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:
Winter Olympics: Games official claims stories of human rights abuses are 'lies’
The Winter Olympics is facing renewed political controversy after a Games official dismissed claims of human rights violations against the Uyghur Muslim population as "lies".
China Is Holding My Uyghur Mother Prisoner. Will President Biden Say Her Name?
The 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing is well underway. Millions of people will likely tune in to see the spectacle that China has orchestrated—everything from the choreographed pageantry of the Opening Ceremonies to the man-made snow blanketing the ski slopes. China wants the Olympics to project its economic might and global dominance. But for me, the images on the screen will be a bleak reminder of China's oppression and persecution, on a very personal level.
Beijing 2022 organisers claim stories of Xinjiang human rights abuses are ‘lies’
The Winter Olympics have been plunged into further controversy after Beijing 2022 spokesperson Yan Jiarong dismissed human rights violations among the Uyghur Muslim population as “lies” and insisted Taiwan was part of China. Yan, a former member of the Chinese delegation to the UN general assembly, referred to “so-called forced labour” in Xinjiang in response to one question, before saying China was against the “politicising of sports”.
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.
World Bank unit is financing Chinese companies that appear to employ forced laborers, report says
An arm of the taxpayer-funded World Bank has provided nearly $500 million in financing to four Chinese companies that appear to have employed forced laborers in the country’s Xinjiang region, according to a new report.
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.
Suspicion and subjugation in Xinjiang
The Chinese authorities have long treated the region – and its people – with suspicion. The abuses there can no longer be ignored.
Historic Uyghur culture is under existential threat
Shaped over centuries by pilgrimage, trade, art and war, a unique culture has been suppressed and exploited by Beijing. Can Uyghur distinctiveness re-emerge?
The Uyghurs’ plight shows the biggest threat to democracy is Western apathy
We know that populist dictators are emboldened by each other’s atrocities, so how many more disappearances will it take before China crosses the West’s “red line”?
“My culture will survive”: the Uyghur poet Fatimah Abdulghafur Seyyah on her family’s devastating persecution
Cut adrift from her background, Seyyah uses poetry to preserve Uyghur culture and prevent it from being characterised by victimhood. “I’m scared of being defined by only genocide,” she says. “My culture is such a joyful, happy desert – it’s sandy, it’s shifting, it’s hot. My dad was always a happy person. I want my culture to be seen by the world as resilient. It’s been there for thousands of years. It will survive.”
Behind Xi Jinping’s Great Wall of Iron
The 12 million Uyghurs in Xinjiang, China have been repressed and maltreated because of their religion, ethnicity and opinions; key elements in a policy set out personally by President Xi Jinping.
Financing & genocide: Development finance and the crisis in the Uyghur Region
A joint investigation reveals how the World Bank’s private lending arm, the International Finance Corporation (IFC), has several significant investments in China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, where indigenous peoples have been subjected to what international legislators, legal scholars, and advocates have determined to be a genocide.
The Silencing: a special report on China, the Uyghurs and a culture under attack
From Xinjiang’s network of detention centres to the suppression of tradition, writers report on China’s relentless campaign against the Uyghurs – and what will be lost if it succeeds.
Beijing Olympics: Winter Games start amid Covid and boycotts
The most divided Olympic Games in decades gets under way in China on Friday as Beijing becomes the only city to host both the Summer and now the Winter Games.
The Crisis in Xinjiang: What’s Happening Now and What Does it Mean?
Policies implemented by the CCP in Xinjiang since 2016 have become a central issue in PRC international relations. This talk reviews the Xinjiang crisis to date and suggests how we should understand these events and trends.
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
Japan parliament adopts resolution on human rights in China
Japan's parliament adopted a rare resolution on Tuesday on what it called the "serious human rights situation" in China, and asked the government to take steps to relieve the situation.
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.
Citing Xinjiang, EU commits to ban forced labor goods but is divided on how to do it
The European Union is moving forward with plans to outlaw goods made using forced labor, senior officials said, citing allegations of widespread uses of such practices in the Chinese region of Xinjiang. The ban was announced by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen in September ― a surprise move that caught other parts of the EU unaware. Since then, von der Leyen has said little on the issue and, according to people familiar with the situation, provided very little guidance on how it should be implemented.
'My hell in Beijing's sterilisation camp' by Gulbahar Haitiwaji
“Like more than one million other Uighurs, I was imprisoned in a Chinese ‘re-education’ camp. The camps, which China describes as ‘schools’, claim to ‘eradicate Islamist terrorism from Uighur minds’. In reality, they aim to eradicate an entire ethnicity. I am neither a separatist nor an Islamic terrorist – just a mother – but on the basis of a nine-minute trial, I was sentenced to seven years of ‘re-education’.”