Nostalgia for the boyishly-brutal Wang Zhen flooded across Han Xinjiang in the days, weeks, and months following the intra-communal violence of early July 2009 in Urumqi. Many Han invoked Wang Zhen’s notorious approach to management of Xinjiang’s non-Han (and in particular, Uyghur) population as the solution to what they termed the ‘ethnic problem’ (minzu wenti).…
High school sweethearts – both originally from China’s Xinjiang Uighur region – dreamed of living together in Australia The last time Almas Nizamidin saw his wife was on Valentine’s Day last year, when he flew from Australia to China to surprise her. Now she’s in prison. A month after his visit to China, his newly pregnant wife,…
One member of the Uyghur diaspora explains why Uyghurs abroad raise their banners outside Chinese embassies. A question I am often asked is why I participate in protests and demonstrations. What impact do our blue and white placards and hoarse voices have against a stoic Canberran building that hoists the Chinese flag? Perhaps my questioners see…
TO THE BRINK In the early hours of New Year’s Day in 2017, a heavily armed gunmanstormed Reina, an exclusive Istanbul nightclub on the Bosphorus coast, murdering 39. ISIS claimed responsibility for the massacre, but the Turkish deputy prime minister swiftly made an incendiary claim: the perpetrators, he said, were “probably” Uyghur—the ethnically Turkic Muslims indigenous to the region…
BEIJING: A court in China’s mainly Muslim East Turkistan (Xinjiang) region has sentenced a man to six years in prison for “provoking trouble” and growing a beard, a practise discouraged by local authorities, a newspaper reported on Sunday. The court in the desert oasis city of Kashgar sentenced the 38-year-old Uyghur to six years, while…
The article, about a Muslim couple in the western Chinese region of East Turkistan (Xinjiang) being sentenced to prison for growing a long beard and wearing a burqa, appeared in state news media on Sunday. By Monday morning, it had vanished. Such occurrences are commonplace in China, where censors frequently purge without explanation online information…
During 2014, the ruling Chinese Communist Party intensified its targeting of ethnic minority groups with an “anti-terror” campaign in the troubled northwestern region of East Turkistan (Xinjiang), and ratcheted up controls on freedom of expression, Amnesty International said in its annual global human rights report. Ethnic minorities including Tibetans, mostly Muslim Uyghurs, and Mongolians faced…
Last week, a court in China’s far western East Turkistan (Xinjiang) region sentenced Ilham Tohti, a member of the Uyghur minority, to life in prison for the crime of “inciting separatism.” The conviction of this moderate scholar elicited international condemnation; the sentence was an order of magnitude longer than those given to other Chinese dissidents. But,…
Beijing should learn from the mistakes of the U.S.’s “war on terror” as it mounts its own campaign against attacks allegedly perpetrated by its predominantly Muslim Uyghur minority, analysts said Thursday. Speaking at a George Washington University conference on Uyghur affairs — what aims to be an annual dialogue to influence how Washington addresses the…
Despite the official stance of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), which nominally recognizes the Uyghur people as equal citizens, Uyghur Muslims have always had a troubled relationship with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) central government authorities. The CCP currently considers Uyghurs part of the global radical Islamist threat. Facing a Beijing-supported influx of Chinese migrants,…
