Darren Byler is an Assistant Professor of International Studies at Simon Fraser University, where his teaching and research focus is on the technology and politics of urban life in Northwest China and Southeast Asia. His writing has appeared in Logic, Guardian, and ChinaFile, among other publications.
Ilham Tohti was famous for pushing back against the material and social dispossession of Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims. When even this moderate scholar was silenced five years ago, it signalled that there was no more space to publicly suggest ways to oppose the elimination of Uyghur culture. The Sakharov Prize honors the dignity of Uyghur social life and the way Ilham Tohti strove to protect it.
The “bilingual” education system introduced over the past decade in Xinjiang is better characterized as an attempt to transform minority education systems in the region...
Factories of Turkic Muslim internment, part of China’s reeducation camp system, are subsidized and directed by the state, and employ many former detainees at a fraction of minimum wage. Companies, both Chinese and foreign, are taking advantage.
Since 2018, there has been a notable rise in articles promoting marriage between Han men and Uyghur women. At a time when many people across...
July 5, 2009, is a date that forever changed the course of Xinjiang history. The lives of Uyghurs in China have never been the same.
Pictured: The Uyghur student activist Örkesh, better known in English-language media as Wu’er Kaixi, raises his arms with fellow protesters in Beijing in 1989. Protests...
“I grew up (with the idea) being instilled (in me) that fifty-six nations compose one family. This was the first time that a person showed me a social issue which was hidden by the media."
Poets — and the musicians who perform their lyrics — are at the forefront of Uyghur culture. If they were to be given even limited...
Poetry has a long and proud tradition in Uyghur culture. But it is being threatened in Xinjiang, where the Chinese state has been attempting to re-engineer Uyghur society by silencing and eliminating Uyghur cultural thought.