- The video begins with a humorous introduction about eyelashes but quickly shifts to discussing the Uyghurs, a Muslim ethnic minority in China.
- The Chinese government has been treating the Uyghurs terribly, with reports of internment camps and forced indoctrination.
- Uyghurs are being used as forced labor in factories, including for producing face masks during the pandemic.
- The Chinese government has tried to keep this story hidden, but it is becoming harder to ignore.
- The Uyghurs face discrimination due to their cultural and religious differences, and tensions have escalated since 2009.
- Xinjiang is heavily policed, with surveillance on every house and a list of behavioral indications of religious extremism.
- China uses a predictive policing system to monitor potential threats and sends thousands of people to re-education camps based on suspicion.
- The Chinese government argues that they are being proactive in preventing crimes, but this logic is questioned.
- The video references the movie Minority Report to highlight the ethical concerns of preventive policing.
- People in Xinjiang are being arrested and put in camps without having committed any crimes.

- People in Xinjiang have been arrested and thrown into camps without committing any crimes.
- Initially, the Chinese government denied the existence of the camps but later claimed they were vocational training facilities.
- The camps have prison-like conditions and detainees are subjected to abuse and forced to undergo re-education.
- Reports of forced abortions, sterilizations, and cultural erasure of Uyghur minority are also prevalent.
- China has shifted to sham trials and mass labor transfers, forcing Uyghurs into factory and service jobs.
- International companies like Nike and Volkswagen have been implicated in benefiting from Uyghur forced labor.
- The global community needs to take action, including independent investigations, speaking out against abuses, and pressuring the Chinese government to end these practices.

The piece emphasizes the importance of awareness and attention towards the treatment of Uyghurs, even if it comes from unconventional sources like TikTok. It highlights the need to take action against cultural erasure and urges people to speak up if an entire culture is being replaced.

- The video discusses the mistreatment of the Uyghurs, a Muslim ethnic minority in China.
- Uyghurs are being forced into internment camps and used as forced labor.
- China has tried to hide this issue, but it is gaining attention.
- The Uyghurs face discrimination and tensions have escalated.
- Xinjiang is heavily policed and China uses predictive policing to monitor potential threats.
- People are being arrested and put in camps without committing crimes.
- The camps have prison-like conditions and detainees are abused.
- Forced abortions, sterilizations, and cultural erasure are also reported.
- International companies have been implicated in benefiting from Uyghur forced labor.
- Action is needed, including independent investigations and speaking out against abuses.

John Oliver discusses the human rights abuses the Uighur people are facing at the hands of the Chinese government, and why those atrocities are worth our undivided attention.

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Our main story tonight concerns eyelashes.

Among other things, the reasons that camels are so sexy.

Look, without those luscious lashes, they'd just be lumpy horses with furry back boobs.

But then you see those eyes and you remember, oh, yeah, I totally fuck a camel.

And by the way, I'm serious, we're gonna talk about eyelashes.

Look, it's the summer, there's a pandemic raging, and frankly, I think we've all earned a deep dive on how to best make your eyelashes pop.

And to that end, There's a TikTok makeup tutorial that I'd like you to take a look at.

I'm gonna teach you guys how to get long lashes.

So the first thing you need to do is grab your lash curler, curl your lashes, obviously.

Then you're gonna put them down and use your phone that you're using right now to search up what's happening in China, how they're getting concentration camps, throwing innocent Muslims in there, separating their families from each other.

She went from promising longer lashes to discussing concentration camps in just 12 seconds, and that's genuinely impressive.

Look, I'm a bit of an expert at taking something fun and quickly ruining it, so this is game recognizing game here.

A lash curler is a vital tool in anyone's beauty arsenal, and there's an ethnic group in China being systematically surveilled and imprisoned in an attempt to essentially wipe their culture off the map.

Let's hold the eyelash story for another week, and instead, let's talk about this.

Because the people in question are the Uyghurs.

They're a mostly Muslim ethnic minority in a region of China called Xinjiang.

And the Chinese government has been treating them absolutely terribly.

Panel says the region resembles a massive internment camp, where more than 1000000 Muslim minorities have been rounded up, detained, and forcibly indoctrinated by the Chinese regime.

Witness accounts, satellite imagery, and Communist Party documents reveal what appears to be the largest imprisonment of people on the basis of religion since the Holocaust.

Saying anything is the largest since the Holocaust automatically makes whatever you just said worse.

The largest collection of shoes since the Holocaust?

And if this is the first time that you're hearing about an estimated million people who've been held in detention camps, mostly Uyghurs, but also Kazakhs and other ethnic minorities, you are not alone.

