Xinjiang, China is home to the largest known concentration camp network in the modern world. Author and journalist Nick Holdstock discusses his work investigating the mass imprisonment of Muslims by Chinese officials and the tight government control that makes gathering information and providing aid to the Uyghur people so difficult. This episode covers the history and politics surrounding this human rights crisis.
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Nick Holdstock is a journalist and writer whose work has appeared in publications around the world including The Guardian, The London Review of Books, The Independent, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Dublin Review. He is the author of China’s Forgotten People and Chasing the Chinese Dream, two titles from our I. B. Tauris list.
Excellent Podcast thank you. Considering that Nick Holdstock was being scrupulously careful to express his experience and observations in measured sober language without recourse to rhetoric, it really helps us put the CCP’s repressive authoritarianism in perspective. I always say yes, I love China. I just loathe the CCP. That’s a sentiment widely shared by many who know them by their deeds, including of course their criminal cover-up of the COVID-19 outbreak and its disastrous consequences for the world. Nick Holdstock gives us a very clear insight into cultural genocide and Han colonisation that recalls crimes under the British Empire (the original inventors of the ‘concentration camp’), under the South African apartheid regime and in many other contexts. The word apartheid is most apt for what has happened in Xinjiang – or rather the annexed East Turkestan. I very much look forward to reading the book.