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The Idea of the ‘Uyghur Genocide’ and the Realities of Xinjiang

Vijay Prashad and Tings Chak

When They Began to Say Genocide

In March 2017, the Jamestown Foundation (Washington DC) published a three thousand-word report on “Xinjiang’s Rapidly Evolving Security State” written by Adrian Zenz and James Leibold.[1] A few months later, the same writers published another report, this one slightly longer at nearly five thousand words, with the more aggressive title, “Chen Quanguo: The Strongman Behind Beijing’s Securitization Strategy in Tibet and Xinjiang.”[2] At that time, there was not much interest in these stories. Zenz came from the Victims of Communism Foundation, a nonprofit organization set up by the U.S. Congress in 1993 and funded by various right-wing sources, including the Heritage Foundation. Leibold is a professor of Chinese history at La Trobe University (Australia), but is also a senior fellow at the Australian government-funded Australian Strategic Policy Institute. The texts by Zenz and Leibold were seen initially as the work of ideological right-wing scholars with an axe to grind, rather than with evidence of any interest to anyone. These seemed more like fringe Cold War texts rather than anything serious.

The following year, in May 2018, the Associated Press’s Gerry Shih published a story after interviewing several Kazakhs in Almaty, Kazakhstan, about experiences that they claim they had in Xinjiang.[3] Shih’s story, “China’s Mass Indoctrination Camps Evoke Cultural Revolution,” was the first in a Western corporate journal to report on a phenomenon that would later become almost household news in the Global North and in some parts of the Global South. A month before Shih published his report, the co-chairs of the Congressional Executive Commission on China, then Senator (and now Secretary of State) Marco Rubio and Representative Chris Smith, released a letter that made three important accusations against the Chinese government:

1. That the Chinese government had begun a “crackdown” in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR).
2. That “as many as 500,000 to a million people are or have been detained in what are being called ‘political education centers,’ the largest mass incarceration of a minority population in the world today.”
3. That “Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities in the XUAR have been subjected to arbitrary arrest, egregious restrictions on religious practice and culture, and a digitized surveillance system so pervasive that every aspect of daily life is monitored.”[4]

These three accusations became foundational for a media campaign that followed, in which Zenz became an “expert” on the XUAR and on this “crackdown.”[5] It is important to point out that behind Zenz is a cohort of Uyghur exiles who live in the Washington DC area and work for the U.S. intelligence community through the media (three of the main figures involved in this network are Shohret Hoshur, Omer Kanat, and Rushan Abbas—all three of whom are with the U.S. government’s Radio Free Asia). Exiles such as Kanat and Abbas founded the Uyghur American Association, the Uyghur Human Rights Project, and the World Uyghur Congress with U.S. government funds. Zenz drew from these sources, as well as from Istiqal, a media outlet run by Uyghur exiles in Turkey. By the second half of 2018, it had become established wisdom that China was running “internment camps” for a million Uyghurs (as Lily Kuo’s article in the Guardian put it in October), and that there was a “Muslim Gulag” in Xinjiang (as Philip Wen and Olzhas Auyezov wrote for Reuters in November).[6] At that time, there was no use of the word genocide. That word, with all the legal weight of the UN Convention Against Genocide (1948), requires clarity and rationale.

When addressing accusations of such gravity, it is worth examining what the UN Convention on Genocide actually requires. According to Article II of the 1948 Convention, genocide means “any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm; deliberately inflicting “conditions of life calculated to bring about…physical destruction”; imposing measures to prevent births; or forcibly transferring children from the group to another group. The drafters of the 1948 Convention explicitly rejected including “cultural genocide” after extensive debate, a term often deployed in Xinjiang discussions that does not have standing in international law. Intent (dolus specialis)—the specific determination to physically destroy a group—is the most difficult element to prove and must be demonstrated, not merely alleged.

In June 2019, Asiye Abdulaheb, a woman from Xinjiang who had been living in the Netherlands for a decade, received a digital file containing what she was told were leaked Chinese government documents.[7] She posted a picture of one of the documents on X and was immediately contacted by Zenz and by Rian Thum, who teaches Chinese history in Manchester. Zenz asked for the documents and told Abdulaheb to delete her tweet. These documents became the “China Cables” and the “Karakax List,” which provided Zenz with the materials to write his reports on Xinjiang.[8] The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, which published the China Cables, said it “does not comment on sources.”[9] It did not matter that there was nothing beyond four documents leaked to a woman in the Netherlands who believed she got them because she can read Mandarin, and that there was no real corroboration of these documents beyond the word of Uyghur exiles who worked for the U.S. government and scholars such as Zenz, who had already begun to build a narrative of gulags and digitalized surveillance. At the time of writing, there has been no information about where these digital documents came from and none about whether they are authentic. (Western media organizations claimed that they did an internal verification, but no forensic authentication report has been released to the public.)

In June 2020, Zenz went further with another Jamestown report. A word on the Jamestown Foundation: founded in 1984 with the support of CIA director William J. Casey, it was established to assist defectors from the USSR and the eastern bloc and to use the knowledge of defectors in the Cold War. After the USSR collapsed, the Jamestown Foundation pivoted to provide expertise on counterterrorism and on Chinese Communism for, among other entities, the U.S. government, founding the China Brief in 2001. Zenz’s reports must be read in this context. His 2020 report is called “Sterilizations, IUDs, and Mandatory Birth Control: The CCP’s Campaign to Suppress Uyghur Birthrates in Xinjiang.”[10] Early into the report, Zenz lists the allegations he makes against the Chinese government and then says, “these findings provide the strongest evidence yet that Beijing’s policies in Xinjiang meet one of the genocide criteria” in the UN Convention.[11] The word “genocide” had arrived, and it then gets used in journalistic accounts that cite this report.

On January 19, 2021, almost four years after Zenz’s first report, then-U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, after listing the accusations made by Zenz and others (for instance, one million civilians incarcerated, forced sterilizations, and forced labor), said that the Chinese government “has committed genocide against the predominantly Muslim Uyghurs and other ethnic and religious minority groups in Xinjiang.”[12] Other countries, such as Canada, followed with this use of the term genocide.[13]

What is rarely mentioned in Western reports is the international support China has received on its Xinjiang policies. In July 2019, ambassadors from thirty-seven countries sent a joint letter to the President of the UN Human Rights Council commending China’s “remarkable achievements in the field of human rights” and noting that “safety and security has returned to Xinjiang” with “not a single terrorist attack in Xinjiang” in three consecutive years. The signatories included Algeria, Cuba, Egypt, Nigeria, Pakistan, Qatar, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates as well as others from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East.[14] By June 2021, this number had grown to sixty-nine countries issuing a statement in defense of China’s policies, with twenty-eight of these being members of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), founded in 1969 to bring Muslim-majority countries into conversation with each other.[15] This organization itself, after sending delegations to Xinjiang, issued a report in March 2019 praising China for “providing care to its Muslim citizens.”[16] This support from Muslim-majority nations stands in sharp contrast to accusations from countries with much smaller Muslim populations, or even with long histories of illegal violence against Muslim-majority countries (such as the United States and the United Kingdom against Iraq and Iran).

