Thank you very much.
Official documents prescribing mass forced sterilization and mass surveillance; satellite imagery documenting the destruction of ancient cultural sites and the proliferation of concentration camps; drone footage showing men, heads shorn, shackled and blindfolded, being herded onto trains—these are just some of the glimpses we've had of China's practices in the Uighur homeland of East Turkestan, Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, despite the cone of secrecy China has placed around it. We don't even know for sure exactly how many hundreds of thousands—millions—of Uighurs have been incarcerated in what is suspected to be the largest regime of minority internment since the Nazi Holocaust.
China's infamous network of concentration camps is just one node of a far more extensive project. It's extensive spatially, with the intensive surveillance state penetrating into Uighur villages, homes, bedrooms, cellphones and even DNA through mass biometric collection, even reaching abroad to target Uighurs living in Canada and elsewhere. It's also extensive temporally, with this just the latest stage in what academics have analyzed as China's decades-long, if not centuries-long, project of settler colonization and deliberate demographic change in the resource rich territory China refers to as Xinjiang, meaning literally “new frontier”.