A Uyghur man who recently left Xinjiang (East Turkistan for Uyghurs) interviewed with Voice of America about life in his homeland. Over 11 million Uyghurs live in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in northwestern China, according to China’s 2020 census, which is 45% of the total population of the region’s 25 million inhabitants. More than 10 million Han Chinese live in the region. The others there are from majority Muslim ethnic groups, including Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Uzbeks and Huis (Chinese Muslims).
The interviewee mentions confiscation of passports by Chinese authorities, the transfer of Uyghurs from reeducation camps to factories, arbitrary and repeat arrests of Uyghurs, lack of freedom of movement, disappearances and “the normalization of the combination of fear and hopelessness.”