When Central Asia Became a Threat

Edges of old empires always pose a problem to the center because they are far away, and often in terrain that is inhospitable to easy conquest given the state of military technology and statecraft (including communications and travel). Borders in the premodern era were often undefined, and frequently therefore found in deserts and in high mountain ranges or in thick forests, areas where the demarcation of terrain is harder to manage. It is also where rebels often fled and hid from the large armies of the plains, whose strength was often in frontal combat rather than in the guerrilla warfare possible in areas that are not flat. Tibet, Xinjiang, Mongolia: these defined the outer reaches of the various old empires of China, whether the successive dynasties of the Eastern Han, the Tang, the Yuan, the Ming, and the Qing. From the earliest known written records, there is evidence from these imperial dynasties with their scrupulous documentation that areas such as Xinjiang and Tibet belonged to them, but at the same time, people in the outer reaches had other ideas. These sometimes overlapped with the ideas of the center (agreeing that they were indeed part of the same polity) and at other times dismissed the ideas of the center (maintaining that they were a separate polity, or at least not incorporable). Indeed, Chinese political thought is not rooted in fixed territory but in a more abstract idea of belonging. Tianxia (天下) means “all under Heaven,” which does not equate to a fixed territory but a moral order, so that the emperor traditionally ruled over a people who accepted the imperial authority due to its virtue. At least, that is the theory, although the sword was often wielded to ensure that imperial authority was obeyed. To abstract from the long and complex history of places such as China, India, Mali, or Great Zimbabwe and to assume that these histories can be rendered based on modern ideas of land and property is to negate the different ways in which rulers understood the land and the people who lived on that land.[17]

From at least 60 BCE, however, the Western Han Dynasty established the Western Regions Frontier Command and began to claim the entire flatland of Xinjiang as part of its territory. Subsequently, all empires from the Eastern Han to the Qing had documents that suggested their rule over those lands. But it was only during the Kangxi emperor period (1708–1718) that the first territorial surveys were conducted, with the first maps—still with fuzzy borders—developed in that period. The maps had a practical purpose: how far troops could march, or where the river systems are. It was only with the defeat of the Dzungar Khanate between 1755 and 1759 that mapping took on a more cadastral purpose, now delineating the territory controlled by the empire and centralizing taxation systems—with the territory becoming a fiscal imagination. It is in this period that Xinjiang becomes cartographically part of China, and then in 1884, during the Qing Dynasty, established as a province.[18]

The history laid out here is obviously only a sketch, since the literature is vast, stretching back centuries and beyond our command to interpret. Regardless of the view one has on the claims over the vast territory known now as Xinjiang, one thing is clear, however, and that is what is called “East Turkestan” is not an ancient term but a term that was used by nineteenth-century European geographers—such as the German scholars Alexander von Humboldt and Ferdinand von Richthofen, as well as the Russian scholar Wilhelm Barthold—to delineate Turkic-speaking peoples who were separated into a western district (controlled by Russia) and an eastern district (considered a rather wild place).[19] That being said, there were secession movements that emerged in the twentieth century and that began to use the term “East Turkestan” to describe an area that comprises sections of Kazakhstan and Xinjiang.

In 1975, Yusupbek Mukhlisi (also known as Modan Mukhlisi), who was living in the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic, set up the United Revolutionary Front of East Turkestan to start a secessionist movement in Xinjiang. Mukhlisi, born in 1920, participated enthusiastically in the Second East Turkestan Republic (1944–1946).[20] A Soviet-brokered agreement led to the incorporation of this republic into China, with a joint government formed between the leaders of the Second East Turkestan Republic and the Republic of China. The governor of Xinjiang was Zhang Zhizhong, a general in the Chinese nationalist forces who would later become a senior Communist official. During his tenure, Zhang encouraged the development of Uyghur culture. In 1947, he was succeeded by the pan-Turkic and anti-Communist leader, Masud Sabri. The Chinese Civil War enfolded Xinjiang, whose nationalist military leader Tao Zhiyue defected to the Communists and brought Xinjiang into the People’s Republic. Mukhlisi, distraught, spent the next decade in the towns and cities of the Taklamakan Desert to learn about Uyghur culture and life.[21] In Kazakhstan, by the 1970s, he became an instrument in the Sino-Soviet dispute, setting up the United Revolutionary Front of East Turkestan to agitate for secession.

The fall of the USSR provided Mukhlisi with new momentum, since the United States, which had been averse to his anti-China propaganda during the Cold War, had developed new ears in the post-Cold War environment. In 1996, Mukhlisi went to the United States to plead his case before Cold Warriors in the U.S. Congress who had developed an affection for the strategy of using Islamist violence as a weapon to bring down their adversaries (they felt that it was their work with the mujahideen in Afghanistan that had brought down the USSR, and that now groups such as those led by Mukhlisi would bring down the People’s Republic of China). In late 1996, Mukhlisi announced that his group would start an armed struggle within China. When in February 1997, bombs exploded on three buses in Ürümqi (the capital city of XUAR), killing nine and injuring sixty-eight, Mukhlisi took responsibility. Then, in March of that year, a bus in Beijing was bombed, and once more Mukhlisi said that his group had done it. It is now largely forgotten, but Mukhlisi’s group in Almaty began to issue press releases about demography (the size of the Uyghur population and the rate of Han migration into Xinjiang) and about Chinese state violence (numbers of executions and detentions of Uyghurs)—presaging the kind of information released to Abdulaheb in 2019.[22]

With the collapse of the USSR, the Central Asian states experienced a torrential transition, with several of these states drawn into the kind of politics afflicting Afghanistan.[23] In 1996, the Taliban rode into Kabul and set aside the old mujahideen factions.[24] At the same time, the influence of the Taliban—now established in Afghanistan with all the institutions of state—traveled far afield. Across the region, Taliban-like groups emerged to afflict their societies with violence. Two of the most important of these were the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (founded in 1998) and the Islamic Renaissance Party of Tajikistan (founded in 1990 and one of the major players in the Tajik Civil War of 1993–1997).[25] It was in this foul soup that two Uyghur exiles (Hasan Mahsum and Memetuhut Memetrozi) met in an Islamist camp in Pakistan in late 1997 and founded the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM). Their goal was to create East Turkestan in Xinjiang and to convert it into an Islamic state. In the period between 1997 and 2001, ETIM recruited a handful of fighters and trained them in Taliban and al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan alongside a few fighters from groups such as the East Turkestan Liberation Organization (ETLO, established in Turkey in 1997). In 1998, the Chinese government accused ETLO of being behind arson attacks in Ürümqi, and, the following year, the government of Turkey arrested ETLO members in Istanbul for attacking a Chinese national in the city. Meanwhile, the Chinese government accused ETIM of blowing up a warehouse at the Ürümqi train station in May 1998, bombing civilians in Hotan in southern Xinjiang in March 1999, and bombing civilians in Xinhezhen in the northern part of Xinjiang in June 1999. These incidents, according to the United Nations, resulted in the death of 140 people and injured 371 others. These were among the thousands of attacks that were launched in Xinjiang from 1990 to the end of 2016, killing large numbers of innocent people and hundreds of police officers and causing immeasurable damage to property, according to a 2019 white paper that provides the most comprehensive accounting of the incidents.[26] These attacks may or may not have been done directly by ETIM, whose actual existence in or near Xinjiang became mysterious after the United States attacked Afghanistan and detained several Uyghur fighters in Guantánamo. However, new groups, such as the Turkestan Islamic Party, continued to emerge.

