OneZero is partnering with Big Technology, a newsletter and podcast by Alex Kantrowitz, to bring readers exclusive access to interviews with notable figures in and around the tech industry.

This week, Kantrowitz sits down with BuzzFeed News reporter Megha Rajagopalan. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

_To subscribe to the podcast and hear the interview for yourself, _you can check it out on _Apple Podcasts**, Spotify, and _Overcast.**

China’s mass internment of Muslims in its Xinjiang region is one of the world’s most under-covered stories. The country has detained 1 million people there, putting them through a “reeducation” program meant to erase their language and culture, sometimes through forced labor and sterilization.

Though comprehensive, on-the-ground reporting from Xinjiang is sparse, BuzzFeed News reporter Megha Rajagopalan has been on the story from the beginning. She reported from Xinjiang itself. Then, after China did not renew her visa, she worked with BuzzFeed News contributors to track the internment camps using satellite imagery, finding that they are expanding.

To learn more about what’s happening in Xinjiang, how China treats the press, and the future of the global internet, I sat down with Rajagopalan on this week’s Big Technology podcast. The following discussion is filled with fascinating revelations from her reporting, an absolute clinic for anyone interested in these issues.

Kantrowitz: What is Xinjiang and what’s happening there?

Rajagopalan: Xinjiang is a really large region in Western China that sits on the border of a number of Central Asian countries. You have a population there of some 25 million people. About half are Uighur Muslims and other predominantly Muslim ethnic minorities and the other half are Han Chinese.

The government has had its issues with the minority populations there for a long time — since the Communist Party came to power in 1949. But what I’ve primarily written about is the government’s policies in Xinjiang in the Xi Jinping era. And it’s during that time period that things got significantly worse.

Starting in late 2016, early Sep 2017, the government started to implement this policy of high-tech and pervasive surveillance over Muslim minority populations, and mass internment and incarceration of a portion of that population.

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