In the last few weeks, I have talked to a number of Uyghurs. The Uyghurs are a Turkic people, living in the northwest of China. There are millions in a diaspora, around the world. The Uyghurs don’t even attempt to mask their fear, their desperation, their panic. Why should they? How can they?
The same is true even with professional Sinologists, old China hands who have seen it all, or a lot. Even they can’t play it cool.
What is happening? Up to a million Uyghurs have been rounded up, thrown into a gulag — an archipelago of “reeducation” camps — with no due process whatsoever. Many have simply been “disappeared.” There has not been mass killing yet, but many Uyghurs have been tortured to death.
Lots of people fear that this is a pre-genocidal situation — that the mass incarceration is a prelude to mass murder, and to organ harvesting, in particular. (This is one of the evil specialties of the Chinese Communist Party.) The entire Uyghur population, incarcerated or not, has been DNA-sampled.
In short, the Uyghurs feel they have an emergency on their hands. And they do. I have written a piece, giving the essentials.