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:
100 Camp Testimonies
In "100 Camp Testimonies," former internees share first-hand accounts of the camps, and how family members, relatives, and friends have been arbitrarily incarcerated.
Cultural Heritage and Mass Atrocities
Assembling dozens of experts from the heritage, social science, humanitarian, legal, and military communities, this open-access book features a series of essays on the global value of cultural heritage, recent examples of intentional cultural heritage destruction across the globe, and how it can be protected.
The Backstreets - A Novel From Xinjiang
The Backstreets is an astonishing novel by a preeminent contemporary Uyghur author. A translator’s introduction situates the novel in the political atmosphere that led to the disappearance of both the author and his work by the Chinese state.
No Escape - The True Story of China's Genocide of the Uyghurs
As a human rights attorney and Uyghur activist who now serves on the US Commission on International Religious Freedom, Nury Turkel tells his personal story to help explain the urgency and scope of the Uyghur crisis.
We Uyghurs Have No Say: An Imprisoned Writer Speaks
This book presents a collection of imprisoned Uyghur intellectual Ilham Tohti’s words on justice, the history of Xinjiang and the plight of China’s Muslim minorities.
How I Survived a Chinese Re-education Camp: A Uighur Woman Speaks Out
The first and only memoir about the reeducation camps by a Uyghur woman. “I have written what I lived. The atrocious reality.” — Gulbahar Haitiwaji to Paris Match
The Xinjiang Emergency: Exploring the causes and consequences of China's mass detention of Uyghurs
The Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region is the site of the largest mass repression of an ethnic and/or religious minority in the world today. Existing reportage and commentary on the crisis tend to address the various forms this takes in isolation, but this ground-breaking volume brings them together, exploring the interconnections between the core strands of the Xinjiang emergency in order to generate a more accurate understanding of the mass detentions' significance for the future of President Xi Jinping's China.
The Chief Witness: Escape from China’s modern-day concentration camps
“I will never forget the camp. I cannot forget the eyes of the prisoners, expecting me to do something for them. They are innocent. I have to tell their story, to tell about the darkness they are in. It is so easy to suffocate us with the demons of powerlessness, shame, and guilt. But we aren't the ones who should feel ashamed.”
Eurasian Crossroads: A History of Xinjiang
(Originally published November 2006, revised February 2021) Eurasian Crossroads is an essential resource for anyone seeking to learn about the complex historical context of the genocide taking place in Xinjiang today. James Millward, who is widely regarded as the leading historian of Chinese Central Asia, provides an accessible-yet-thorough examination of the various peoples and empires that have called the region home.
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.
Securing China's Northwest Frontier: Identity and Insecurity in Xinjiang
In the first study to incorporate majority Han and minority Uyghur perspectives on ethnic relations in Xinjiang following mass violence during July 2009, David Tobin analyses how official policy shapes identity and security dynamics on China's northwest frontier. He explores how the 2009 violence unfolded and how the party-state responded to ask how official identity narratives and security policies shape practices on the ground.
The War on the Uyghurs - China's campaign against Xinjiang's Muslims
This eye-opening book reveals how China has used the US-led Global War on Terror as cover for its increasingly brutal suppression of the Uyghur people, and Uyghur responses to these devastating government policies.
Xinjiang Camps: A Book Exposes CCP’s Lies
An interview with Kazakh author Turarbek Kusainov, whose book on the experience of ethnic Kazakhs in the transformation through education camps is greatly embarrassing China.
Language, Education and Uyghur Identity in Urban Xinjiang
This book explores the relationship between language, education and identity among the urban Uyghurs of contemporary Xinjiang and how ethnic identity is expressed in social, cultural and religious practice.
Oil and Water: Being Han in Xinjiang
With Oil and Water, anthropologist Tom Cliff offers the first ethnographic study of Han in Xinjiang, using in-depth vignettes, oral histories, and more than fifty original photographs to explore how and why they became the people they are now. By shifting focus to the lived experience of ordinary Han settlers, Oil and Water provides an entirely new perspective on Chinese nation building in the twenty-first century and demonstrates the vital role that Xinjiang Han play in national politics—not simply as Beijing’s pawns, but as individuals pursuing their own survival and dreams on the frontier.
Uyghur Nation - Reform and Revolution on the Russia-China Frontier
The meeting of the Russian and Qing empires in the nineteenth century had dramatic consequences for Central Asia’s Muslim communities. Along this frontier, a new political space emerged, shaped by competing imperial and spiritual loyalties, cross-border economic and social ties, and the revolutions that engulfed Russia and China in the early twentieth century. David Brophy explores how a community of Central Asian Muslims responded to these historic changes by reinventing themselves as the modern Uyghur nation.
The Sacred Routes of Uyghur History
For 250 years, the Turkic Muslims of Altishahr—the vast desert region to the northwest of Tibet—have led an uneasy existence under Chinese rule. Today they call themselves Uyghurs, and they have cultivated a sense of history and identity that challenges Beijing’s official national narrative. Rian Thum argues that the roots of this history run deeper than recent conflicts, to a time when manuscripts and pilgrimage dominated understandings of the past. Beyond broadening our knowledge of tensions between the Uyghurs and the Chinese government, this meditation on the very concept of history probes the limits of human interaction with the past.
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.
Living Shrines of Uyghur China
Lisa Ross’s ethereal photographs of Islamic holy sites were created over the course of a decade on journeys to China’s Xinjiang region in Central Asia, historically a cultural crossroads but an area to which artists and researchers have generally been denied access since its annexation in 1949. These monumental images show shrines created during pilgrimages, many of which have been maintained continuously over several centuries; visitation to the tombs of saints is a central aspect of daily life in Uyghur Islam. Many of the sites in Ross’s work are threatened by political and economic pressures—her images are valuable, therefore, not only for their intrinsic beauty, but as an important record of a rich and vibrant culture.
Community Matters in Xinjiang: 1880-1949
Based on a wide range of Western and local materials, this book offers an introduction to the historical anthropology of the Muslim Uyghur of Xinjiang from the late 19th century to 1949.