After the Fall: Being American in the World We've Made

by Ben Rhodes

This is the apathy that those with unchecked power seek to engender in others: the idea that it’s not even worth caring about something because it’s not going to change. That’s the strategy the Chinese Communist Party has pursued for decades—for instance, on something like the erasure of the Tibetan people’s distinct language, culture, history, and leadership. It would hurt the feelings of the Chinese people and Xi Jinping if you met with the Dalai Lama. “It’s not worth it,” they might as well say. “It’s not going to change, and we have more important things to talk about.” But in Maya Wang’s telling, informed by countless interviews with Uighurs (“I didn’t interview one person who wasn’t crying or close to tears”), Xinjiang is really about the future of China. “It’s about the whole model of Xinjiang—the ability of authorities to put basically [an area the size of] a third of Western Europe under some kind of lockdown, from prisons to reeducation camps to being detained at home, depending on their level of reliability.”