Bangladesh, Feb. 4 -- When the Chinese government quietly began retreating from its vast system of detention camps in Xinjiang after 2019, Beijing insisted nothing fundamental had changed. Officials claimed the “vocational training centers” had simply fulfilled their mission. Yet new academic research suggests a very different story: Chinas shift was not voluntary, nor purely security-driven, but the result of sustained international exposure-especially investigative journalism that pierced one of the worlds most sophisticated information control systems.

A recent study published in Modern China, a peer-reviewed academic journal, argues that reporting by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and its...