Among the most significant, yet underreported aspects of Xinjiang’s terrorism crisis, were the systematic assassinations of Islamic religious leaders and scholars who opposed extremism—Mullah Abulizi (1993), Akemusidike Aji (1996), Aronghan Aji (1996), Mullah Younusi Sidike (1997), Abulizi Aji (1998), Abdurehim Damaolla (2013), and Juma Tayir (2014). The assassination of Tayir is particularly significant.[27] He was not only the imam of Id Kah Mosque (Kashgar)—China’s largest mosque—but he was targeted specifically because he had consistently condemned terrorism and received threatening letters for doing so. Today, his son, Memet Jume, serves as imam at that same mosque.

The rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan and the offshoot groups threatening Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and China led to discussions among these countries about how to contain the problem posed by the government in Kabul. In June 2001, the governments of China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan met in China to found the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO).[28] The main reason for the formation of the SCO was to find a method to tackle the terrorism and drug trafficking associated, in their view, with the uncertainties in Afghanistan. The problem, they agreed, was the “three evils” of Islamism, separatism, and terrorism. The early Chinese response to the problems being posed in XUAR should be seen through this lens. But before the SCO could develop its own strategy, the events of 9/11 shifted the focus away from politics toward war. The United States by its action sidelined the SCO, subordinated the Central Asian states to its aims (taking over the Karshi-Khanabad Air Base in Uzbekistan and the Manas Air Base in Kyrgyzstan, for instance), and began to bomb Afghanistan. In September 2002, both the U.S. Treasury Department and the United Nations designated the ETIM as a terrorist organization.[29] Mahsum of ETIM was killed by Pakistani troops in 2003 near the Afghan border when they raided an al-Qaeda hideout. Much of the fighting capacity of ETIM was degraded, and many of its hardened fighters either went to prison (Memetrozi in China) or to Syria after 2011, where they regrouped in Idlib.[30]

The attacks by ETIM and associated groups intensified in the years after 2002, despite the death of its founder and the repression in Turkey and in Central Asia. In 2007, Chinese security forces uncovered evidence of an ETIM training camp near Kashgar, raided it and killed eighteen suspected militants. The following year, at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, Interpol warned that it had uncovered evidence of possible suicide bombings at the games. The Chinese state also announced it had foiled several plots (including in Kashgar, which did, however, see a grenade attack at a police post that same year that killed fourteen police officers). Over the next few years, a regular series of attacks took place, but each of them sporadic—2011 in Kashgar, 2012 in Yecheng (twenty-four killed), and 2013 in Beijing (five killed).

To explain what was happening in XUAR, the Chinese government released two substantial white papers—the first in 2003 and the second in 2009—both going over the history of the province and both detailing the attacks by ETIM and other groups. In the first decade of the 2000s, the general approach by the Chinese government was to treat this problem as one of a security issue and to deal with it through a law-and-order approach. By the end of the decade, it became clear that this was not sufficient, since the problem in Xinjiang was deeper and had to do with deficiencies in the Chinese development paradigm as well as in the policy of cultural integration. It was not enough to raid ETIM camps and arrest ETIM operatives. ETIM, it began to be understood, operated in a social and cultural context that partly welcomed its presence and resented that of distant Beijing. For instance, on July 5, 2009, a group of young Uyghurs in Ürümqi marched in protest against the killing of two Uyghur migrants in a southern Chinese factory after alleged sexual assaults on two women.[31] It is unclear what happened, but a terrible conflict went on in Ürümqi and there were casualties of Han Chinese in the city. This kind of incident, which had also taken place in Tibet, alerted authorities that it was insufficient to simply see this as terrorism.[32] There was a social problem that needed a much wider assessment and solution.

How to deal with that wider social and cultural dilemma, not only in Xinjiang but equally in Tibet and other western reaches of China, became an enduring issue.

Go West

In the late 1990s, during the last few years of General Secretary Jiang Zemin’s leadership, two problems began to be discussed in the upper levels of the Communist Party of China (CPC). First, the widened inequality between the coastal regions of China’s east and the inland regions that had not benefited from the Reform and Opening Up period was a concern. Second, ethnic unrest in Tibet and Xinjiang had been met by security measures, but this was not sufficient. A series of monk-led protests in Lhasa, Tibet, between September 1987 and March 1989 was shut down by martial law in 1989, while the ETIM and other groups faced counterterrorism tactics from the Chinese security state. In March 2000, the National People’s Congress announced the Great Western Development (Xibu Da Kaifa) that was to accelerate economic and political integration of the western regions, including Tibet and Xinjiang but also Yunnan, Sichuan, Shaanxi, and Guangxi. This policy was institutionalized in the Tenth Five-Year Plan (2001–2005), with funds set aside for infrastructural development. The CPC had evaluated the problem of unrest in places such as Tibet and Xinjiang and by 2000 had concluded that the problem was not to be seen merely as a security issue, but as one of economic development.

The amount of money invested in the western region between 2000 and 2017 is staggering: ¥6.85 trillion (or $1.04 trillion), most of it invested in Xinjiang, which is the area’s largest province. This capital went toward infrastructure and fixed-asset investment, building up the province through railways, airports, roads, industrialization, and mechanization of agriculture. XUAR gradually began to be integrated into the eastern province’s dynamism. According to the Xinjiang Statistical Bureau and the National Bureau of Statistics (Xinjiang Survey Team), household income data, and the 2025 white paper, in 2000 the per capita disposable income was ¥5,645 for urban residents and ¥1,618 for rural residents; by 2017, the per capita disposable income rose for urban residents to ¥30,775 and for rural residents to ¥11,045, growing to ¥42,820 and ¥19,427 by 2024, respectively. From 2012 to 2024, GDP in Xinjiang increased from ¥749.95 billion to over ¥2.05 trillion—exceeding ¥2 trillion for the first time. In terms of infrastructure, railway mileage doubled, reaching all prefectures and 80 percent of rural counties; civil air routes expanded to include twenty-five international destinations in seventeen countries; electric transmission lines were widely expanded; and all towns were connected to 5G and all villages with broadband. From the 1950s to 2024, the life expectancy of a person in Xinjiang grew from 30 years to 77 years.[33]

In 2013, President Xi Jinping announced the One Belt, One Road in a speech in Kazakhstan. The idea was to extend the new “Go West” policy, which integrated western China with the east and moved to build infrastructure that would go through Central Asia and West Asia to Europe. This would eventually become the Belt and Road Initiative, with Xinjiang as the “core area” (héxīn qū) of the entire project.[34] Xi linked “Go West” and the Belt and Road Initiative with two other important initiatives: a new ethnic policy and the poverty eradication campaign.

