Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.

Over the last few years, something terrible has been happening in China, in the northwest

province of Xinjiang, a thousand miles from Beijing.

The government has constructed a network of internment camps and has been imprisoning ethnic minorities

in huge numbers. Weiger and Kazakh people are rounded up for expressing their religion,

for speaking their languages. They're arrested on the merest suspicion of what China considers

disloyalty, and that's a very broad umbrella. At least a million

people have been sent to these camps. It's the largest attainment of civilians since the Holocaust

in Europe. The State Department has deemed it a genocide. And finally, the world seems to be

taking notice. The International Olympic Committee is coming under criticism

as human rights organizations call for a boycott of the Games

because of China's human rights record, including them.

You just talked to China's president.

Yes, for two hours.

What about the Uyghurs? What about human rights abuses?

We must speak up for human rights. It's who we are.

We're devoting our entire episode today to Xinjiang.

What's happened there and why and what the world can do about it.

I'm going to start with Rafi Khach Dori, a longtime staff writer at the New Yorker, who reported the story

surviving the crackdown in Xinjiang.

There's been a long history of repression in this part of the country. In Mao's time, especially

during the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese Communist Party attempted to solidify its control over the region by effectively diminishing the local culture and the institutions that support that culture.

...