REVISITED China's Secret Internment Camps with Rian Thum

Originally Aired April 2019

Did you know there are roughly one million people currently held in internment camps in China? One million people detained against their will, facing no criminal charges, cut off from the outside world. This is the story of the Uyghurs, a small insulated ethnic minority in Western China. The predominantly Muslim group has faced growing levels of Islamophobia and paranoia from the Chinese government. Right now, roughly ten percent of the Uyghur population has been ‘disappeared’, held indefinitely in re-education camps where they are subjected to totalitarian indoctrination in an attempt to erase their identity, their language, their religion and their culture. Rian Thum, who has spent his career studying the Uyghurs, joins us to explain everything we know about the camps and how they came to be – including the prison-like surveillance state that Uyghurs outside of the camps are forced to live in.

LINKS

The Sacred Routes of Uyghur History by Rian Thum

How China Turned a City Into a Prison

"Eradicating Ideological Viruses”: China’s Campaign of Repression Against Xinjiang’s Muslims