The latest grim news from Xinjiang

Darren Byler writes on The China Project that “Uyghur ‘patriotism’ in China’s Xinjiang region now requires the active disavowal of the Uyghur way of life. There is an ongoing attempt by Han Chinese authorities to erase a native system of knowledge and the basic elements that make Uyghur life Uyghur: language, religion, and culture. It begins with an insistence on the ‘national language,’ Mandarin Chinese.”

See also:

• ‘Now we don’t talk anymore’ — inside the ‘cleansing’ of Xinjiang by Joanne Smith Finley on ChinaFile
• This opinion piece in the New York Times (porous paywall) by Mustafa Akyol, a senior fellow on Islam and modernity at the Cato Institute, who argues that for “Muslim societies, however, the Uyghur crisis must be a wake-up call. It shows what can happen to Muslims when authoritarian governments embrace Islamophobia as state policy.”