China’s ambassador has no answer to the treatment of Uighur Muslims

When Liu Xiaoming agreed to come on the Andrew Marr show, he ought to have expected that – as the Chinese ambassador – he’d be asked about Uighur Muslims. He doubtless came on to bemoan the Huawei decision. But as anyone with a social media account could have told him, video footage of people with their heads shaved, blindfolded, kneeling, handcuffed, being forced on to trains have been circulating widely for days now. It was fairly obvious that the subject would come up. Marr didn’t just raise the topic, he screened the video. The ambassador seemed flummoxed. It made for some very striking television:

The ‘re-education’ camps are understood to detain about a million Uighur people and other, mostly Muslim, minorities in response to what Beijing describes as terrorist attacks. It is widely seen as state-sanctioned ethnic cleansing using 21st century concentration camps. 

When asked by Marr to explain the footage, Liu began to say that Xinjiang – the area where Uighurs are being imprisoned – is ‘very beautiful’.