Regarding Belt and Road connectivity: since the eradication of extreme poverty in the region, Xinjiang has been positioned as the core of Eurasian connectivity, specifically through the Silk Road Economic Belt. As part of this integration, 19 ports and 119 bilateral transport routes have been established—over half of the national total of freight trains passing through Xinjiang in 2024—with Xinjiang becoming a key node in the China-Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan Railway and China-Pakistan Economic Corridor. Among other important initiatives are the pilot free trade zone established in October 2023, the green belt built around Taklamakan Desert, the longest sand-blocking barrier in the world, and major boosts to tourism, reaching over 300 million tourist visits in 2024.[35]

In terms of ethnic policy, after the Eighteenth CPC Congress in 2012, when Xi was elected as the General Secretary, he began to speak about the importance of national unity and integration of all peoples of China. At the Central Work Conference on Ethnic Affairs in September 2014, he gave a speech where he emphasized national identity rather than group-specific identity, but at the same time specified that he did not mean assimilation but only integration. Minorities must retain their culture, but at the same time they must be integrated into the Chinese Revolution. For the Communist Party, this meant more Han and minority cadres must mix and get to know each other. For the broader society, it meant more use of Mandarin for education alongside minority languages.

With the goal of poverty eradication in mind, Xi launched the Targeted Poverty Alleviation campaign in 2013. CPC cadre and government officials began to do baseline surveys and household registrations. Official surveys found that between 2.6 million and 3 million people—concentrated principally in the southern prefectures such as Aksu, Hotan, Kashgar, and Kizilsu—lived below China’s national poverty line. Between 2014 and 2020, the state deployed an intensive mix of fiscal transfers, infrastructure construction, household replacement, education subsidies, health care coverage, and employment-based poverty reduction. Since 2012, the central government has allocated more than ¥4 trillion in transfer payments to Xinjiang.[36] Over 70 percent of Xinjiang’s public spending has been directed to livelihood-related areas. Labor transfer and vocational training programs were key to this process, which is why there was large-scale rural relocation into newly built settlements with improved access to services. Since 2012, over 450,000 new urban jobs have been created each year, keeping registered urban unemployment under 4 percent. Xinjiang also participated in the “paired assistance” program, in which the eastern provinces invested hundreds of billions of yuan in the west. By 2020, the Chinese government declared that all registered poor households and counties in Xinjiang had been lifted out of extreme poverty, with most of this due to substantial increases in rural incomes and universal access to basic services (including broadband Internet and education for all children). Unlike earlier “Go West” strategies, which focused on macroeconomic growth, poverty alleviation operated at the household level and was explicitly linked to social stability, with development framed as a means of reducing perceived risks of unrest and extremism.[37]

The most complex component of the entire process was the relocation schemes to bring dispersed villages into combined townships to better provide services and to draw workers to industrial parks and factories to ensure better incomes than what was available from hardscrabble rural farms. This scheme was a crucial part of the poverty eradication program across China and not just in the XUAR. It is never clear with this scale of development whether everyone finds themselves willing to relocate even if the living facilities and work opportunities are better. There will always be people who are disgruntled and resent the entire project. Millions of people received vocational training and experienced their pathway out of poverty through their own employment income. Whether this is experienced as repression or not is an important issue that the Chinese intellectuals and authorities do not seem to take lightly.[38] But it should be remembered that the scale of transformation is so vast that it is impossible to manage expectations and aspirations evenly.

The most important element in the whole debate arising over the attacks emanating from aspects of Islamism-secessionism-terrorism in Xinjiang was that Chinese authorities declined to go down the same path as Russia in its two wars in Chechnya from 1994 to 2009. Nor did China proceed along the lines of the U.S. “War on Terror” against Afghanistan and Iraq, with its entire panoply of “black sites” with torture and murder as routine (from Abu Ghraib in Iraq to Guantánamo in Cuba). According to Brown University’s Costs of War Project:

An estimated over 940,000 people were killed by direct post-9/11 war violence in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and Pakistan between 2001–2023. Of these, more than 432,000 were civilians. The number of people wounded or ill as a result of the conflicts is far higher, as is the number of civilians who died “indirectly,” as a result of wars’ destruction of economies, healthcare systems, infrastructure and the environment. An estimated 3.6–3.8 million people died indirectly in post-9/11 war zones, bringing the total death toll to at least 4.5–4.7 million and counting.[39]

The UN Secretary General Kofi Annan told BBC in 2004 that the U.S. attack on Iraq was illegal, and yet there was no sanction at all on the U.S. government or on its war planners, and there was no use of the word genocide to describe any of these wars. The United States and its European allies insisted that any war death of civilians was merely “collateral damage” and the “consequences of warfare,” not a deliberate act of killing. When NATO was asked to confirm targeting information in Libya, its lawyer, Peter Olson, argued that “NATO incidents” do not violate the law and that any report state “that NATO did not deliberately target civilians and did not commit war crimes in Libya.” That was in 2012. Five years later, Zenz and Leibold began to document what Zenz was to soon call a genocide, not in Iraq (where over a million civilians have been killed) but in China (where Zenz does not allege any mass killing of civilians).

By 2017, when Zenz and Leibold published their two pieces at the Jamestown Foundation website, the Chinese government opened a region-wide system of Vocational Education and Training Centers. What do the reports by Zenz argue took place in these centers? Mandarin instruction, legal education, vocational training, and political training (which Zenz calls “indoctrination”). After a few main Western media outlets reported on these centers, the Chinese government acknowledged their existence and said that they were indeed for vocational training and for “counter-extremism through education”; the authorities denied that these were detention centers. By 2019, after a year or so of being operational, these institutions were downsized and converted into formal vocational education and schools (zhiye jiaoyu peixun) for employment skills training (jiuye jineng peixun) and industrial worker training (chanye gongren peixun). The courts in Xinjiang have sentenced several people to prison for different terms between 2014 and 2019 based on the evidence of their participation in these violent activities, but there is nothing at the level of the half a million political prisoners alleged by Radio Free Asia.

Documentation about the training centers in Xinjiang between 2017 and 2019, when they were operational, is contested. Chinese government sources have their own limitations, since they would—in the best of circumstances—be self-justifying. Reports by Western governments and foundations such as Jamestown are even more limited because they are designed to undermine the Chinese government and to inflame secessionist feeling within the border regions of China (whether it be Xinjiang or Tibet) and to malign the reputation of China globally (but particularly amongst the two billion Muslims around the world). Methods that use satellite imagery and leaked documents must be taken very carefully, since satellite imagery reveals infrastructure but not lived experience, and leaked documents are prone to be faked in this day and age of sophisticated hybrid war technologies. Testimonies by exiles are interesting but anecdotal and often heightened by the antimigrant and antirefugee policies in the West. (If a population can suggest that it is a victim of communism, it has a higher chance of attaining refugee status.)

There is no evidence of a policy of physical annihilation of the Uyghur peoples by the Chinese government, unlike say, direct evidence of extermination by the Israeli government against the occupied Palestinian people. There are no mass graves and no accusations of systematic killing—the hallmarks of a genocide. Even the worst description of the camps in Xinjiang shows them to be coercive but not exterminatory.

