From the Heritage Foundation, I'm Tim Desher, and this is Heritage Explains.

Have you heard of what's happening to Uyghur Muslims in China?

We've talked about it on this podcast before, but never like this. Xinjiang is the region where the U.S. says China has put up to two million people, nearly all Muslims, in detention camps over the last few years. Activists say Beijing has done

that to try to eliminate Islam within its borders. China says these camps aren't prisons,

but voluntary vocational training centers

that are being used to not eliminate Islam generally,

only Islamic extremism.

Cameras watch their every move,

and some places positioned every 50 meters.

While Han Chinese regularly breathed through

the myriad police roadblocks,

anyone we saw who appeared to be a minority got stopped. Racial profiling appears rampant.

For Uyghur Muslims living in the Xinjiang province in western China, fear is an understatement.

And that clip from CNN is one of many news documentaries

that exist covering the issue. But still, this story is largely unknown here in America.

Uyghur traditions are longstanding and proud. For centuries, they've lived a mostly peaceful existence in China,

practicing their Muslim faith, engaging in commerce, and raising their families. But in 2017,

as Uyghurs began to disappear from their homes, being arrested in the middle of the night and placed in concentration camps, families were kept in the dark as to what was

happening, and the children left behind after their parents disappeared were called orphans by the Chinese government,

and they too placed in a kid's version of a concentration camp.

All of this with one goal.

Destroy any identity, faith, family, tradition.

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