NEW YORK - “Everyone has woken up,” she said. “Slowly. Change takes time.” The recent protests in China have rippled well beyond the mainland, to cities around the world with large contingents of Chinese students — even Hong Kong, where the pro-democracy protests of 2019 were crushed and dissent of any kind is now dangerous, writes the New York Times.

On the mainland, the protests may have drawn more attention to the Uyghurs, a mostly Muslim Turkic minority who have been the target of a crackdown that detained vast numbers of them in internment camps.

Many in China were aware of a Covid lockdown in Xinjiang that led to shortages of food and medicine. Then the deadly fire last month in the regional capital, Urumqi, set off the recent protests.

But activists and experts said that while the protesters knew about the fire and expressed solidarity with Uyghurs about the lockdown, that empathy did not necessarily extend to the group’s broader plight.

“Most people in China don’t really understand the camp system,” said Darren Byler, an anthropologist who studies the minority populations in northwestern China and the Uyghur diaspora. “They don’t see Xinjiang as the Uyghur homeland.

They see Xinjiang as a part of China, another province far away.” But some Uyghurs overseas who attended recent protests saw some hope for changing minds.