And it's probably because China has done its level best to keep this story from getting out.

Just this week, we learned that you may actually have a personal connection to this without even knowing it.

Because it turns out, Uighurs are being shipped and not always willingly to work in factories across China.

And some of the products they've been making may be right in front of your face.

If you are 1 of the millions of people around the world wearing a face mask because of the coronavirus pandemic...

It shows a group of Uyghurs arriving at a textile company that started producing masks in response to the pandemic.

We identified several Chinese companies that use Uyghur labor to produce PPE.

And we tracked some of their shipments to consumers in the U.S.

The very masks that some in this country see as unacceptable infringements on their personal liberty may be getting made by people who would absolutely love for their worst infringement to be getting politely asked to leave a fucking Costco.

And while there is clearly nothing new about horrific practices being hidden deep in the supply chain of global capitalism, what is happening to the Uyghurs is particularly appalling.

Who they are, what's been happening to them, and why.

About 11 million Uyghurs live in Xinjiang, in the far northwest corner of China.

It's resource-rich and it's strategically important.

But Uyghurs have always had an uncomfortable relationship with the authorities in Beijing.

They have their own language and are culturally and ethnically distinct from the rest of China's population, which is more than 90 percent Han Chinese.

On top of which, there's the fact that Uyghurs are Muslim in a country that is aggressively secular.

So much so, that a few years ago, a Chinese reality show went to Dubai, and state TV censored all depictions of a woman in a headscarf in the weirdest possible way.

Covering it with a cartoon helmet and a shock of yellow hair with a ghost in it.

And covering her hijab by obscuring her completely with a cactus in a Santa hat.

Even doing that when she was reflected in another person's sunglasses.

And look, setting aside the issue of religious freedom for a second, that's an amazing way to censor someone out of a TV show.

I'm just saying, watching old episodes of House of Cards would be much less uncomfortable if it looked like this instead.

Because I just wanted to look in your eyes 1 more time before we do this.

And now you can enjoy House of Cards just as much as you used to, which was a bit.

So there was that baseline difference there, on top of which, some Han Chinese have held bigoted views about the Uyghurs.

In fact, just listen to this interview from back in 2008.

Here in Beijing, Uyghurs are dispersed across the city.

Many work at restaurants and street stalls.

They stand out because of their different features and dress.

Some Han Chinese are blatantly prejudiced against them.

The people from Xinjiang are Not very good.

That is not an acceptable way to describe an entire ethnic group.

It's barely an acceptable way to describe all raccoons.

I mean, yeah, they are essentially just kleptomaniac possums who steal your trash with their spooky little doll hands, but that's not all that they are.

And all of this was exacerbated by the Chinese government, encouraging Han people to migrate to Xinjiang, with them often being favored over Uyghurs for top jobs.

And these tensions and resentments amid an overall atmosphere of extreme discrimination finally boiled over in 2009 with riots in the capital that killed 200 people, mostly Han Chinese.

But rather than address the complex underlying factors behind those riots and other incidents, the Chinese government simply painted them as religious terrorism, beginning a decade-long crackdown that's escalated steadily, especially after China's president, Xi Jinping, came to power and instituted what was called the Strike Hard campaign against violent terrorism in 2014.

And think of it as the Patriot Act on steroids.

Because all of a sudden, Uyghurs started being treated like they were all potential terrorists.

In fact, Xinjiang is now 1 of the most heavily policed areas in the world, with the authorities surveilling things that most people would find utterly meaningless.

If you go through Uyghur neighborhoods or suburbs, you see cameras over literally every house entrance so the government can see who enters and who leaves.

How low is the bar for being highlighted by the system.

Are you socializing more or less with your neighbors?

Are you going out the front door of your house instead of the back door of your house?

The government has a list of 75 behavioral indications of religious extremism, with some as vague as...

Although that last 1 clearly would not be an issue for me, because I got 2 pretty obvious reasons for dumbbell ownership right here.

It's not called a workout if you don't put the work in, bro, Seth Bronrad.

Trust me, they call me the lunch lady, because from the hours of 11 to 1, I don't stop stacking plates.

I call this 1 John and this 1 Taffer because together, they lift up bars.

But look, China doesn't just collect this information, it feeds it into a predictive policing system that monitors for potential threats.

In 1 week, it flagged the names of 24,000 people as suspicious, 15,000 of whom were then sent to re-education camps.

And when pressed on whether any of this is strictly necessary, Chinese officials will argue that they are simply being proactive.

Some people, before they commit murder, already show they are capable of it.

Should we wait for them to commit a crime or prevent it from happening?

