The War on the Uyghurs: China’s Internal Campaign against a Muslim Minority

Years before COVID-19 was first identified in the Chinese city of Wuhan, the Chinese government had already set its targets on another purportedly dangerous pathogen: Islamist extremism, which Chinese officials said was ‘infecting’ the Uyghurs, the predominantly Muslim indigenous peoples of northwest China’s Xinjiang region. In 2014 and 2015, the People’s Republic of China (PRC)’s bio-politicisation of this supposed threat reached its zenith, with the PRC Justice Department’s Party Committee Secretary suggesting that some 30 per cent of Uyghur villagers were ‘polluted by religious extremism’ and required ‘concentrated education’ (203). The secretary added: ‘when the 30% are transformed […] the village is basically cleansed’ (203). Long before the world was reintroduced to the concept of ‘quarantining’ as a measure to avoid the spread of COVID-19, the PRC had deemed such treatment necessary to deal with the Uyghurs ‘in order to ensure that the alleged infection of ‘‘extremism’’ did not spread to others’ (203), as Sean R. Roberts writes in his exceptional new book, The War on the Uyghurs: China’s Campaign Against Xinjiang’s Muslims. Roberts, an associate professor of the practice of international affairs and director of the International Development Studies Program at George Washington University, convincingly shows through extensive interviews and Uyghur language sources that the PRC’s claims of a large-scale Uyghur ‘terrorist threat’ are profoundly disingenuous. Yet they found purchase following 9/11, allowing the PRC to fold the Uyghurs into the ‘Global War on Terror’ (GWOT) in order to suppress them. This, however, created a ‘self-fulfilling prophecy of Uyghur Read more