Megha Rajagopalan

Summary of Madison Activities

Megha Rajagopalan presented a special talk titled, “Dateline Xinjiang: International Correspondent Megha Rajagopalan on Her Work Covering Police States” to over 50 students at UW-Madison.

Rajagopalan worked with architect Alison Killing to produce the Pulitzer Center-supported reporting project Built to Last, an extensive investigation of China’s internment camp system. Drawing from publicly available satellite images and dozens of interviews with former detainees, BuzzFeed News identified more than 260 structures built since 2017 bearing the hallmarks of fortified detention compounds. During that time, the investigation shows, China established a sprawling system to detain and incarcerate hundreds of thousands of Uighurs, Kazakhs, and other Muslim minorities.

Megha’s Biography

Megha Rajagopalan is an award-winning international correspondent for BuzzFeed News, based in London. She has been a staff correspondent for BuzzFeed News based in China and Thailand as well as in Israel and the Palestinian territories, and before that she was a political correspondent for Reuters in China. She has reported from 23 countries in Asia and the Middle East on stories ranging from the North Korean nuclear crisis to the peace process in Afghanistan. Rajagopalan was the first journalist to find and visit an internment camp for Uighur Muslims in China’s far west — work for which she won the Human Rights Press Award in 2018. In 2019, she won a Mirror Award for an investigation uncovering the links between Facebook and religious violence in Sri Lanka. Previously she was a Fulbright fellow in Beijing and a research fellow at the New America Foundation in Washington DC. She speaks Tamil and Mandarin Chinese.