Okay, that is both insane logic and also the exact plot of Minority Report, which, if you haven't seen it, very briefly, the year's 2054, Tom Cruise's John Anderton is chief of Washington, D.C.'s pre-crime police department, where murders are stopped before they happen.

Now, ethically, There are some questions about the system.

For instance, can you really be sure an individual will commit the crimes that the precogs say they'll commit?

They are bald freaks who sleep in an indoor swimming pool and they scream whenever they visualize a future murder.

I think they're all siblings or aliens or babies.

But basically, The murder rate in the city is 0, Anderton's doing well, and so the status quo remains.

Now, 1 day, the precogs generate a prediction.

John Anderton will murder a man he doesn't even know in just 36 hours, but it couldn't be.

So, he stages an escape, gets an eye transplant so he can't be detected by the city's eye-based surveillance system, finds out he's being framed, then finds out that Max von Sydow, oh yeah, by the way, he's in this too, is gonna kill Anderson, but decides not to, and Anderson doesn't kill the person that he supposedly was going to, disproving the very basis of the pre-crime system and proving that people do have free choice.

So, in the end, they shut down the program and send the precogs away to live on a farm, but not the death kind, we assume.

Anyway, it's scary, but it's pretty good.

But the bigger point is, People in Xinjiang have been arrested and thrown in camps, despite having committed no crimes.

A million Uyghurs were at 1 point being held extrajudicially, many for acts as innocuous as growing a beard, fasting, or applying for a passport.

And this is a very sore subject for the Chinese government, which initially denied the existence of the camps at all, before shifting to arguing that they are merely vocational training facilities.

Although, even the heavily orchestrated media tours suggest their primary purpose might be something else.

Authorities recently took some diplomats and journalists on a carefully supervised tour of some of these facilities.

Some detainees told journalists the camps re-educate them.

All of us found that we have something wrong with ourselves.

And luckily enough, the Communist Party and the government offer this kind of school to us for free.

If you're happy and you know it, say yes sir.

That might be the single creepiest sing-along I've ever heard that doesn't involve Barney, a dinosaur who is clearly aware of clothing, he's wearing a hat, and yet still actively chooses to go bottomless around children.

And for all the Chinese government's talk of vocational training, these camps sure seem prison-like.

Leaked classified documents have shown that staff at these facilities were told to...

And the phrase, prevent escapes, is something of a tell there.

If your employee handbook says, prevent escape, you're probably working at a prison or at the very least, a Scientology picnic.

Hey, we're just here to grill some dogs, play some tunes, and if anyone asks where Shelley is, do not let them escape.

And look, if that weren't enough to make it clear what these camps really are.

Just listen to 1 former detainee describe what she went through.

Each woman gets 2 minutes to go to the toilet.

If you're not quick enough, they shock you with an electric baton on the back of your head.

Even after being shocked, we had to say, thank you, teacher, we will not be late next time.

I didn't think people had to publicly thank abusers anymore now that Harvey Weinstein doesn't go to award shows.

And look, I'm not even getting into the reports of forced abortions and sterilizations of Uyghur women, which are absolutely horrific.

And China will argue that this is all about economic opportunity and attempting to assimilate a historically ostracized minority.

But assimilation, when forced, is cultural erasure.

Because in addition to using mass detention to keep families apart, There are also rules that seem to be trying to break the chain by which families hand down a culture and faith across generations, from laws preventing kids from going to mosques, to a ban on baby names that are considered too Islamic, to the creation of state-run boarding schools for Uyghur children.

Now, other moves by China have been even more on the nose, like the destruction of Uyghur cemeteries.

The government actually turned an enormous graveyard where a prominent Uyghur poet was buried into something called Happiness Park, complete with fake pandas, children's rides, and a man-made lake.

And look, I'm not saying that this is the most important thing, but this is 1 of the pandas in question.

And frankly, I have never had more questions.

Why does he have the posture of a startled gopher?

Why does he have an expression that screams, I just had a lobotomy, but it turns out I'm both happy about it and surprisingly horny?

Frustratingly, we may never know the answers.

Now, thankfully, as criticism of China's camps has intensified in recent years.

The government seems to be closing some of them.

Unfortunately, though, they seem to have shifted to staging sham trials and transferring many Uyghurs to prisons that aren't even pretending to be training centers anymore.

China's also created a system of mass labor transfers that sends Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities into factory and service jobs, sometimes hundreds or thousands of miles from home.

That is how those masks that we mentioned at the start of this piece are getting made.

And Chinese state media presents this as a positive, showing Uyghur workers arriving at a train station, then being taken on a bus to their new accommodations, all with upbeat narration like this.

