All Reading
This section contains a curated list of useful articles, investigations, books and other reading materials. The list is updated on a weekly basis and suggestions for additions are welcome.
Starting Points:
Public Security Minister’s Speech Describes Xi Jinping’s Direction of Mass Detentions in Xinjiang
An internal Chinese government document provides new support for the extraordinary scale of internment during what was likely its peak in 2018 and 2019. The document, a transcript of an internal June 15, 2018 speech by Minister of Public Security Zhao, reinforces the plausibility of previous detention estimates and is one of many documents leaked as part of the Xinjiang Police Files.
In Xinjiang’s Tech Incubators, Innovation Is Inseparable from Repression
In 2017, the Urumqi High-Tech Industrial Development Zone, in the capital of Xinjiang, published a catalogue of the “entrepreneurial and innovative” projects underway in its jurisdiction. The Xinjiang University Information Technology Innovation Park Co., Ltd. aimed to improve capacity for “grassroots makerspaces.” Another company was using blockchain “to establish an Asia-Europe big data trading platform.” But the catalogue also heralded innovation of a very different kind.
Where Did the One Million Figure for Detentions in Xinjiang’s Camps Come From?
Given the Chinese government has not released its own official numbers, and given the extreme obstacles that prevent independent on-the-ground accounting of camp inmates, how do outside observers arrive at the one million estimate?
‘Now We Don’t Talk Anymore’ - Inside the ‘Cleansing’ of Xinjiang
Last summer, when I traveled to Xinjiang, I witnessed the most abject sense of fear and trauma I have encountered in 27 years of researching identity and religion among its Uighur communities.
How Should the World Respond to Intensifying Repression in Xinjiang?, A ChinaFile Conversation
Deliberate, systematic human rights abuses are happening in China’s northwest. While several U.S. lawmakers have called for sanctions, much of the world remains silent, including the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, which calls itself “the collective voice of the Muslim world.” What should the international community do?
Xinjiang Unsettled
When you travel in Xinjiang, you see two communities living side-by-side but rarely interacting. Relations between Uighurs and Han Chinese have soured to the point where little dialogue seems possible. The 2009 Urumqi riots, in which a Uighur mob went on a killing spree that ultimately resulted in at least 194, mainly Han, deaths, was a turning point. Beijng’s “strike hard” policy in the aftermath of the riots, which continues to this day, has only created more resentment, hatred, and misunderstanding. On top of economic alienation, Uighurs feel culturally threatened. The shutdown of Uighur language schools and websites and the new rules curtailing the practice of Islam have only reinforced the sense of a Uighur identity, which wasn’t as strong a few decades ago.
Beyond the Dalai Lama: An Interview with Woeser and Wang Lixiong
An interview with Tsering Woeser and Wang Lixiong, an activist couple who have devoted themselves to chronicling ethnic unrest in China, and to finding solutions to it. Woeser, a Tibetan poet, was widely read in China until her books were banned in 2003 and her Chinese blog shut down in 2006.
Wang Lixiong and Woeser: A Way Out of China’s Ethnic Unrest?
Why has the Chinese government relied so much on suppression in Tibet and Xinjiang? “Simply put, it’s due to their politics, but they can’t say that. They say it’s due to hostile forces.”
Welcome to Uighur Web—Now Watch What You Say
China’s Internet is vast, with millions of sites and more than 618 million users. But nested within that universe is a tiny virtual community comprising just a few thousand websites where China’s Uighur gather online to communicate in their own language and script. This is the Uighur web. The space can be defined as the Internet as it exists within the borders of Xinjiang. It can also be seen as the Uighur-focused Internet perused by Uighurs across China. In both cases, content and access are tightly controlled.
Punching a Hole in the Great Firewall
China has “one of the most pervasive and sophisticated regimes of Internet filtering and information control in the world,” according to the OpenNet Initiative. The Ministry of Public Security’s censorship and surveillance system, formally called the Golden Shield and colloquially known as the Great Firewall, blocks access to thousands of websites focusing on what authorities deem politically “sensitive” issues or individuals (such as the Dalai Lama), or offer unfiltered discussions.
Are Ethnic Tensions on the Rise in China?
On December 31, President Xi Jinping appeared on CCTV and extended his “New Year’s wishes to Chinese of all ethnic groups.” On January 15, Beijing officials detained Ilham Tohti, a leading Uighur economist and subsequently accused him of “separtist offenses”; a fresh report shows arrests of Uighurs for “endangering state security” in Xinjiang rose sharply last year; and the number of Tibetans who have taken their own lives in public protest against Chinese rule has recently surpassed 120 since February 2009.
The Strangers: Blood and Fear in Xinjiang
In the winter of 2009, I was spending my weekends in the northeast Chinese city of Tangshan, and eating most of my food from the far-western province of Xinjiang. There was something unfamiliar about the place I usually ate at in Tangshan; the waiters were young children. Two solemn little girls of about eight, wearing Muslim headscarves, would take my order and relay it to the kitchen, occasionally joined by their plump-cheeked older brother. After we had gotten on familiar terms—I let them play on my laptop—I asked the girls when they started working as waitresses. “In July,” they said. It wasn’t surprising that the restaurant might have wanted a friendlier face at that point. That was the time that a Uighur mob had tried to murder one of my friends.
China’s Sufis: The Shrines Behind the Dunes
Lisa Ross’s photographs are not our usual images of Xinjiang. In 2008, 2009, and 2012, Xinjiang was the site of bloody protests. Instead of representing these political conflicts, however, Ross’s photographs are unassuming and quiet; people are never present and the objects she captures—stone on sand, cloth on stone, the skeleton of a dried animal—have an incandescent glow, as if lit by another sun. In fact, these images reveal a little-known religious tradition in Xinjiang—its desert shrines to Sufi saints. Taken in Xinjiang’s Taklamakan Desert, they are collected in Ross’s addictive new book, Living Shrines of Uyghur China, and are now on view at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York.
China’s Area of Darkness - Book Review
James Millward’s book is the first comprehensive study of Xinjiang, including its geography and prehistory, in English. This vast region in Eurasia has long been the setting for thousands of armed men, some Chinese, most others not, trying and failing to dominate a culturally mixed region the size of Great Britain, France, Germany, and Spain combined.