I am among thousands of Uyghurs who cannot renew their passports and like them I cannot make plans. I cannot enroll at university, I cannot work, and I cannot travel. I don’t want to go back to China to get a new passport out of fear I will never come back. I don’t know what to do.
“For us, our passion for the game shows the world the skills and aspirations of our people.”
In spring 2009, a Uyghur intellectual came to the University of Hawaii on a prestigious Ford International Fellowship to start his graduate work.
I was raised in the UK by parents who survived the Nazi occupation of Poland. I grew up hearing their stories of fear and deprivation.
On a cold December day in 2013, Mutellip Imin, a 25-year-old Uyghur student from Hotan, changed his life. He collected four handwritten signs he had made, went to a road near his home, and took four photographs of himself holding each message in turn.
Recent events in Xinjiang have generated a great deal of analysis and commentary. In particular, reports of violence have opened up the region to the attention of activists, journalists, academics and officials not familiar with the constituent people of Xinjiang.
A series of violent incidents in their homeland have intermittently propelled the Uyghurs into recent international consciousness.
Writing on the Uyghur people has not been lacking in recent months. An uptick of violence since 2013 in Xinjiang has seen an increase in analysis that sometimes reveals more about the author than the issue.
In a 10 month period, China destroyed 80% of the Uyghur Internet in a massive digital book burning.
The situation of the Uyghur minority in north-west China became even more precarious in 2013, says Henryk Szadziewski.
Bibliography of select news reports & academic works
Compiled by Professor Magnus Fiskesjö
The Uyghur Human Rights Project has released a new report analyzing the Chinese government’s attempts to craft and promote a narrative responding to international criticism of its large-scale arbitrary detention of Uyghurs and other Turkic peoples.
The Uyghur Human Rights Project (UHRP) has released a new report, Kashgar Coerced: Forced Reconstruction, Exploitation, and Surveillance in the Cradle of Uyghur Culture. The report documents the Chinese government’s campaign to stamp out tangible aspects of Uyghur culture, using the ancient city of Kashgar as the most emblematic case.
The #HearUyghurs Campaign: On April 17, Uyghur diaspora activist Arslan Hidayat launched a new social-media campaign with the hashtag #HearUyghurs. The campaign highlights the trauma experienced by the worldwide Uyghur diaspora.
UHRP’s new report, “Weaponized Passports: The Crisis of Uyghur Statelessness,” documents an ongoing and worsening issue facing Uyghurs abroad, namely refusal to renew passports and denial of access to other documentation by the Chinese government.
The Uyghur Human Rights Project is deeply concerned by alarming new evidence that local residents are starving across the Uyghur homeland.
A new UHRP report analyzes a leaked document revealing ground-level implementation of the Chinese government’s mass detention program targeting Uyghurs and other Turkic peoples.