Editor’s Note: Every Wednesday, WPR Newsletter and Engagement Editor Benjamin Wilhelm curates the week’s top news and expert analysis on China.
The United States has offered its harshest assessment yet of the mass detention of Uighur Muslims in China’s western Xinjiang autonomous region. Speaking at a press briefing Friday, Randall Schriver, the assistant secretary of defense for Indo-Pacific security affairs, said China is “using the security forces for mass imprisonment of Chinese Muslims in concentration camps.”
Pressed on his use of the term “concentration camps,” Schriver defended it as “appropriate.” He also said that “at least a million but likely closer to 3 million citizens” were being detained—a significant jump from the usual estimate of a million or more detainees.