United States Agency for Global Media

Radio Free Asia wins award for in-depth web project on Uyghur diaspora

March 28, 2017

Washington, D.C. — RFA is among min magazine’s “Best of the Web” award winners and finalists for 2017. RFA’s “Between Identity and Integration: The Uyghur Diaspora in the West” was selected as the best multimedia feature in this year’s international contest. RFA’s online feature “The Wild West: Gold Mining and Its Hazards in Myanmar” was named a finalist in the same category.

“With this investigative project, RFA interviewed generations of Uyghurs who left their homeland to resettle and re-establish their lives at unimaginable costs,” said Libby Liu, RFA’s President. “It’s the stories of these brave individuals escaping Chinese repression that are so compelling.

“Credit for this award belongs to RFA’s Uyghur, editorial, and graphics staff for their hard work in realizing this incredible and ambitious project.”

Over the past 60 years, tens of thousands of ethnic Uyghurs from northwest China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region have fled oppression and political violence at home, seeking refuge in the West. “Between Identity and Integration” is the first known effort to document the emigration of Uyghurs from China to Europe and Turkey. RFA shares these individuals’ stories through interviews, in-depth reports, and graphics. Collected in this investigative project, they tell of the heartbreaking losses, intrepid escapes, and personal triumphs of Uyghurs who went into exile after the 1949 establishment of Communist Chinese rule, which extinguished hopes of an independent homeland.

RFA’s finalist entry “The Wild West” focuses on the unprecedented environmental destruction and human toll of rampant industrial gold mining in Myanmar. With a documentary video and in-depth reports, the special investigation provides a detailed look at the lives of the mostly young people driven by poverty to undertake the dangerous and low-paying work in the Mohnyin district of Myanmar’s northern Kachin State.

Other winners in this year’s min Awards include Bloomberg Media, The Economist, Time Inc., National Geographic Society, and Hearst Magazines Digital Media.