Bearing Witness to the Uyghur Genocide During the Beijing Olympics

The 2022 Winter Olympics have kicked off in Beijing. Meanwhile, in the northwestern Xinjiang region of China, the government is implementing policies that many human rights organizations and foreign governments have determined amount to crimes against humanity and even genocide against the Uyghur people. The juxtaposition of this internationally celebrated Olympics in the midst of an ongoing human rights calamity is what drives our conversation today, with four different speakers. Rushan Abbas is the founder and executive director of the campaign for Uyghurs Teng Biao is a Chinese human rights lawyer and the Pozen Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago. Yaqiu Wang is the senior china researcher for human rights watch Sean Roberts is a professor at the Elliot School of International Affairs at the George Washington University and author of the book The War on the Uyghurs. We recorded our conversation live on Twitter Spaces just before the opening ceremony.