Of Mosques and Men

Early into the campaign against China, scholars such as Zenz began to accuse the government not of genocide per se, but of “cultural genocide”—namely, the crime of erasing the cultural world of a people.[40] Two accusations should be taken seriously: first, that there is a population decline amongst the Uyghurs and second, that there is an attack on mosques in China. According to the 2020 Chinese national census, the Uyghur population in Xinjiang grew from 10 million to 11.6 million, an increase of 1.6 million over the past decade. The data offered in the census show that the Uyghur population grew at 1.67 percent per year from 2000 to 2020, a growth rate double that of other ethnic minorities in China.[41] With the poverty eradication program in full swing, it should be expected that this growth rate will not be maintained as families with higher incomes often choose not to have many children, and so it will be likely that the growth rate will decline. This is a normal process in human history known as the demographic transition. By 2020, poverty rates had fallen sharply in XUAR, Uyghur life expectancy has increased, and overall data on education and health has improved modestly but certainly improved. On the issue of attacks on mosques, there is very interesting data. According to the last official Chinese government source (the State Council white paper of 2016), there are 24,800 venues for religious activities in Xinjiang (and out of those, 24,400 mosques); this compares to fewer than 2,000 mosques in the 1980s. Leibold’s Strategic Policy Institute released a report in 2020 saying that 16,000 mosques had been damaged or destroyed, with only 15,500 still standing. This report was based largely on analysis of satellite imagery. Since the Australian report is largely without details, it is difficult to go mosque by mosque to verify its claims.

However, there is another interesting demographic detail that should be considered. There are 813,000 Muslims in Australia, and there are around 600 mosques in the country, which means that there is a mosque for 1,355 Australian Muslims.[42] The Muslim population in XUAR is roughly 13 million (11.6 million Uyghurs), and, using 2020 data, with 24,400 mosques. This means that there is a mosque for every 533 Muslims, and, with the alleged reduction to 15,500, there is a mosque for every 839 Muslims.[43] In both cases, the density of mosques in China’s XUAR is greater than in Australia, and in Australia there have been a spate of attacks against mosques, as well as campaigns to prevent mosques being opened (the most famous being the Bendigo and Ballarat mosques in the state of Victoria). No report about these atrocities came from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. In the United States, in constrast, attacks against mosques and prevention of the building of mosques have become normal, with elected officials on the record with statements against Muslims and particularly against Islam in the United States. No report about these atrocities has come from the Jamestown Foundation.

Wang Hui, who teaches at Tsinghua University, has argued that ethnic governance in China since the Reform and Opening period of 1978 has undergone a process of “depoliticization,” in which ethnic relations have been recast as problems of administration, development, and security.[44] Political questions that involve historical difference, institutional pluralism, equality, and trust amongst peoples have been set aside. For Wang, ethnic relations cannot be reduced to technical problems — to poverty, insufficient integration, or extremism. Structural inequalities are obscured by this approach, which fails to see the political implications involved in ethnic relations: dialogue is necessary to build trust in a diverse country, and ethnic unity cannot be secured through technocratic management but only through recognition of cultural difference and substantive equality. This is a fundamental point, namely, that even though the development strategy has lifted millions of Chinese minority groups out of poverty, the lack of understanding and the lack of trust across populations must be dealt with politically. What this will come to mean in practice is not easy to imagine.

