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Hello and welcome to Chinese Whispers with me, Cindy Yu. Every episode, I'll be talking to journalists, experts and long-time China

watchers about the latest in Chinese politics, society and more. There'll be a smattering

of history to catch you up on the background knowledge and some context as well. How did the

Chinese see these issues? A few years ago, few in the West had heard of the Uyghur people.

But recently, concerns over their welfare have been at the forefront of any China discussion.

Listeners will already know about the wide-ranging detention scheme that China has implemented in Xinjiang,

the Western province of the country that's closer to Central Asia than to Beijing.

It's believed that around a million Uyghur Muslims are incarcerated, one in ten of that ethnicity.

The Chinese Communist Party calls this vocational training, portraying it as a counter-terrorism strategy

that these Uyghurs who have been what the CCP sees as being infected with extremist thought

are being reformed in their thought and are being retrained to do other things once they have graduated from the camps, while critics in the rest have likened it to genocide and the eradicating of Uyghur culture and their religion.

But the region is shrouded in opacity, forcing reporters to rely on satellite imagery and anecdotal accounts to piece together exactly what is going on.

There have been reports of forced sterilisation, forced labour and torture.

Much work has been done on that front as to what we do and don't know is happening in Xinjiang,

and on this episode we won't be going into the what is happening in Xinjiang as much as the why it's happening.

This episode will be all about who the Uygo people are, China's historic relationship with its ethnic minorities, and what the ruling party hopes to get out of this.

In other words, why is this all happening? I'm joined by Professor James Milwood, a renowned historian of the region and the professor of intersocietal history

at Georgetown University. Jim, welcome. Thanks very much for having me. To start with, I wondered

if you could paint a picture of the ethnic breakdown of China. Growing up as part of the majority

population, the Han Chinese, in Nanjing into the east of the country. I learned about ethnic minorities in my textbooks,

but I didn't really meet any because almost everyone around me were Han. So how diverse or

...