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:
Interpreting Witness Statements from the Uyghur Genocide
The undercover reporter asked, “Do Uyghurs feel their human rights are being violated?” And the reply was, “They don’t have human rights. It’s not about violation. They just don’t have human rights.”
Inside A Xinjiang Detention Camp
It started as a single small compound. Within 18 months, it had grown to more than 10 times its original size, capable of holding about 3,700 detainees. China's mass internment system for Muslims in Xinjiang is so secretive that, despite a growing international outcry, little is known about any one detention camp. Interviews and architectural modeling offer a rare and terrifying view into a massive internment complex.
Coercive Labor in Xinjiang: Labor Transfer and the Mobilization of Ethnic Minorities to Pick Cotton
Xinjiang produces 85 percent of China’s and 20 percent of the world’s cotton. Chinese cotton products, in turn, constitute an important basis for garment production in numerous other Asian countries. New evidence shows that hundreds of thousands of ethnic minority laborers in Xinjiang are being forced to pick cotton by hand through a coercive state-mandated labour transfer and “poverty alleviation” scheme, potentially affecting all global supply chains that involve Xinjiang cotton as a raw material.
China’s ‘tainted’ cotton
China is forcing hundreds of thousands of Uighurs and other minorities into hard, manual labour in the vast cotton fields of its western region of Xinjiang, according to new research seen by the BBC. Based on newly discovered online documents, it provides the first clear picture of the potential scale of forced labour in the picking of a crop that accounts for a fifth of the world’s cotton supply and is used widely throughout the global fashion industry.
Apple is lobbying against a bill aimed at stopping forced labor in China
Apple wants to water down key provisions of the bill, which would hold U.S. companies accountable for using Uyghur forced labor, according to two congressional staffers.
Beijing 2022 Olympics: Stop the ‘Genocide Games’
With just over a year to go until the 2022 Winter Olympics, the clock is ticking for the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to ensure it does not repeat the same mistake it made in 2008 by effectively endorsing China’s failure to improve human rights.
Why Did the United States Take China’s Word on Supposed Uighur Terrorists?
On Oct. 20, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo quietly entered into the Federal Register that the United States no longer recognized the Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM) as a “terrorist organization.” China, which portrays ETIM as part of the supposed Uighur terrorist threat that justifies its brutal crackdown in Xinjiang, immediately complained bitterly.
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.
IOC President Thomas Bach: Olympics ‘Are Not About Politics,’ Athletes Should Be Politically Neutral At Games
In an op-ed that ran on The Guardian’s website Friday, International Olympic Committee (IOC) President Thomas Bach penned his thoughts on politics and the Olympic Games and why, in his opinion, the two don’t mix. “The Olympic Games are not about politics. The International Olympic Committee, as a civil non-governmental organisation, is strictly politically neutral at all times,” Bach wrote.
Kazakhstan’s Ambiguous Position towards the Uyghur Cultural Genocide in China
Kazakhstan’s increasing economic and, by extension, political dependence on China has put it in a difficult position with regards to what is happening in the Uyghur region of China on which it borders.
Parent-Child Separation in Yarkand Country, Kashgar
New evidence from non-public Xinjiang government spreadsheets has come to light that details the fate of over 10,000 children from the Uyghur majority population county of Yarkand (Kashgar Prefecture). The spreadsheets indicate that a number of them have been placed into state-run orphanages, while others are kept in full-time boarding school facilities. Other spreadsheets show entire households along with the internment status of their members, corroborating the veracity of these lists of “children in difficult circumstances” and giving us a full picture of their actual family situation.
China Doubles Down on Xinjiang Policy Amid Reports of Cultural Erasure
International opprobrium has so far failed to shake Beijing from its stance that a crackdown in Xinjiang serves the country’s stability.
Cultural erasure: Tracing the destruction of Uyghur and Islamic spaces in Xinjiang
The Chinese government has embarked on a systematic campaign to rewrite the cultural heritage of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) in northwest China by desecrating or “rectifying” mosques and indigenous sacred sites. This report maps over 900 mosques and other important Uyghur religious-cultural sites across Xinjiang, analyses their condition before and after 2017, and then used statistical extrapolation to estimate the full extent of their destruction and alteration.
Documenting Xinjiang’s Detention System
This database of nearly 400 suspected detention facilities in Xinjiang highlights ‘re-education’ camps, detention centres and prisons that have been newly built or expanded since 2017.
Xinjiang Detention and Cultural Sites Interactive Map
ASPI researchers have located, mapped and analysed over 380 suspected detention facilities in Xinjiang that have been built or expanded since 2017, making it the most comprehensive dataset on Xinjiang’s detention system in the world. The project has also located and analysed hundreds of mosques and other important Uyghur and Islamic cultural sites in Xinjiang and assessed how many have been demolished or damaged since 2017. Both datasets are viewable on this interactive map.
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.
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.
Uighur Muslim teacher tells of forced sterilisation in Xinjiang
A teacher coerced into giving classes in Xinjiang internment camps has described her forced sterilisation at the age of 50, under a government campaign to suppress birth rates of women from Muslim minorities. Qelbinur Sidik said the crackdown swept up not just women likely to fall pregnant, but those well beyond normal childbearing ages. Messages she got from local authorities said women aged 19 to 59 were expected to have intrauterine devices (IUDs) fitted or undergo sterilisation.
What They Saw: Ex-Prisoners Detail The Horrors Of China's Detention Camps
BuzzFeed News interviewed 28 former detainees from the camps in Xinjiang about their experiences, who wanted to make the world aware of how they were treated.