The Uyghurs today

The Uyghurs today are a Turkic-speaking, Sunni Muslim people whose homeland is East Turkestan — the region China calls the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. They number about 11–12 million. They are not descendants of the medieval Uyghur Khaganate in a simple, straight-line sense, but they carry the same name and a Turkic-Islamic heritage. Since the mid-2010s China has carried out extensive human-rights abuses against them that several states and organisations have called genocide or crimes against humanity.

Who are today's Uyghurs

Uyghurs speak Uyghur — a Karluk Turkic language related to Uzbek, written mainly in the Arabic script. The great majority are Sunni Muslims. By the 2020 Chinese census about 11.8 million Uyghurs live in China, nearly 99% of them in Xinjiang; the larger communities outside China are in Kazakhstan, Turkey and Pakistan. The region the Uyghurs themselves call East Turkestan is governed by China as the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. The medieval Uyghurs are not to be equated with today's Uyghurs in a simple straight line — on the ancient khaganate see Uyghurs (the khaganate).

East Turkestan and China

In the 20th century two short-lived independent republics were proclaimed in East Turkestan — the First East Turkestan Republic (1933) and the Second East Turkestan Republic (1944) — but both vanished quickly. In 1949 the region was incorporated into the People's Republic of China, and in 1955 the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region was created. Since then China has encouraged the mass migration of Han Chinese into the region: once a clear majority, the Uyghurs now make up under half of Xinjiang's population, and Han about 42%.

The repression (2017–)

From 2017 China launched a mass-detention campaign in Xinjiang. In China's official account these are “vocational education and training centres” and a policy of counter-terrorism and “de-radicalisation”. The documented picture is different: an estimated more than a million (by some estimates up to 1.8 million) Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims have been detained without trial — described as the largest mass internment of an ethnic-religious group since the Second World War. Documented practices include mass surveillance, forced labour, torture, family separation, sexual violence, and the suppression of births, including forced sterilisation. Under the “Pair Up and Become Family” programme, Han Chinese officials were billeted in Uyghur homes to monitor them. The children of detainees were separated from their parents and placed in state boarding schools.

The destruction of culture and religion

The repression did not stop at the camps. An estimated 16,000 mosques — nearly two-thirds of those in Xinjiang — were demolished or damaged, and cemeteries and sacred sites have been bulldozed. The use of the Uyghur language in schools has been restricted and religious practice obstructed. The same pattern — the destruction of a language, a faith and places of memory — that this knowledge base describes for other peoples repeats here.

The international assessment

What is happening has been given different names. The United States Department of State in 2021 declared China's acts a genocide; the parliaments of several countries, including the United Kingdom, Canada and the Netherlands, have passed motions to the same effect. A 2022 report by the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights found that the violations may amount to crimes against humanity. China rejects the accusations, calling them lies and interference in its internal affairs.

The link to us

The Uyghurs are the eastern branch of the Turkic languages — distant relatives of the Mišärs in the Turkic-Islamic world. Their fate echoes what other Turkic and Muslim peoples have lived through: the deportation of the Crimean Tatars in 1944, the cultural genocide of the Estonian Tatars under the Soviet occupation, and the pressure on minority peoples in present-day Russia. That is why the Uyghurs' story belongs in this knowledge base too. See also Uyghurs (the ancient khaganate) and the Crimean Tatars.

Sources: Uyghurs (Wikipedia); Persecution of Uyghurs in China (Wikipedia); Xinjiang internment camps (Wikipedia); “Break Their Lineage, Break Their Roots” (Human Rights Watch, 2021); China’s Repression of Uyghurs in Xinjiang (Council on Foreign Relations).