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:
In Istanbul, the last Uyghur bookshops struggle to survive
Caught between a vindictive Chinese state and Turkish police, Uyghur booksellers try to preserve their language and culture.
China’s crackdown on Uyghurs reaches the Arctic
During his final month in Xinjiang, before he set off for Europe, Memettursun Omer’s Chinese handlers threatened him. They told him how they “dealt” with people who went to the west on intelligence missions and then severed contact with the authorities. “Wherever you go, we can always take you back. You have no other way except to work for us,” they said.
China ordered a Uyghur journalist extradited to Xinjiang. His wife has taken to the Istanbul streets to stop it
Every day is a protest for Buzainuer Wubuli, 28, and her three young children. Her husband, Idris Hasan (Yidiresi Aishan), is a journalist, computer engineer and activist. He is one of the thousands of Uyghurs living abroad being sought out by Chinese authorities in an attempt to bring them back to Xinjiang.
China's Global Dragnet
Since 1997, the Chinese government has engaged in an unprecedented scale of abuse and reprisals – often called “transnational repression” – against Uyghurs living abroad. These are the 440 people in 40 countries known to have faced detention, deportation, and more from 1997 until March 2021.
Immersive simulation attempts to pierce apathy over the Uyghur genocide
Uyghur students in Istanbul are attempting to make people viscerally feel their ongoing genocide. They’ve done that with immersive simulation rooms, and may have, to a high degree, succeeded. “For the simulation part, we want visitors to actually feel the experience,” said Idris Ayas, 29, who came to Istanbul to study law 10 years ago. “By touching the Tiger Chair, by visiting the forced cotton-picking farm, the forced abortion room and the concentration camp cells, visitors actually feel that these things are really happening in 2022.”
Threatened, harassed, punished: The Uyghur translators defying China to tell Xinjiang’s story
Journalists rely on a short supply of Uyghur interpreters to investigate the human rights crisis in northwest China. The CCP is intent on muzzling them.
Why targeting ethnic minority journalists is central to China’s crackdown on the press
Tibetan and Uyghur reporters are under siege in Beijing’s war on free expression.
‘Surveillance’ doesn’t begin to describe what Beijing is doing to Uyghurs
Researcher and writer Vicky Xiuzhong Xu talks about the way the Chinese state has penetrated every aspect of life in Xinjiang — and targeted her, thousands of miles away, in Australia.
China’s oppression of Xinjiang’s Uyghurs: a visual history
Today, Xinjiang’s Uyghurs are subject to a comprehensive, targeted campaign of surveillance and control. According to leading researchers and human rights groups, as many as 1.5 million have been placed in concentration camps. This ongoing program of repression follows decades of tension between the Uyghurs and the Chinese government. So, how did we get here?