REVISITED China's Secret Internment Camps with Rian Thum

Why Is This Happening? The Chris Hayes Podcast

MS NOW, Chris Hayes

Msnbc, The Chris Hayes Podcast, Government, Politics, Chris Hayes, Why Is This Happening?, Withpod, Versant, Ms Now, News, Society & Culture, Versant Media

4.6 • 9.1K Ratings

🗓️ 18 August 2020

⏱️ 47 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Originally Aired April 2019 Did you know there are roughly one million people currently held in internment camps in China? One million people detained against their will, facing no criminal charges, cut off from the outside world. This is the story of the Uyghurs, a small insulated ethnic minority in Western China. The predominantly Muslim group has faced growing levels of Islamophobia and paranoia from the Chinese government. Right now, roughly ten percent of the Uyghur population has been ‘disappeared’, held indefinitely in re-education camps where they are subjected to totalitarian indoctrination in an attempt to erase their identity, their language, their religion and their culture. Rian Thum, who has spent his career studying the Uyghurs, joins us to explain everything we know about the camps and how they came to be – including the prison-like surveillance state that Uyghurs outside of the camps are forced to live in. LINKS The Sacred Routes of Uyghur History by Rian Thum How China Turned a City Into a Prison "Eradicating Ideological Viruses”: China’s Campaign of Repression Against Xinjiang’s Muslims

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey guys, it's Chris.
0:01.8	You're hearing me a little earlier than usual because I'm off this week.
0:04.9	So we're going to re-air an episode that I think, and it's so sad I may say this, is
0:09.1	really timely.
0:11.5	Over a year ago, back in April of 2019, I spoke with Ryan Thumb, who, as you're going to
0:16.6	hear in this episode, is an expert on a Chinese ethnic minority you might have heard of,
0:20.9	a group called the Weggers, who are being ethnically cleansed, rounded up into concentration
0:26.3	camps by the Chinese government in indescribably horrific ways.
0:31.0	And here we are in August of 2020, and that the story about what is happening in Weggers,
0:35.8	what the Chinese are doing has gained quite a bit of attention.
0:39.0	You may have seen recently just in the last few weeks some of those videos circulating
0:43.9	of members of the South and group in Western China, Weggers being loaded onto trains, obviously
0:49.7	of intense and horrific historical residents there.
0:54.4	We've been hearing reports about forced sterilization and forced labor and items appearing in
0:59.5	the US that are actually being built by slave labor in these camps.
1:03.5	And so I thought it would be a good time to revisit this episode.
1:06.1	We kept the original intro in because it does a lot of helpful setup about what exactly life
1:10.2	is like for the Weggers.
1:11.8	So here is the original episode in its entirety.
1:14.7	I mean, really, they're trying to make people less Wegger or not Wegger at all.
1:19.9	Yeah.
1:20.9	They're trying to stop them from speaking Wegger.
	...

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