Anthropologist Darren Byler chronicles artistic culture in Northwest China amid a massive security crackdown. By Jonathan Hiskes In the last three months, University of Washington anthropology student Darren Byler has spoken about his research to AI developers at Google, business leaders at the Washington State China Relations Council, and journalists at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club in Beijing.…
Deliberate, systematic human rights abuses are happening in China’s northwest. Reporting and research published in recent weeks shows that the Chinese government is targeting the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region’s roughly 11 million Muslims for “re-education.” Anywhere from several hundred thousand to more than a million people have been or are being held in “centers,” where they have to “disavow their Islamic…
The government in China is further tightening its grip on minority groups in the Uighur Autonomous Region of Xinjiang during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan as it continues to use its deradicalization campaign to suppress local residents, Uighur leaders and human rights activists warn. China started a campaign in April 2017 to arrest local…
How a Mao-era Chinese agricultural conglomerate came to dominate the African tomato market. Ahundred workers were picking tomatoes in a field near Wusu, a town in northern Xinjiang Province, China, half way between the provincial capital, Ürümqi, and the border with Kazakhstan. Most were migrants from Sichuan Province, with a few Uyghurs. A teenage girl…
More than 1 million Oralmans, mainly from China and Uzbekistan, have seized the opportunity to resettle in Kazakhstan. The joy that Tursynzhan Yesenalyuly felt in moving to his ethnic homeland of Kazakhstan from China four years ago wore off pretty quickly. Yesenalyuly, 44, lives with his three-year-old daughter in a cramped rented house in the…
Four hundred thousand to one million people in concentration camps. If these estimates are true, that means that at least one—and perhaps far more—of every ten Uyghur men lives in a re-education camp right now. Those numbers come from an article published by the Associated Press two weeks ago. [1] This week’s Economist lists a similar tally. It goes on to…
Kazakhstan’s Foreign Ministry has finally raised the issue of its missing new citizens with Chinese authorities. For many months, some ethnic Kazakhs who took advantage of offers of “repatriation” from Kazakhstan’s government and are now Kazakh citizens have crossed back into China, usually to the neighboring Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, as part of their business,…
