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:
Great Wall of Steel: China’s Global Campaign to Suppress the Uyghurs
This report posits that the focus on how Uyghurs are treated within China ignores China’s harassment of Uyghurs and Kazakhs living abroad.
An overview of the atrocities against Uyghur Muslims
An overview of the atrocities taking place in Xinjiang and information on re-education campaigns, sexual violence, forced labour and actions you can take to support Uyghurs.
Land of Strangers: The Civilizing Project in Qing Central Asia
At a time when understanding the roots of the modern relationship between Uyghurs and China has taken on new urgency, Land of Strangers illuminates a crucial moment of social and cultural change in this dark period of Xinjiang’s past.
China’s system of oppression in Xinjiang: How it developed and how to curb it
This report describes the history of Uyghur oppression in Xinjiang, outlining the current conditions in the region and Chinese surveillance policies, as well as policy recommendations for addressing the ongoing oppression.
China’s Uyghur Repression
In the name of combating Islamic extremism, the Chinese Communist Party has embarked on a massive campaign of harassment and detention of Uyghurs in the Xinjiang province.
The Historical Foundations of Religious Restrictions in Contemporary China
The ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) abolished its total ban on religious activities in 1982. However, the distrust that the CCP feels for religions remains obvious today, and the religious restrictions in contemporary China remain tight. Conventional wisdom tells us that the official atheist ideology of Marxism-Leninism is the main reason behind the CCP’s distrust for, and restriction of, religion. However, taking a historical institutionalist perspective, this paper argues that the religious restrictions in contemporary China are in fact rooted in the fierce political struggles of the country’s two major revolutions in the first half of the twentieth century.
Ethnic Policy in China: Is Reform Inevitable
Following significant interethnic violence beginning in 2008, Chinese intellectuals and policymakers are now engaged in unprecedented debate over the future direction of their country's ethnic policies. This study attempts to gauge current Chinese opinion on this once-secretive and still highly sensitive area of national policy. Leading public intellectuals, as well as some party officials, now openly call for new measures strengthening national integration at the expense of minority rights and autonomy. Adjustments in rhetoric and policy emphasis are expected as the party-state attempts to strengthen interethnic cohesiveness as a part of its larger agenda of stability maintenance.
Behind the Violence in Xinjiang
The eruption of ethnic violence in China’s Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, the most deadly recorded in decades, seems to have taken both Beijing and the world by surprise. It should not have.
Migration, Modernisation and Ethnic Estrangement: Uyghur Migration to Urumqi
This article explores how the modernisation project in Xinjiang is taking precedence over ethnic harmony, as the ethnic division of labour exacerbates tensions between Han and Uyghur people.
China's Uyghur 'Problem’
The Xinjiang province is strategically very important for China, but what of the rights of the Uighurs?
China: Minority Exclusion, Marginalization and Rising Tensions
This report demonstrates how China’s overarching agenda for ‘unity’, under the guise of ‘development’ and ‘security’, is having a particularly grave impact on its minority communities, including the Uyghurs in Xinjiang.
Devastating Blows - Religious Repression of Uighurs in Xinjiang
This report details for the first time the complex architecture of law, regulation, and policy in Xinjiang that denies Uighurs religious freedom.
The Xinjiang Conflict: Uyghur Identity, Language Policy, and Political Discourse
This study explores Chinese language policy and language use in Inner Asia, as well as the relation of language policy to the politics of Uyghur identity. Language is central to ethnic identity, and official language policies are often overlooked as critical factors in conflict over ethnic nationalism. In Chinese Inner Asia, any solution to ethnic conflict will include real linguistic and cultural autonomy for major ethnic groups.
Violent Separatism in Xinjiang: a critical assessment
Since the events of 9-11 and Chinese attempts to link Uyghur separatism to international jihadist groups, a steady flow of reports from the international media—as well as official PRC releases—have given the impression of an imminent separatist and terrorist crisis in the Xinjiang region. This study surveys open sources as well as less easily accessible Chinese documents on violent separatist and terrorist events and groups.
Criminalizing Ethnicity: Political Repression in Xinjiang
This summary of a new report by HRIC and Human Rights Watch examines how the Chinese government has used international campaigns against terrorism as a pretext to crack down on any expression by members of the Muslim minority of Xinjiang to assert their ethnic character or promote an independent state.
Uighurs fleeing persecution as China wages its “war on terror”
The first section of this report gives an overview of the human rights situation in the XUAR. It describes the cases of two Uighur prisoners of conscience who continue to be imprisoned, despite repeated calls for their release from other governments, the United Nations, and non-governmental organizations. The second section describes the plight of Uighurs in other countries, including those who apply for asylum.
Autonomy in Xinjiang: Han Nationalist Imperatives and Uyghur Discontent
This paper analyzes the sources of Uyghur discontent and ethnonational conflict in Xinjiang since the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949.
China's War on Terror: September 11 and Uyghur Separatism
In the wake of September 11, China has launched its own "war on terror" against Uighur separatists in Xinjiang. But Beijing is employing the wrong strategy; the way to improve the situation is by addressing the Uighurs' legitimate grievances.
China’s anti-terrorism legislation and repression in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous region
This report describes the new anti-terrorism provisions in Chinese law and Amnesty International’s concerns about these provisions and the crackdown against “terrorist, separatist and illegal religious activities” currently underway in the XUAR.
Religious minorities and China
The treatment of religious minorities lies behind many of the headlines from China in recent years. China’s treatment of the Falungong and its policies in Tibet receive regular comment in the West, but rarely is this commentary informed by an understanding of how China’s policies towards religious minorities as a whole have developed. This report fills that gap and provides an authoritative overview of the major world religions in a country that is as diverse as it is vast.