The Last Generation of Uighurs

But look even closer: this line is one facility’s perimeter wall.

And these shadows? They’re cast by the watch towers along the wall.

Uighurs mainly live in the Xinjiang province of northwestern China. That puts them closer to the capitals of Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan than to Beijing. And Uighurs are also closer culturally to those Turkic groups than they are to the Han Chinese, China’s ethnic majority.

That was sort of an inflection point, after that the Chinese really started to crack down harder on the Uighurs. By 2013, Xinjiang had become even more important to China. The country launched the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) a trillion-dollar investment in things like fiber optic cables, train lines, and gas pipelines meant to boost the country’s economic and political influence around the world by making it easier to trade with China. If you plot these projects on a map you’ll see a lot of them pass through Xinjiang, making the province arguably the most important corridor for the whole project.

At first, China denied the existence of these camps. But activists and academics fought back. In terms of strategies and tools that they have used to uncover evidence of these camps are quite simply a computer and Chinese knowledge and thinking about what words, especially government websites, would use.

China started taking a different approach and started admitting that these facilities exist, but carefully painted them as training schools for potential criminals or terrorists.

In the meantime, the camps are still there and growing. From China’s perspective they think it’s worth it. They want to make sure Xinjiang is an area of the country they have total control over. And if that comes with a high human cost and even a reputational blow on the international stage, China seems so far willing to do that anyway.

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