Notes

1. Adrian Zenz and James Leibold, “Xinjiang’s Rapidly Evolving Security State,” China Brief 17, no. 4 (March 14, 2017).
2. Adrian Zenz and James Leibold, “Chen Quanguo: The Strongman Behind Beijing’s Securitization Strategy in Tibet and Xinjiang,” China Brief 17, no. 12 (September 21, 2017). A lesser-read piece by Zenz is “‘Thoroughly Reforming Them Towards a Healthy Heart Attitude’: China’s Political Re-Education Campaign in Xinjiang,” Central Asian Survey 38, no. 1 (2019): 102–28.
3. Gerry Shih, “China’s Mass Indoctrination Camps Evoke Cultural Revolution,” Associated Press, May 17, 2018.
4. U.S. Congressional Executive Commission on China, “Chairs Urge Ambassador Branstad to Prioritize Mass Detention of Uyghurs, Including Family Members of Radio Free Asia Employees,” press release, April 4, 2018.
5. For a forceful takedown of this work, see Gareth Porter and Max Blumenthal, “US State Department Accusation of China ‘Genocide’ Relied on Data Abuse and Baseless Claims by Far-Right Ideologue,” The Grayzone, February 18, 2021.
6. Lily Kuo, “China ‘Legalises’ Internment Camps for Million Uighurs,” Guardian, October 11, 2018; and Philip Wen and Olzhas Auyezov, “Tracking China’s Muslim Gulag,” Reuters, November 29, 2018.
7. Marije Vlaskamp, “Beijings grote geheim stond op haar laptop,” deVolkskrant, December 7, 2019.
8. The China Cables are available at the website of the International Consortium of International Journalism, based in Washington DC, which was funded by the U.S. State Department from its founding in 1997 to 2025. During the period of the China Cables, the Consortium received U.S. government funds. The Karakax List is written about in Adrian Zenz, “The Karakax List: Dissecting the Anatomy of Beijing’s Internment Drive in Xinjiang,” Journal of Political Risk 8, no. 2 (February 2020).
9. Fergus Shiel, “Uighur Woman Tells Dutch Newspaper She Shared Leaked Chinese Government Documents,” International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, December 7, 2019.
10. Adrian Zenz, “Sterilisations, IUDs, and Mandatory Birth Control: The CCP’s Campaign to Suppress Uyghur Birthrates in Xinjiang,” Jamestown Foundation, 2020.
11. Zenz, “Sterilisations, IUDs, and Mandatory Birth Control,” 3.
12. Michael R. Pompeo, “Determination of the Secretary of State on Atrocities in Xinjiang,” press statement, January 19, 2021.
13. Government of Canada, “Parliamentary Committee Notes: Use of the Term ‘Genocide’ and the Situation in Xinjiang,” January 27, 2023.
14. UN Human Rights Council, Forty-First Session, Agenda Item 3, “Letter Dated 12 July 2019 from the Representatives of Algeria, Angola, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Belarus, the Plurinational State of Bolivia, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cambodia, Cameroon, Comoros, the Congo, Cuba, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Djibouti, Egypt, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Gabon, the Islamic Republic of Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, the Lao People’s Democratic Republic, Mozambique, Myanmar, Nepal, Nigeria, Oman, Pakistan, the Philippines, the Russian Federation, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, Somalia, South Sudan, Sri Lanka, the Sudan, the Syrian Arab Republic, Tajikistan, Togo, Turkmenistan, Uganda, the United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan, the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, Yemen, Zambia, Zimbabwe and the State of Palestine to the United Nations Office at Geneva Addressed to the President of the Human Rights Council,” A/HRC/41/G/17, July 12, 2019.
15. Permanent Mission of the People’s Republic of China to the United Nations, “Joint Statement of 69 Countries at the Interactive Dialogue on High Commissioner’s Annual Report at the 47th Session of the Human Rights Council,” June 22, 2021.
16. Organization of Islamic Countries, Resolutions on Muslim Communities and Muslim Minorities in the Non-OIC Member States, adopted by the Forty-Sixth Session of the Council of Foreign Ministers, Abu Dhabi, March 1–2, 2019, 5.
17. A State Council July 2019 report titled Historical Matters Concerning Xinjiang rehearses some of this history, although with its own priorities. See State Council Information Office of the People’s Republic of China, Historical Matters Concerning Xinjiang (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 2019).
18. Xue Zhang, “Imperial Maps of Xinjiang and Their Readers in Qing China, 1660–1860,” Journal of Chinese History 4, no. 1 (2020); Jianxiong Ge, Zhongguo Lidai Jiangyu de Bianqian [The Evolution of China’s Territorial Boundaries through the Dynasties] (Beijing: Commercial Press, 1997).
19. James A. Millward, Eurasian Crossroads: A History of Xinjiang (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007, 2nd edition, 2021). “Turkistan” is a much older Persian ethnographic term for Turkic-speaking people.
20. The literature on Uyghur history is beginning to be well-documented in both English and Chinese. For the better academic work in English, see David Brophy, Uyghur Nation: Reform and Revolution on the Russia-China Frontier (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2016); and Millward, Eurasian Crossroads. For Chinese texts, see Zhiping Pan, “Eguo Datasta Si’tan ‘Zhajide’ Yundong yu Jindai Weiwuer Qimeng Yundong—Xinjiang ‘Dongtu’ersitan’ Yundong de Yuanqi,” Xibei Minzu Yanjiu, no. 3 (2014); and Ke Wang, Dongtu’ersitan Duli Yundong: 1930 Niandai zhi 1940 Niandai (Hong Kong: Xianggang Zhongwen Daxue Chubanshe, 2013).
21. Ablet Kamalov, “Uyghur Historiography,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History, October 29, 2021, oxfordre.com.
22. Sean Roberts, “The Narrative of Uyghur Terrorism and the Self-Fulfilling Prophecy of Uyghur Militancy,” in Terrorism and Counterterrorism in China: Domestic and Foreign Policy Dimensions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018); and Maria Soloshcheva, “The Uyghur Terrorism: Phenomenon and Genesis,” Iran and the Caucasus 21, no. 4 (2017). For the official Chinese government white paper, see State Council Information Office of the People’s Republic of China, “Xinjiang de Fan Kong, Qu Jiduanhua Douzheng yu Renquan Baozhang” [“The Fight Against Terrorism and Extremism and Human Rights Protection in Xinjiang”], white paper, March 2019.
23. Ahmed Rashid, The Resurgence of Central Asia: Islam or Nationalism? (London: Zed Books, 1994).
24. Ahmed Rashid, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil, and Fundamentalism in Central Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000).
25. Ahmed Rashid, Jihad: The Rise of Militant Islam in Central Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002).
26. State Council Information Office, Historical Matters Concerning Xinjiang.
27. Notably, this was registered in the Western academic literature. See, for instance, Andrew Mumford, “Theory-Testing Uyghur Terrorism in China,” Perspectives on Terrorism 12, no. 5 (2018); Millward, Eurasian Crossroads.
28. Alyson J. K. Bailes, Pal Dunay, Pan Guang, and Mikhail Troitskiy, “The Shanghai Cooperation Organization,” SIPRI Policy Paper no. 17, Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, 2007.
29. United Nations Security Council, “Reason for Listing: Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement,” April 7, 2011; U.S. Department of the Treasury, “Press Statement on the UN Designation of the Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement,” press release, September 12, 2002.
30. One of the authors, Vijay Prashad, met many of these fighters in northern Syria in late 2014. They had been fighting alongside Jund al-Aqsa, a wing of the Islamic State. Most of the other fighters saw them as the most ideologically committed to the al-Qaeda tradition and as very brave and dangerous on the battlefield.
31. The numbers of dead are disputed, but the fact of the violence is uncontested.
32. Wang Hui, “The ‘Tibetan Question’ East and West: Orientalism, Regional Ethnic Autonomy, and the Politics of Dignity,” in The Politics of Imagining Asia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011). For the Chinese original, see 汪晖,「东方主义、民族区域自治与尊严政治——关于”西藏问题”的一点思考」,《天涯》2008年第4期.
33. State Council Information Office of the People’s Republic of China, “CPC Guidelines for Governing Xinjiang in the New Era: Practice and Achievements,” September 20, 2025. The numbers in this report are close to what demographers find, such as Jianxin Li and Liya Qiu, “Demographic Transition and Population Dynamics in Xinjiang, China,” China Population and Development Studies 8 (2024). There is a body of literature on health disparities that mostly negatively impacted minorities, but this literature is out-of-date, with the trend lines now showing overall improvement. Brenda Schuster, “Gaps in the Silk Road: An Analysis of Population Health Disparities in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region,” China Quarterly, no. 198 (2009). For a response to some of the Western scholarship, see Jianxin Li and Liya Qiu, “Xinjiang renkou zhuanbian yu fazhan—Huíying xifang youguan Xinjiang renkou ‘zhongzu miezhong’ miu lun,” Xibei Renkou 44, no. 5 (2023).
34. Zhang Donggang, The Belt and Road. A New Route to a Shared Future (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 2023).
35. Ürümqi is seen as a key “pivot city” in the entire Belt and Road complex and is now one of the five gateway airports into China. See: The Belt and Road Research Team, Pivot Cities on the Belt and Road (Beijing: Chongyang Institute for Financial Services of Renmin University/New World Press, 2016), 216–22.
36. State Council Information Office of the People’s Republic of China, “Poverty Alleviation: China’s Experience and Contribution,” white paper, April 6, 2021.
37. For a broad assessment of poverty eradication, see Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, “Serve the People: The Eradication of Extreme Poverty in China,” Studies in Socialist Construction, no. 1 (July 23, 2021).
38. A more recent article on southern Xinjiang and mechanization is Xie Dawei, “Shendu pinkun diqu yidi fupin banqian chanye fazhan moshi ji zhiyue yinsu fenxi—yi Xinjiang nanjiang san di zhou wei li,” Ganhanqu Dili, January 2021; Xiaoyun Li and Yang Chengxue, “The Battle Against Poverty: An Alternative Revolutionary Practice in China’s Post-Revolutionary Era,” Wenhua Zongheng: A Journal of Contemporary Chinese Thought, no. 3 (June 2020), in Chinese. An English translation of the same article was published by Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research in Wenhua Zongheng: A Journal of Contemporary Chinese Thought 1, no. 2 (June 2023).
39. “Human Costs,” Costs of War Project, Brown University, costsofwar.watson.brown.edu; David Michael Smith, Endless Holocausts (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2023).
40. Zenz, “The Karakax List: Dissecting the Anatomy of Beijing’s Internment Drive in Xinjiang.”
41. State Council Information Office of the People’s Republic of China, “Xinjiang Population Dynamics and Data,” white paper, September 26, 2021.
42. Australian Bureau of Statistics, “2021 Census Shows Changes in Australia’s Religious Diversity,” press release, June 28, 2022, abs.gov.
43. Nathan Ruser, James Leibold, Kelsey Munro, and Tilla Hoja, “Cultural Erasure: Tracing the Destruction of Uyghur and Islamic Spaces in Xinjiang,” Policy Brief no. 38, Australian Strategic Policy Institute, September 24, 2020.
44. Wang Hui, “The ‘Tibetan Question’ East and West.”

[Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor, and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter, and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He is a senior non-resident fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. He has written more than 20 books, most recent being (with Noam Chomsky) The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan and the Fragility of US Power (New Press, August 2022). Vijay Prashad and Tings Chak (Beijing, China) work at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, where Prashad is director and Chak is the co-coordinator of its Asia office. They are both editors of the international edition of Wenhua Zongheng. Courtesy: Monthly Review, an independent socialist magazine published monthly from New York City since 1949, whose present editor is John Bellamy Foster.]

