I am of Indian origin but grew up in China. If you want to know how its got to this state I can tell you my point of view. Back in ~2007 I saw the first brush of Uighur Han tensions. My family and I were stuck in a traffic jam in a very crowded market place. We were in car with a driver. At some point my mom, who used to be a journalist, spotted a pickpocket. This pickpocket was armed with a knife and was going about pick pocketing people. There was a police patrol around, however it was clear that he was trying to steer clear of trouble with the pickpocket. When my mom saw this her inner indian-journalist/activist was immediately re-awakened. She was about to open the door and take on the negligent police and pickpocket. At this point our driver immediately locked the door and told her to stop. He explained that the man was an Uighur and the police just did not want to run in to his gang. Later on we learnt that many Uighurs would leave their home towns for second and first tier cities in China in the hope of finding work. However due to linguistic and cultural barriers they would inevitably be unable to find work and hence fall to other ways to make money. Unfortunately when you are a minority if one person of you're kind does something wrong, your entire minority comes under scrutiny. There was a point in time when news of mass stabbings by Uighurs was becoming a weekly phenomenon. The one sited on Wikipedia is a stabbing at train stations, but I remember some which even involved children in kindergartens and pre-schools. Naturally, the local population will expect something. China may not be a democracy but their government has a social contract with the han majority to make sure they deliver. All of this was happening around the time that Xi was slowly taking the reigns from the then president Hu Jin Tao. Xi's rise was not particularly clean and his establishment of "anti-corruption" bureaus was most certainly a good way of him to get rid of opposing politicians. To prove his metal he needed to act. One of the things that was evident was the Uighurs needed "education" so they could work. For all purposes, the average Chinese would back this (heck even I would think that it'd be a good thing to help disadvantaged people come out of poverty). The only problem with "education" in China is that its not always what the rest of the world would consider humane. As a child, I had a piano teacher would beat me if I played the wrong notes. When my parents found out they of course flipped shit and immediately fired her, but I'm pretty sure other children were subjected to similar treatment and their parents would support such treatment. It is only very recently that the average Chinese parent actually started to consider child abuse by teachers as wrong. Hence it was not difficult for the CCP to recruit a group of people who sincerely believe they are doing social work to design, build and run these camps. To add to the fire you of course had western media which would report terrorism acts that were predominantly muslim (seems like american media thinks white shooters are not terrorists but anyone muslim is, and yes, Chinese do read western media its not North Korea). Hence the local Chinese also would be lead to believe that stamping out Islam is what the rest of the world supports. Towards the end of the stay there were a few times that the police stopped myself and my dad because we looked Uighur, but once we told them we were foreigners they became very jovial and let us carry on with our work. I don't know how cancel culture will solve this. In fact I don't how the world will solve this without causing more divides and hurt to an already very polarized world. But I do know one thing, it is important that we remain kind to one another irregardless of race, language or religion.