John Oliver returned to last week tonight on Sunday with a segment demanding attention to the persecution of China and the forced detention of the Uighurs, a predominantly Muslim ethnic minority in the country’s northwestern Xinjiang region, more than a One million of whom have been detained by the Chinese government in re-education camps.
“If this is the first time you have heard of an estimated one million people detained in detention camps, mostly Uighurs, but also Kazakhs and other ethnic minorities, you are not alone,” said Oliver. “And it’s probably because China has done its best to prevent this story from coming to light.”
Still, reports earlier this month revealed that many Uighurs have been forcibly sent to work in factories across China that produce personal protective equipment (PPE), such as face masks in response to the pandemic in the United States. In other words, “the same masks that some in this country see as an unacceptable violation of their personal freedom may be being created by people who would love for their worst offense to be politely asked to abandon a fucking Costco,” he said. Oliver.
And while “there is clearly nothing new about the horrible practices that lie deep in the global capitalism supply chain,” Oliver continued, “what is happening to the Uyghurs is particularly appalling.”
The systemic suppression of the government of the Uighurs, who number about 11 million in Xinjiang and are culturally, linguistically and ethnically different from the Han Chinese, who comprise 90% of the country’s population, is based on decades of discrimination by the regime communist based in Beijing. The Chinese government has exacerbated the long-standing prejudices of some Chinese against Uighurs, largely based on the Uighurs’ Muslim faith in an aggressively secular country, by encouraging Han migration to Xinjiang.
Prejudice, tension and extreme discrimination turned into riots in the Xinjiang capital in 2009, killing more than 200 Han Chinese and sparking a decade-long crackdown by the central government; In 2014, Chinese President Xi Jinping instituted the “Hard Strike Campaign Against Violent Terrorism,” which was “basically the Patriot Steroid Act,” Oliver said. “Suddenly, the Uighurs began to be treated as if they were potential terrorists.”
Xinjiang is now one of the most heavily watched areas in the world, with authorities “watching over things that most people would consider completely pointless,” said Oliver, such as growing a beard or applying for a passport. Marked individuals enter a predictive surveillance system that, according to a 2019 data leak, sent 15,000 Uighurs to “brainwashing camps” for just one week in 2017.
Repression is a “sensitive issue” for the Chinese government, Oliver continued, who initially denied the camps existed and later downplayed them as “vocational” facilities. But even strictly supervised state visits barely concealed their true role as Uighur prisons, as evidenced by leaked official documents encouraging staff to “strictly administer and control student activities to prevent leakage.”
“The phrase ‘avoid leaks’ is somewhat revealing,” said Oliver. “If your employee’s manual says ‘prevent escape,’ you’re probably working in a prison, or at least a Scientology picnic.”
During the pandemic, the government has intensified the existing deportation of Uighurs for job transfer out of Xinjiang, and “as you probably guessed, this is not a benevolent employment program,” Oliver said. “The idea, as a local government report put it, is that sending Uyghurs away from home will ‘distance them from extreme religious views and educate them,'” sending some 80,000 conservative Uighurs to factories that benefit multinational companies like Nike . A period of two years.
When contacted by Last Week Tonight, Nike said the factory was no longer employing Uighur workers and that company representatives “are conducting ongoing diligence with our suppliers in China.” What “seems like their supervisory policy is less ‘just do it’ and more ‘just talk about it and expect people to finally stop asking,'” Oliver replied.
More broadly, “in the future, the entire global community needs to do more,” Oliver concluded, calling on the UN to appoint independent investigators to investigate China’s abuses in Xinjiang, which governments should denounce “without leaning towards economic influence. from China, “and companies like Nike to clean up their supply chains while” actively using their financial clout to pressure the Chinese government to end these abuses. “
But none of this will happen, he argued, without a redirection of individual attention. “I know raising awareness is often a crappy solution that doesn’t really solve a problem, but there can be a real benefit to awareness even if it comes through a TikTok makeup tutorial or,” he added, pointing to himself, “the exact opposite of one.
“When it comes to a concerted campaign focused on cultural erasure, one of the most important things we can do is keep paying attention.”
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