In February, Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, declared on Chinese state television, “China has the right to carry out antiterrorism and de-extremization work for its national security.” He was following the clumsy script that China has used repeatedly to cover up its violations of the human rights of the Uyghur people in Xinjiang province.

The alibi is common to authoritarian states who create “states of exception” and “emergency resolutions” to bypass the rule of law, substituting its own self-appointed notion of “right” to violate human rights doctrine conventions. In the case of the Uyghur, an entire people has been categorized as “terrorist,” and China has developed a massive and programmatic response to such “extremism” — concentration camps that extract labor at the same time as they suppress any thoughts, beliefs, cultural values, language, even food, that evinces Muslim identity.

Besides bin Salman, other leaders regarded as strong advocates for Muslims have also signed on to what might be called the “Uyghur Exception.” In 2017, Pakistan’s current prime minister, Imran Khan, while still in the political opposition party, condemned the “hypocrisy” of the international community in failing to protect the rights of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar; Khan also has criticized human rights violations against Muslim Kashmiris.

But when asked about the Uyghur, Khan simply said, “Frankly, I don’t know much about that,” explaining that the issue was “not so much in the papers.”

Many speculate that, like bin Salman, Khan has chosen not to defend Uyghur Muslims because of the lucrative trade deals Middle East countries are inking with China. In the case of Pakistan, this has taken the form of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) along the Arabian sea, a project priced at $60 billion. In an op-ed in the Washington Post, Barkha Dutt notes that “China has long used its economic investments for strategic expansionism, especially in countries that share a border (maritime or terrestrial) with India. Whether it’s Nepal, Bhutan, Sri Lanka or the Maldives, China has dangled investments in exchange for influence.”

Economics also plays a large role in the persecution and repression of the Uyghur as well. Approximately ten million Uyghur are concentrated in Xinjiang province, also known as the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region (XUAR). It spans some 640,000 square miles, representing about one-sixth of the total land area under the control of the People’s Republic of China.

China has long been intent on exploiting Xinjiang’s vast natural resources — increasing oil extraction and refining, along with coal and natural gas production, among other resources. The province has an estimated twenty-one billion tons of oil reserves; its coal resources represent 40 percent of China’s total. Thus the repression of the Uyghur takes place simultaneously with the plundering of Xinjiang’s natural resources.

But Xinjiang is important for another reason: it is the hub of the most ambitious infrastructure project in modern history.

The Belt and Road initiative runs along the old Silk Road, and will span three continents and cover almost 60 percent of the world’s population. It is the vehicle with which China hopes to become the world’s predominant superpower. Thus it is all the more essential to control this key geopolitical area with an iron hand.

The suppression of the Uyghur also has both a direct and indirect benefit. It represses an entire population and that repression serves as a threat to any other group that would challenge Chinese hegemony. The construction and maintenance of the concentration camps is meant to “re-educate” the rest of China, and indeed the world, at the same time it tortures the Uyghur and extracts all elements of their independence.