At night, while travelling for hours along Xinjiang's desert highways, the unmarked cars that had been following us from the moment we arrived would tailgate us at speed, driving dangerously close with their headlights on full beam, reports BBC.

"Their occupants - who never identified themselves - forced us to leave one city by chasing us out of restaurants and shops, ordering the owners not to serve us," read the BBC report titled 'China’s pressure and propaganda - the reality of reporting Xinjiang' by John Sudworth.

"The report we produced, despite these difficulties, contained new evidence - much of it based on China's own policy documents - that thousands of Uighurs and other minorities are being forced to pick cotton in a region responsible for a fifth of the world's crop," read the report.

But now China's Communist Party-run media have produced their own report about our reporting, accusing the BBC of exaggerating these efforts by the authorities to obstruct our team and calling it "fake news".