Xinxiang has organized transfers for around 178,000 workers, providing them a stable employment rate of over 92 percent.

Yeah, you can't celebrate a stable workforce when it is forced labor, any more than you give me credit for spending a lot of time with my kids over the past few months.

Believe me, if I had any other choice, I wouldn't be.

Because as you've probably guessed, this isn't just a benevolent jobs program.

The idea, as 1 local government report put it, is that sending Uyghurs far from home will allow for...

1 Australian think tank that investigated forced labor estimated that conservatively, over just a two-year period, more than 80,000 Uyghurs were transferred out of Xinjiang to work in factories across China.

They also found over 80 companies, directly or indirectly, benefiting from Uyghur labor in their supply chain.

Some of them, big international brands like Nike.

When the Washington Post visited the factory of 1 of Nike's suppliers, it found Uyghur workers were forced to attend patriotic education and Mandarin classes, and live in dormitories under constant supervision, with 1 worker saying, we can walk around, but we can't go back to Xinjiang on our own.

Now, Nike has claimed that this factory no longer employs Uyghur workers, and they told us that they take any reports about forced labor seriously, and they're conducting ongoing diligence with our suppliers in China.

Which, given what the Post found, feels like their policy on oversight is less just do it than just talk about doing it and hope people eventually stop asking.

Another company on the list is Volkswagen, which told us they found no indications of forced labor in their supply chain.

Though, it is worth noting that last year, their CEO was challenged about whether China's treatment of the Uyghurs gave him pause, and this was his response.

We are absolutely proud to also create workplaces in that region, which we think is very useful.

But Xinjiang is something you're not proud to be associated with in terms of what the Chinese government is doing to Uyghur people in

You don't know about China's re-education camps for a million Uyghur people, that it has referred to as re-education camps as part of its counter-terror threat in the west of this country?

Finding out that Volkswagen is overlooking a massive human rights crisis is kind of a lot like finding out your grandparents are still having sex.

Sure, it's completely horrifying, but it really shouldn't be too shocking.

After all, they've been doing it since World War II.

And look, I can understand why companies and others might want to turn away from what's going on in Xinjiang, because it's harrowing.

Remember that woman who got electric shocks for taking too long in the bathroom?

She was in 2 different camps, then was transferred into forced labor at a glove factory, all while separated from her family for 2 years.

And while they were eventually reunited, they are understandably still haunted to this day.

That is heartbreaking and completely indefensible.

And whenever pressed on this, the Chinese government has been quick to use whataboutism.

They responded to US criticism by invoking atrocities ranging from the genocide of Native Americans to a statement that read, George Floyd's death shows that U.S.

Systemic racism has choked ethnic minorities so hard that they can't breathe.

Those are fair points right there, but...

It's also completely possible for 2 things to be wrong at the same time.

And I know, the U.S.-China relationship is complicated, particularly right now, and too often, it descends into reductive, xenophobic, us-versus-them stereotypes.

But human rights should be completely non-negotiable.

Has taken some small steps here, like imposing sanctions against top Chinese officials and Congress even passed the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act earlier this year.

But, although Trump signed it, he also reportedly told Xi Jinping that he should go ahead with building the camps because he thought it was...

Which, from a foreign policy perspective, a human rights perspective, a political perspective, and even an interpersonal perspective, is exactly the wrong fucking thing to do.

But look, this clearly isn't just about Trump, is it?

Going forward, the entire global community needs to do more.

Should have independent investigators looking into what China has done in Xinjiang.

Governments around the world should be speaking out about the treatment of the Uyghurs without bending to China's economic influence.

And big, multinational companies like Nike and VW should not only be working to clean up their supply chains, but also actively using their financial leverage to pressure the Chinese government to end these abuses.

But none of that is gonna happen unless people pay attention.

And look, I know that raising awareness is often a bullshit solution that doesn't really solve a problem.

But there can be a real benefit to awareness, even if it is coming through a TikTok makeup tutorial, or let's say, the exact opposite of 1.

Because in this instance, awareness is actually a necessary precondition for action.

And I know, there is a lot to worry about right now.

From a raging pandemic, to an ugly presidential election, to a purple pervert who couldn't give a fuck about pants.

But we have to make sure that the treatment of Uyghurs is also on that list.

Because when you're dealing with a concerted campaign centered on cultural erasure, 1 of the most important things we can do is continue to pay attention.

At the very least, so that if an entire culture is replaced by a horny, lobotomized panda, we'll know to stand up and fucking say something.

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China & Uighurs: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)