Unlike the more recent lockdowns in major cities populated by ethnic Han majorities – like Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen – the majority Uyghur, Kazakh, and Kyrgyz people of East Turkistan are reportedly facing mass starvation, as the Communist Party fails to provide food shipments to homes where authorities do not let people out. Videos began surfacing in the past week on heavily censored Chinese social media outlets of people in the region desperately calling for the government to provide food, saying that they and their children were starving with no end in sight and no response from authorities.

Prior to the lockdowns, China began a campaign of genocide in the region to exterminate its indigenous Turkic population through mass internment in concentration camps, killing prisoners for organ harvesting, and sterilizing entire villages, according to eyewitnesses and human rights investigators.