More than 600,000 Uyghurs and members of other ethnic minority groups in China have been sent to work far away from their hometowns in an attempt to “influence, meld and assimilate Uyghur minorities,” according to media reports that cited an accidentally leaked internal study.

The study, written by a group of academics from Nankai University in Tianjin, described mass labor transfers as important tools to “reduce Uyghur population density” and bring about a “transformation of their thinking,” the BBC reported.

The study was meant for senior officials only but was accidentally posted online. A Uyghur researcher based overseas saw the leaked study and saved a version of it before the university realized its mistake.

The labor transfers involved more than 600,000 Uyghurs and members of other minority groups from Xinjiang, the Globe and Mail reported, citing a Chinese researcher who studied these transfers in the region.

The BBC referenced a video report by China’s state broadcaster in 2017, which showed a father reluctantly sending his daughter 4,000 kilometers away to work in Anhui province. The daughter said she did not want to leave, but under the scrutiny of government officials and state-TV journalists, she eventually conceded.

Professor Laura Murphy, an expert in human rights and contemporary slavery at Sheffield Hallam University in the U.K., told the BBC that the video showed people were coerced into the labor-transfer system, despite the Chinese government’s insistence that they entered these programs voluntarily.

Murphy said the video also showed the “ulterior motive” of these labor programs.

“Although the narrative is one of lifting people out of poverty, there’s a drive to entirely change people’s lives, to separate families, disperse the population, change their language, their culture, their family structures, which is more likely to increase poverty than to decrease it,” she said.

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