Hello and welcome to worldly part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

For weeks our listeners have been asking us to cover the situation in Xinjiang province,

where the Uyghur, mostly Muslim ethnic minority is being systematically persecuted by the Chinese government.

I'm here with Alex Ward.

Jen Williams is out this week, so we brought in an expert on the Weavers to talk with us.

That's James Palmer, who's an editor at Foreign Policy. Hi James.

Hi, Zach. So when you start people off trying to explain what's happening in Xinjiang today,

what do you tell them? What's your entry point? Well, we're at a crisis point where the Chinese government has

moved from previously repression of Uyghur culture but tolerance and attempts at assimilation attempts at seeing Uyghur as part of wider Chinese culture to an almost pathologizing of Uyghur identity whereby being Uyghur in particular being a practicing Muslim is seen as being a

a deep threat to the Chinese state and that's resulted in around a million Uyghur being put into concentration camps, using that term in the original sense, meaning that is places where you concentrate a population, where you press a population together in order to control them.

Fairly few people have been released from these camps which are normally termed

re-education camps. We don't know a lot about what their ultimate goal is or what's happening in them and so this is really a crisis of

Unprecedented proportions even when it comes to a population that's been heavily repressed in the past.

Is it fair to say that the basic goal here is the replacement of Uyghur culture and identity

with something else, with a more homogenous Han Chinese identity?

Yes, I think it's part of what it's part of a big push for Han Chinese dominance

within China itself, which was not always the case in the past, and for the extermination of Uygh

a tradition of Uyghur religious belief, and I think ultimately aimed at the breakup or dissolution of the Uyghur as a people.

What I don't fully understand is why Gijinping's government has decided to launch

this such a systematic and widespread targeting of Uyghur society.

And just to build on that point I had heard that there had been attacks by Uyghurs on

sort of Han Chinese people coming in that the government considered these terrorist attacks effectively, the separatist attacks and that is, was that used as kind of a cover for this bigger campaign?

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