The Black Gate: Vanished in the Night

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News, Society & Culture, News Commentary, Documentary

4.8 • 11.8K Ratings

🗓️ 5 December 2024

⏱️ 31 minutes

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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, including the wife and young children of a Uyghur businessman named Abdullatif Kucar. NPR correspondent Emilly Feng follows Kucar as he desperately searches for his missing family. To listen to this series sponsor-free and support NPR, sign up for Embedded+ in Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Support for this podcast and the following message come from the NPR Wine Club, which has generated over $1.75 million to support NPR programming.
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0:19.1	Hey, I'm Kelly McEvers, and this is Embedded from NPR.
0:23.6	In the Xinjiang region of China, that's in the northwest part of the country,
0:29.2	the Chinese government for years has been detaining and imprisoning tens of thousands of
0:34.6	ethnic U.S. and other Muslim groups.
0:40.2	The U.S. and some European countries are calling it a cultural genocide. Back in 2021, NPR's China correspondent Emily Fang started
0:47.7	following the Kuchar family. Their lives were totally torn apart by this crackdown on Uyghurs.
0:54.5	Three years later, she's still reporting on them.
0:57.7	And she realized that this one family story is about something much bigger, the massive Chinese
1:04.5	surveillance of Uyghurs.
1:06.8	She's gotten exclusive interviews with the people suffering from that surveillance and the people upholding it, which sometimes are one in the same.
1:16.1	So today we're starting a three-part series reported by Emily with translation help from Uyghur activist Abduelli Ayyup, and we'll start with the Kuchar family.
1:26.4	One Uyghur man's journey to find his wife and children after they were forcibly detained by Chinese authorities and then disappeared.
1:35.4	Three years ago, I had a long conversation with a man named Abdul Latif Kuchar.
1:42.3	And his story was unlike any that I'd ever heard.
1:46.1	He's Uyghur, a Turkic ethnic minority in Western China that mostly practices Islam.
1:51.1	And he told me that for almost two years, he lost all contact with his wife and children.
1:58.5	Abdel-Latif told me it all started one December evening in 2017. This is how he remembers it.
2:04.9	He'd been chatting with his wife, Miriam, on the phone. He was in Istanbul and she was back in China at their home in Xinjiang, a region in Western China where most Uyghurs live.
2:15.5	Miriam was exhausted and on edge because Chinese government minders,
2:19.9	they call themselves relatives,
	...

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