Did you know there are hundreds of thousands of people currently held in internment camps in China? On this week’s WITHPod, listen to chrislhayes and RianThum discuss the Uyghurs, a predominantly Muslim group in Western China facing discrimination.
Did you know there are roughly one million people currently held in internment camps in China? One million people held against their will, facing no criminal charges, forcefully cut off from the outside world. This is the story of the Uighurs, a small, insulated ethnic minority in western China. The predominantly Muslim group has faced growing levels of Islamophobia and paranoia from the Chinese government.
He would go on to be a kind of leading voice of reconciliation and penitence in the period after the war. And he started giving speeches about what he had witnessed in the rise of Nazism. And he said,"First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out because I was not a socialist. And then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew.
And it's being done by the Chinese state to an ethnic minority there called the Uighurs. The Uighurs, spelled U-I-G-H-U-R, or I should say transliterated as U-I-G-H-U-R, are an ethnic minority that are Muslim. And that Chinese state has undertaken a project that, I'm not quite sure the word to describe it, but you're gonna hear in this episode what they're doing.
I don't have any connection to the Uighurs. The odds are as you're listening to this that you don't either. It does feel remote. I'm not sure what the U.S. government can do, but I do know that all the reporting, and The New York Times did a greatthe other day that we'll link to, indicates that the Chinese do pay attention to how much people are paying attention to what they're doing.
CHRIS HAYES: I wanna start super basic. I think this is one of the most important stories happening in the world right now. And it's inaccessible. The New York Times has just done some great reporting on it, but it's remote, I think, to people. And I want to just start with the basics like, who are the Uighurs? What does that word, that term connote?
RIAN THUM: Yeah. And that's something that I think gets overlooked a lot when people do talk about the Uighurs, which is that despite being considered by the Chinese government a minority, until 10 years ago, most Uighurs rarely met somebody who was not a Uighur. That was a pretty unusual circumstance.
CHRIS HAYES: Okay, so 250 years of being controlled by essentially a foreign entity, right? That's the fundamental dynamic here it seems to me. RIAN THUM: This is really just the crescendo of a longer pattern of tightening restrictions on Uighur movement, Uighur cultural expression. And one of the reasons is just a change of leadership in China. Xi Jinping has brought a much more paranoid sense of the threats that the Communist Party faces in China and a lot more interest and willingness to clamp down on any kind of expression of resistance.
RIAN THUM: That's a complicated question. There is a longstanding desire among many Uighurs for Independence. And there have been may times when people have openly expressed that, many times when people have engaged in acts or resistance from writing a poem all the way to killing a police officer.
RIAN THUM: Oh God, no. Within the borders of China, there is no organized resistance whatsoever. And there hasn't been anything that people who actually spent time on the ground in Xinjiang, those of us who have done that, there's nothing that those kinds of scholars recognize as anything more than a handful of people who got together and said,"Let's do something about the terrible situation," and then had some sort of improvised thing.
RIAN THUM: What I've heard is that it's a knock on the door. When this news first started to coalesce in the winter of 2018, I was hearing a lot of stories of people wearing long underwear and warm clothes to bed, so that if they get taken away in the middle of the night, they'll be dressed appropriately for the winter weather.RIAN THUM: A knock on the door seems to be common ...
CHRIS HAYES: I mean, they cannot help but recall the very famous Nazi-led tours of the [Theresienstadt] ghetto to the International Red Cross that happens in the run-up to the Final Solution. I think there's a jazz band that plays and all sorts of cultural activities."Look, we put them all in one place, but they have full access to everything they could possibly want."
CHRIS HAYES: So part of what's really unnerving about this is, if the ostensible purpose is a kind of crash course in language and Chinese thought and Xi thought, then people should be coming out of that, right?CHRIS HAYES: There's something really horrifyingly sinister about people going in and not coming back out, but that's what's telling me, like very, very few people have gotten out.
CHRIS HAYES: So this is the camps, right? Then you've got the knock-on effect this must have on Uighur society, the life world of Xinjiang outside the camps. And then on top of that, you've got this crazy surveillance system in which they've converted the non-camp part into essentially a kind of Panopticon.
RIAN THUM: Yeah, yeah. In the most extreme case, one person reported, I think it was to Human Rights Watch, that a camera was installed inside her house. RIAN THUM: Yeah. The first indication that those of us who study this and live outside of China got that things were getting really bad was around of the fall of 2017. We just started seeing connections go dark, just a whole ethnic group sort of withdraw themselves from the internet and from phone lines and just de-friend everyone on their social media and say,"Sorry, the weather's bad here. I can't talk." Then it just went dark.
Ethnic Uighur women leave a center where political education lessons are held in Kashgar, in Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, China, on Sept. 6, 2018.CHRIS HAYES: I guess part of what I'm wrestling with here is bigotry and oppression like this outside the context always looks insane and irrational. Like why? Why is the Chinese state doing this? Someone from on high ...
I mean, really, they're trying to make people less Uighur, or not Uighur at all. They're trying to stop them from speaking Uighur. The children are all being educated in Chinese. They're not allowed to speak Uighur at school. They're forcing people in the detention centers to say,"I'm not a Muslim."RIAN THUM: Yeah
CHRIS HAYES: That's the thing that I keep thinking about, that keeps haunting me. The reason I've been wanting to talk to you is I know this is going on. It's sort of in the corner of my head, what if the Chinese state just said,"Well, you know what? The indoctrination's not working. We're just gonna execute 1,000 of these folks a day."
But other countries around the world have [made] far less than the noise we've heard from American officials.RIAN THUM: Intractable. Mm-hmm . RIAN THUM: Absolutely. And, you know, for Saudi Arabia, they have concerns that maybe their alliance with the U.S. and with the West in general is weakening, and maybe they're in danger, and so I think it's a bad time for this to be happening because they're looking to China as a possible counterweight to Western pressure.
RIAN THUM: I think it already is. Binding constraint might be a little generous, but certainly, it raises the cost of the kinds of repressive treatments that the rest of the world condemns. You know, I think ... China has already suffered a very large reputational cost that I don't think its leadership is aware of yet.
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