Over the past three years, the Chinese government has implemented a highly repressive series of policies against Uighurs, a Muslim ethnic minority native to the country’s Xinjiang region. Uighurs live under unprecedented surveillance, their every move tracked through cameras and spyware-riddled mobile phones. The government strictly monitors them for signs of religious devotion, such as wearing a beard or veil, avoiding cigarettes and alcohol, or refusing to eat pork. Ancient mosques have been razed and schools are prohibited from teaching the Uighur language. More than one million Uighurs and other Muslim minorities are estimated to be detained in euphemistically-named “re-education facilities,” in which some have reportedly been tortured. Hundreds of thousands of Uighur families in the region have been forced to open their homes to Han Chinese volunteers who surveil their “host” families as they oversee their “patriotic re-education.” The Chinese government has subjected even Uighurs living outside of China to harassment and pressure, often preventing them from keeping in contact with relatives still in Xinjiang.
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