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Dismissing China’s Repression in Xinjiang: A Reply to Vijay Prashad and Tings Chak

David Brophy

[David Brophy, an Australian socialist scholar of Chinese and Uyghur history, delivered a critical response to the above article published in Monthly Review, in the online portal Tempest. We are publishing it below.]

Vijay Prashad and Tings Chak’s article in Monthly Review, “The Idea of the ‘Uyghur Genocide’ and the Realities of Xinjiang,” is among the more substantial recent efforts on the international Left to defend China’s repressive policies in Xinjiang and dismiss the grievances of local Muslim peoples. Their article strikes a similar tone to the Chinese government sources that they often rely on, featuring the same questionable historical narratives and narrow focus on a few individual critics and their affiliations. By the end of the piece, I was noting signs of intellectual sloppiness. As I did my due diligence and dug into its sources, my suspicions were confirmed.

Prashad and Chak now edit the international edition of the journal Wenhua Zongheng 文化纵横. This has brought them into dialogue with Chinese intellectuals such as Wang Hui 汪晖, and it was unsurprising to see the article’s conclusion riffing off Wang’s critique of technocratic governance in the PRC. Wang was cited here for the view that “[g]enuine ethnic unity cannot be achieved through depoliticization, but must be built on recognition of history, diversity, and substantive equality.” I found this a well-meaning note to end on, even if the article itself had done little to advance these objectives.

But as has now been confirmed through an exchange with Prashad online, Wang did not write these lines. The “landmark essay” attributed to him was made up. It also emerged that the authors had invented a book by Wang Ke 王柯, a scholar of Xinjiang who works in Japan, and a Grayzone article by Max Blumenthal.

I’m unsure how much weight to give all this. Needless to say, I found it dismaying to find a left forum like Monthly Review infected by the same fake sourcing that I now must watch out for in the undergraduate essays I receive. Prashad says that there was no AI use involved in their article. Only he and his co-author know the truth of that. He has also said that the flaws in its referencing do not materially impact the substance of the article. Here we agree. Let us note this shortcoming and move on. Any debate should indeed focus on points of substance. On that, I’m afraid to say, my conclusion is that the article’s substance is as deficient as its referencing.

Misusing history

Take the authors’ sketch of Xinjiang’s history. Like every State Council White Paper, they repeat a version of the mantra that this territory has been part of China since ancient times. They claim that not only Xinjiang, but Tibet as well, were part of China during the Eastern Han dynasty (25–229 CE)—and also during the Tang (618–907), Yuan (1271–1368), Ming (1368–1644), and Qing (1644–1912) dynasties.

Before going on, I must pause to note how absurd it is for Prashad and Chak to drag us onto this terrain of debate at all. Since when has the Left considered the political status of a territory millennia in the past to have any bearing on the justice of its political configuration in the present? What business is it of today’s radicals to plumb dynastic chronicles to decide whether this or that piece of land rightfully “belongs” to a modern state? Prashad and Chak would not appreciate the comparison, but the similarity between this kind of argumentation and the logic of Zionism is striking.

Space precludes a full dissection of the specific claims. Briefly, though, the Han and Tang participated in multisided rivalries in the Tarim Basin, both establishing intermittent control there across a century or so—i.e., for less than half their existence. As for the “Yuan,” this was the Chinese name for the “Great Mongol Empire,” i.e., it was a Mongol, not a Chinese dynasty. In any case, the Toluid family ruling the Yuan were mostly kept out of Xinjiang by their Ögedeid and Chaghatayid cousins. The Ming then garrisoned Hami, on the very eastern edge of Xinjiang, for a century or so before the Islamised Chaghatayid Mongols drove them out. Finally, while maintaining that Xinjiang “belonged” to the Qing, the authors acknowledge that it was only after the destruction of the Junghar khanate (1634–1758) that this empire was able to tax it. The admission brings them close to recognizing the obvious reality: that the Qing dynasty’s mid-eighteenth-century incorporation of Xinjiang was an act of imperial conquest.

The difficulty for the authors is that the Chinese government line on Xinjiang has evolved in the last decade, in line with the heightened repression. The official position today is not that some dynasties had control of Xinjiang, but that they all did. The State Council report that Prashad and Chak cite says that Xinjiang became “Chinese territory” in the Han Dynasty and that all dynasties since “exercised the right of jurisdiction” there. This is where things get truly awkward for anyone interested in preserving their credibility as a historian, and Prashad and Chak decide to dodge the issue by shifting to questions of ideology. “Chinese political thought,” they argue, “is not rooted in fixed territory but in a more abstract idea of belonging.” All Chinese empires had documents that “suggested” their rule in Xinjiang, grounded in the civilizational notion of “all under Heaven”, i.e. Tianxia.

There is a term for a style of analysis that rests on a stark binary between Eastern and Western ways of thinking and doing. Edward Said once wrote a book about it. But the fact is, there is nothing particularly unique about the universalist pretensions exhibited by China’s dynasties. The Holy Roman Empire once claimed to rule all “Christendom,” even though its actual writ was far more limited.

What the imperial self-aggrandizing of the past might have to do with the rights and wrongs of policies in the present is again something the authors entirely fail to explain.

At this point Prashad and Chak add a final disclaimer: that the historical literature on Xinjiang is vast and “beyond our command to interpret.” Were they genuinely so perplexed, the appropriate thing to do would be to present various sides of the debate. But this they have studiously avoided doing. The only version of history they have presented is the distorted one preferred by Beijing. Their closing gesture towards the inscrutable Orient is a last-ditch effort to restore some distance between themselves and the obviously false claims they have rehashed.

We move from here to an equally common talking point in official publications: that the notion of “East Turkistan” was a foreign invention. I can assure the authors that well before any Russian influence, the notion that Xinjiang was part of “Turkistan” was commonplace. It is also true that modern nationalism came relatively late to Central Asia, and that when it did, local imaginings of nation and place were part of a trans-Eurasian dialogue, connecting to intellectual trends among Muslims and non-Muslims in Russia and the Ottoman Empire. There is nothing particularly unique in such a story. Entering the twentieth century, activists in or from Xinjiang laid claim to the territory using a mixture of old and new vocabulary: Uyghuristan, East Turkistan, Altishahr, occasionally even the archaic “Moghulistan.”

So what? Again, I am reminded of the way that Zionists try to discredit the Palestinian cause by claiming that “Palestine” was not a well-defined, or meaningful geographic unit for the inhabitants of the region at the time of Zionist colonization. Those facts are in dispute, but even assuming this was the case, what follows? Are people to be punished for arriving late to a fully elaborated nationalist program? Are we reinventing here the category of “non-historic” peoples, destined to be swept aside by those with more viable national movements?

