Will any athlete risk raising China’s human rights record at this month’s Winter Olympics in Beijing? Will the BBC or Discovery make reference to it in their coverage? The difficulties are plain, because China does not take kindly to criticism of this nature. Nor does the International Olympics Committee want to stir up any bad publicity; its vice-president shrugged off the concerns by saying the issue is “not our remit”.

Dispatches, Channel 4’s laudable documentary strand, has no such qualms. In China: The Search for the Missing, it detailed allegations of mass detention, torture, forced sterilisation and abortion. An estimated one million Uyghur and Kazakh Muslims are said to be held in a network of jails and “re-education centres”. 

All the allegations were accompanied, for legal reasons, by denials from the Chinese Embassy. Mass internment and forced labour? No, these are “vocational and training centres set up to counter radicalisation”. A vast surveillance programme that monitors the conversations of Muslims in Xinjiang province, sending alerts if they use trigger words such as “prayers” and “gather”? This is “social governance to prevent crimes and does not target any specific ethnicity”. An independent UK tribunal concluding that China has committed genocide against the Uyghur people? “A machine churning out lies”, according to the Chinese government.

All of the participants demonstrated courage in taking part – from the blogger who secretly filmed vast, newly built “re-education centres” to the families whose children, parents or spouses had been jailed or disappeared. One man’s wife and boys vanished on a trip back to China; two years later he was sent a TikTok video of his four-year-old son in an orphanage, reciting Communist Party lines about the “five-star red flag”.

One of the most unsettling aspects was how far China is willing to exert threats beyond its borders. One mother found asylum in the Netherlands, but claimed she was told that she must send back her 16-year-old son or her father would be jailed. She did so, believing her son was too young to be imprisoned. He was detained immediately and sentenced to 13 years. She claimed that the police had sent a photo of her son in shackles, saying he would never be freed if she kept speaking out. It was a chilling film, all the more so because it offered no hope that these tiny voices would ever achieve anything in their fight against the state.