Embedded: The Black Gate

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NPR

Society & Culture, History, Documentary

4.7 • 15K Ratings

🗓️ 24 December 2024

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In the Xinjiang region of western China, the government has rounded up and detained hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs and other Muslim ethnic groups. Many haven't been heard from in years, and more still are desperately searching for their families. Western governments have called this crackdown a cultural genocide and a possible crime against humanity.

In this episode, the first of a three-part series from Embedded, NPR correspondent Emily Feng tells the story of one of those people. For years, a Uyghur man named Abdullatif Kucar had no idea what has happened to his wife and young children after they were detained by Chinese authorities. Emilly follows Kucar as he desperately searches for his family.

But this story is bigger than one family. In this series, Emily also travels across Asia and dives into decades of history to uncover the massive Chinese surveillance of Uyghurs, getting exclusive interviews with the people suffering from that surveillance and the people upholding it – who sometimes are one and the same.

This episode was originally published in 2022. To hear the whole series, head to https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510311/embedded.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This message comes from 16 sunsets, discovering the untold story of NASA's space shuttle.
0:05.6	Host Kevin Fong uncovers the secrets of the most complex machine ever built.
0:10.5	From the makers of 13 minutes to the moon.
0:13.3	New episodes drop every Wednesday.
0:16.3	You're listening to ThruLine from NPR.
0:19.2	I'm Randt Abdel Fattah.
0:21.2	And I'm Ramtin Arablui.
0:23.5	For years, the Chinese government has been detaining and imprisoning hundreds of thousands of ethnic U.S. and other Muslim groups in the Xinjiang region of China.
0:34.7	The U.S. and some European countries are calling it a quote, cultural genocide.
0:40.6	And in 2021, NPR's China correspondent, Emily Fang, started following one Uyghur family,
0:47.6	the Kuchar family, whose lives were torn apart by this crackdown.
0:52.6	Three years later, she's still reporting on them.
0:56.1	What she found became the Blackgate, a three-part series on NPR's Embedded podcast.
1:02.5	Today we're sharing the first part of that series with you.
1:06.0	And you can find the rest right now over in the Embedded feed.
1:10.7	Embedded is NPR's home for serialized
1:13.2	documentary storytelling. Here's NPR's Emily Fang to take it away. Three years ago, I had a long
1:21.7	conversation with a man named Abdul Latif Kuchar. And his story was unlike any that I'd ever heard.
1:30.1	He's Uyghur, a Turkic ethnic minority in Western China that mostly practices Islam.
1:35.1	And he told me that for almost two years, he lost all contact with his wife and children.
1:42.5	Abdu Latif told me it all started one December evening in 2017. This is how he remembers it.
1:48.9	He'd been chatting with his wife, Mariam, on the phone. He was in Istanbul and she was back in China
	...

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