Why Scholars and Activists Increasingly Fear a Uyghur Genocide in Xinjiang

Abstract

For the past four years, the region of Xinjiang in Northwest China has witnessed the largest forced incarceration of an ethnoreligious minority anywhere in the world since the Second World War: upwards of one million Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims have been forced into internment camps for "re-education" and "thought transformation," or into high-security prisons, or situations of forced labour. Recently, this situation came to the wider attention of the world when the word "genocide"unqualified by the modifier "cultural"was used to describe it. In this Reflection, I provide the background to the crisis, explain why the label "genocide" is now being used by growing numbers of scholars, activists, rights advocates, barristers, and politicians, and consider the legal and diplomatic channels that they propose to use to hold the PRC government to account.

Conceptual metaphor in areal perspective: time, space, and contact in the Sinosphere

“…Looking ahead to future research, most communities of the languages located within China or Taiwan are currently undergoing increasingly intense pressure to become bilingual, if not shift entirely to Mandarin. In an extreme example, Uyghur speakers have been targeted by a cultural and political assimilation campaign involving mass incarceration in re-education camps in which detainees are forced to study Mandarin and Communist Party doctrine, and Uyghur language has been removed from all educational and administrative functions in the region (see, e.g., Hayes, 2019; Smith Finley, 2021; Zenz, 2019). If these languages survive the next few generations of socio-political pressure, it will be interesting to re-examine the situation again and see if any further metaphor transfer has occurred.…”

An Epidemiological Perspective on the Investigation of Genocide

“…While in some other recent epidemiological contributions the emphasis is on data collection ( 14 – 16 ), this Opinion article focused on the use of a few measures to analyse the available data and thereby adding to the Haddon matrix ( 17 ) adapted for an epidemiological study of genocide by Adler et al ( 18 ). Applying epidemiological measures, even with crude mortality data, might result in better or earlier identification or understanding of genocide-related death during potential future and current or imminent genocides such as those against Yazidis in Iraq ( 19 ), Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar ( 20 ), and Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims in Northwest China ( 21 ), or the extreme sectarian violence between the pro-Muslim coalition Seleka and the pro-Christian movement Anti-Balaka in Central African Republic ( 22 ).…”

Geographies of infrastructure III: Infrastructure with Chinese characteristics

“…Anxieties about Uygur resistance to the Han ‘civilizing’ project (Clarke, 2020) and the potential for their increased interaction with ‘other Muslim and kinship groups’ through BRI connectivity (Hayes, 2020: 32), have translated into mass surveillance and incarceration whereby as many as 1 million members of the Turkic Muslim population are held in ‘reeducation centers’. This constitutes ‘the largest forced incarceration of an ethnoreligious minority anywhere in the world since the Second World War’ and arguably a cultural genocide characterized by ‘deaths in the camps through malnutrition, unsanitary conditions, withheld medical care, and violence’ as well as rapes, transfers to ‘securitized forced labour’ and the ‘widespread and systematic suppression of Uyghur births’ (Smith Finley, 2020: 1, 4, 5). This ‘carceral state’ is supported by mass data collection ‘to shape and “score” the economic and social behavior of individual[s]’ (Clarke, 2020: 350–351).…”