The fact is, Prashad and Chak show no serious interest in the complex political history of the region they are discussing. They skip the entire history of Islamic reformism and Soviet-aligned Uyghur nationalism; there is no mention of Comintern strategies towards Xinjiang, which saw various schemes to extend the Russian revolution there; nothing on Uyghur labor organizing or cultural radicalism in Soviet Central Asia. Their “left” analysis sets all this aside to commence a narrative of “secession” movements at the time of the Sino-Soviet split, aligning with a trend in China today to reduce Uyghur nationalism to a tool of Russian/Soviet intrigue. They devote two long paragraphs to the relatively insignificant figure of Yusupbek Mukhlisi (1920–2004), with only a brief nod to the Second East Turkistan Republic as part of his life story. They inform us that Mukhlisi’s Kazakhstan-centered network claimed responsibility for attacks in China in the 1990s, neglecting to mention that not even the Chinese government took these claims seriously. Prashad and Chak’s narrative of more recent militancy likewise zooms in on individuals and organizations at the expense of any consideration of social conditions. No one denies that jihadists have emerged from discontented sections of Xinjiang’s populace, and that some of these have engaged in unconscionable attacks on ordinary Chinese civilians. But simply recycling official narratives on the scale and nature of these attacks adds little clarity to the discussion.

Counter-terrorism and repression

The authors’ master narrative of recent years is of a Communist Party gradually shifting from a counter-terrorism crackdown to recognizing the social and economic grievances that generated support for Uyghur militancy and addressing these through development schemes. There is a grain of truth here, and recent improvements in basic living standards in Xinjiang have indeed been impressive. But the party has long had grand designs for Xinjiang’s economy. The relevant policy shift between the first and second decades of the twenty-first century was not from counterterrorism to development, but from militarized counterterrorist policing to a far more wide-ranging “de-radicalization” paradigm. This involved a panoply of War on Terror techniques: predictive policing (on the basis of Islamophobic “indicators” of radicalization), surveillance of social media and domestic space, public loyalty ceremonies, and of course mass ideological re-education carried out through detention centers.

At the same time, a Stalinist purge hit Xinjiang’s institutions, targeting non-Han elites deemed insufficiently loyal. As one Chinese commentator described it in 2020: “Xinjiang has punished a large number of ‘two-faced people’ and ‘two-faced factions’ in the fields of public security, prosecution, law, education, publishing, propaganda and culture.” The Chinese government has itself publicized stories of Uyghur intellectuals imprisoned for publications that were once approved by state censors, but which now fall foul of tightening ideological standards. Alongside this, there is ample evidence of people receiving devastating sentences for acts as simple as providing religious instruction at home or maintaining contact with relatives outside China.

All this is grossly minimized by Prashad and Chak. In the only mention of formal incarceration in their entire article, they note in passing that “several people” were imprisoned from 2014 to 2019 for “violent activities.” “Several people”? Total prosecutions in Xinjiang soared during this period, jumping from 41,305 in 2016 to 215,823 in 2017, and increased in average length. China has not hidden the fact that thousands have been convicted for “terrorism” offenses—keeping in mind that a UN review of available judicial documentation described “judgments referring to conduct being ‘extremist’ despite none of the formal charges being related to terrorism or “extremism.’” This was seen as indicative “of an approach that considers any type of violation of law committed by a Muslim person as presumptively “extremist.’”

The authors would have us believe that stories of repression in Xinjiang originate in a narrow circle of U.S.-aligned diaspora activists. But some of the most chilling stories I have encountered—of family members ripped from their beds at night, eventually returning months or years later as broken individuals—have been from people who studiously avoid all involvement in diaspora politics. Against such narratives, the authors counterpose the glowing reports that China has received from bodies such as the Organization of Islamic Cooperation. I suppose if China’s State Council is a trustworthy source on human rights in Xinjiang, then why not Egyptian or Indonesian diplomats?

In the end, Prashad and Chak fall back on a form of whataboutism: Sure, the camps might have been coercive, but China’s counter-terrorism policies were still preferable to Russia’s in Chechnya, America’s in Iraq, or Israel’s in Palestine. This is true enough. China has not engaged in the mass slaughter of Uyghurs and Kazakhs. Gaza stands in ruins, while Xinjiang’s modern infrastructure grows. But the comparison strikes me as odd, given the earlier insistence that Xinjiang has been part of China for millennia. If so, why are imperialist wars and colonial genocides the points of reference here?

The question of “genocide”

Which brings me to the question: Is this genocide? This often sits at the center of debate on Xinjiang, but in my opinion it need not. When public discourse shifted to talk of “genocide” in Xinjiang, I was among those who were wary. The hope that accusing China of the crime of crimes might prompt international action was understandable, if misplaced. But it was equally obvious that the claim would serve as a lightning rod for skeptical critique, and risk obscuring the wider question of mass repression and cultural erasure. Some adopt capacious definitions of genocide that may arguably capture the Xinjiang case. Personally, I use the term in its common-language sense of the deliberate destruction of a people. While some have died in China’s camps and prisons, I am not convinced that “genocide” best describes the situation.

I can also concur with the authors that talk of genocide in Xinjiang has been cynically exploited by governments that have no business lecturing anyone on human rights, implicated as they are in their own horrific crimes. Liberal human rights organizations have often been too quick to make common cause with China hawks. The Left should have no truck with any of this.

But equally, the Left should not allow criticism of genocide claims to smuggle in an attitude of indifference to the human suffering that those claims point to—precisely what Prashad and Chak are trying to do. In their hands, talk of genocide is reduced to the work of a handful of individuals affiliated with right-wing think tanks, a move that allows them to focus on cultivating a sense that the entire Xinjiang issue is a construct of funding sources and self-interest. This will pass for “materialism” in some circles, but it is the sort of analysis that Gramsci had in mind when he complained of the reduction of Marxism to “economic superstition.” In such thinking, “‘Critical’ activity is reduced to the exposure of swindles, to creating scandals, and to prying into the pockets of public figures.”

Sadly, far too much of today’s China debate has this feel to it. Prashad and his co-thinkers are often enough on the receiving end themselves of critiques focusing on funding sources. It is a pity that instead of elevating the discussion above this level, they choose to descend to it.

Concluding

Aligning as they do with official Chinese government positions, Prashad and Chak’s argumentation draws more on the logic of nationalism than left traditions of debate on the national question. They are quite often wrong, but just as often they present talking points with little obvious relevance to determining where the Left should stand on the situation in Xinjiang. Wang Hui’s critique of “depoliticization,” which the authors embrace in their conclusion, expresses a desire for more dialogue and debate to build trust among the peoples of Xinjiang. Well and good. But who do they imagine participating in this dialogue? Minzu University Professor Ilham Tohti once tried to initiate such an exchange, and is now serving a life sentence in prison for separatism. Any comment from the authors on that?

Marxists have always insisted that the only way to build trust amid national antagonisms is through the forthright defense of national rights—something that is entirely missing from Prashad and Chak’s lengthy presentation. In the absence of this, what is the import of a call for more “politicized” governance in Xinjiang? After all, Xinjiang has seen plenty of politics in the last decade: relentless ideological bullying, the constriction of non-Han languages and cultural expression, and life-destroying punishments for anyone who steps out of line. The full implications of China’s new Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress remain to be seen, but it looks likely to involve more of the same. Some may choose to keep downplaying all this in the name of anti-imperialism. I think the Left needs to tell the truth.

[David Brophy is senior lecturer in modern Chinese history at the university of Sydney. He is the author of Uyghur Nation (2016) and China Panic (2021). Courtesy: Tempest magazine, that aims to contribute to the reconstitution of revolutionary politics and organization in the United States today.]