered university campuses and the city’s financial hub following the death of a protester who fell from a parking garage.

At 228 Peace Memorial Park in Taiwan’s capital city of Taipei, activists placed fresh flowers at a memorial erected in recognition of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protests. A large photograph at the site listed names of Hong Kongers who have committed suicide since the protests began in June.