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Officials were told to assign inmates to fixed positions in dormitories, classes, lineups and workshops, and to control every detail of life inside the camps, at every moment of the day, including wake-up, meals, studies and showers.

Detainees must meet “disciplinary demands” or face punishment, the directive added.

“Strengthen the management of the students’ hygiene,” it said. “Ensure that they get timely haircuts and shave, change and wash their clothes. Arrange for them to have baths once or twice a week, so that they develop good habits.”

The demands listed in the directive echoed the accounts of former detainees like Orynbek Koksebek, an ethnic Kazakh man who spent four months in an indoctrination camp in Xinjiang after being detained by the Chinese authorities in December 2017.

“There was military discipline in everything we did, how you walk, stand up straight. If you didn’t, they would slap you,” he said in an interview in the Kazakh city of Almaty earlier this year.

A key disclosure in the leaked directive is an official description of the conditions that detainees must meet to be released from the camps. Aside from achieving a good score in the point system, the document said, inmates must be categorized at the lowest threat level and have served a minimum term of one year — though interviews with former detainees indicate that camps sometimes release people sooner.

The directive also emphasized the importance of showing remorse. Discussions with detainees should “promote the repentance and confession of the students for them to understand deeply the illegal, criminal and dangerous nature of their past behavior,” it said.

A different document, among the set shared with The Times earlier this year, described how family members outside the camps are told that their behavior can also affect when a detainee is released — a implied threat aimed at silencing complaints.