In the Xinjiang region of western China, the government has rounded up and detained hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs and other Muslim ethnic groups, including the wife and young children of a Uyghur businessman named Abdullatif Kucar. NPR correspondent Emilly Feng follows Kucar as he desperately searches for his missing family. To listen to this series sponsor-free and support NPR, sign up for Embedded+ in Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org. Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices NPR Privacy Policy
Hey, I'm Kelly McEvers and this is embedded from NPR.
In the Xinjiang region of China.
That's in the northwest part of the country, the Chinese government for years has been detaining and imprisoning hundreds of thousands of ethnic Uyghurs and other Muslim groups.
The US and some European countries are calling it cultural genocide.
Back in 2021, NPR's China correspondent Emily Fang started following the Kuchar family.
Their lives were totally torn apart by this crackdown on Uyghurs.
And three years later, she is still reporting on them.
And she realized that this one family story is about something much bigger, the massive Chinese surveillance of Uighurs.
She's gotten exclusive interviews with the people suffering from that surveillance and the people upholding it, which sometimes are one and the same.
So today we are starting a three part series reported by Emily with translation help from Uighur activist Abdouli Ayoob.
We start with the Kuchar family.
One Uyghur man's journey to find his wife and children after they were forcibly detained by Chinese authorities and then disappeared.
Three years ago, I had a long conversation with a man named Abdul Latif Kuchar, and his story was unlike any that I'd ever heard.
He's Uighur, a Turkic ethnic minority in western China that mostly practices Islam.
And he told me that for almost two years he lost all contact with his wife and children.
Abdul Latif told me it all started one December evening in 2017.
This is how he remembers it.
He'd been chatting with his wife Maryam on the phone.
He was in Istanbul, and she was back in China at their home in Xinjiang, a region in western China where most Uighurs live.
Maryam was exhausted and on edge because Chinese government minders, they call themselves relatives, had been keeping a close eye on her.