What is happening to the Uighurs in China?
The Briefing Room
BBC
4.8 • 731 Ratings
🗓️ 16 July 2020
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The Chinese Communist Party is accused of locking up hundreds of thousands of Uighurs in internment camps. In the Uighurs' homeland in Xinjiang, the state operates a system of mass-surveillance and is accused of human rights abuses against the mainly Muslim minority including forced labour and compulsory birth control.
China says the camps are not prisons but schools for ‘thought transformation’ and it continues to deny the abuse of human rights.
David Aaronovitch asks leading experts what’s going on in Xinjiang and how is the rest of the world responding:
Rian Thum, Senior Research Fellow at the University of Nottingham Dr Jo Smith Finley, Senior Lecturer in Chinese Studies at Newcastle University Josh Chin deputy China Bureau Chief for the Wall Street Journal Charles Parton Senior Associate Fellow at RUSI
Producers: Kirtseen Knight, Beth Sagar Fenton, Joe Kent Studio manger: James Beard Editor: Jasper Corbett.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, radio, podcasts. |
| 0:05.0 | Welcome to the briefing room with me, David Oronovich. |
| 0:08.2 | When you enter the virtual space of the briefing room, |
| 0:10.9 | you can expect 28 minutes of the top experts |
| 0:13.5 | explaining one of the big issues of the moment. |
| 0:16.6 | This week, who are the Uyghurs and what's happening to them? |
| 0:28.7 | No. This week, who are the Uyghurs and what's happening to them? Not much unites American politicians, but one issue now seems to. |
| 0:34.7 | China is home to one of the worst human rights crises of our time. It is truly |
| 0:40.2 | the stain of the century. We are sending a message to the persecuted that they are not forgotten. |
| 0:45.9 | This is a genocide. More than a million people are in concentration camps. Millions more |
| 0:51.0 | are harassed every single day. The whole families have been torn apart. |
| 0:55.9 | Those voices belong to Donald Trump's secretary of state, |
| 0:58.7 | to the Democrat Speaker of the House of Representatives, |
| 1:01.4 | and to a Republican congressman. |
| 1:03.4 | They were talking about the Chinese government's treatment |
| 1:05.8 | of a mainly Muslim minority, the Uyghurs, in the province of Xinjiang. |
| 1:14.9 | The U.S. has announced sanctions against Chinese Communist Party officials, it says, are involved in that treatment. |
| 1:17.6 | China denies behaving badly and has retaliated with sanctions of its own, warning the US to |
| 1:23.0 | stop interfering in its internal affairs. |
| 1:25.9 | So this week, I want to know who the Uyghurs are, |
| 1:29.3 | what's really been going on, |
| 1:30.8 | and is it as bad as people have been claiming, |
... |
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