The Uyghurs — a predominantly Muslim people who inhabit China’s northwestern Xinjiang province and consider the region their homeland — have long had a tumultuous relationship with the various iterations of the Chinese state that have governed them since the mid-eighteenth century.

In 2017, that relationship entered a new and more terrifying phase as the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) — eyeing the region’s economic potential and drawing on Islamophobic, “War on Terror” rhetoric — began to construct a series of mass internment camps that, according to a 2018 study, are believed to hold over a million people in arbitrary detention.

The CCP has built a repressive apparatus that includes a panopticon of digital surveillance, family separation, forced birth control, and the physical destruction of Uyghur communities. As scholar David Brophy wrote in Jacobin in 2018, “More than at any point since its incorporation into the People’s Republic of China, Xinjiang today resembles occupied territory, and the party’s policies reveal an all-encompassing view of the Uyghurs as an internal enemy.”