All Reading
This section contains a curated list of useful articles, investigations, books and other reading materials. The list is updated on a weekly basis and suggestions for additions are welcome.
Starting Points:
Making Xinjiang Sanctions Work - Full Report
Can economic sanctions address Xinjiang forced labour? Drawing on 3 original datasets containing over 12,000 datapoints, confidential interviews and a year of research, this final report presents the most comprehensive analysis of Xinjiang sanctions to date, and offers ideas for strengthening them.
Great Wall of Steel: China’s Global Campaign to Suppress the Uyghurs
This report posits that the focus on how Uyghurs are treated within China ignores China’s harassment of Uyghurs and Kazakhs living abroad.
An overview of the atrocities against Uyghur Muslims
An overview of the atrocities taking place in Xinjiang and information on re-education campaigns, sexual violence, forced labour and actions you can take to support Uyghurs.
The Crisis in Xinjiang: What’s Happening Now and What Does it Mean?
Policies implemented by the CCP in Xinjiang since 2016 have become a central issue in PRC international relations. This talk reviews the Xinjiang crisis to date and suggests how we should understand these events and trends.
The architecture of repression: Unpacking Xinjiang’s governance
This report is a part of a larger online project which can be found on the Xinjiang Data Project website. The project maps and analyses the governance mechanisms employed by the Chinese party-state in Xinjiang from 2014 to 2021 within the context of the region’s ongoing human rights crisis. The authors have located and scrutinised thousands of Chinese-language sources, including leaked police records and government budget documents never before published. For policymakers, this report will provide an evidence base to inform policy responses including possible sanctions. For the general public and anyone whose interests are linked to Xinjiang and China more broadly, this project can inform risk analysis and ethical considerations.
CCP: 100 Years of Suppression
In order to gain a comprehensive understanding of the CCP’s ambitions, it is important to analyze both the historical and current injustices perpetrated by the Chinese government, particularly in Tibet, Xinjiang , and Hong Kong — three regions where the CCP’s state-sanctioned policies appear to be the most widespread and concerning.
China Can Lock Up A Million Muslims In Xinjiang At Once
This investigation reveals the full capacity of China's previously secret network of prisons and detention camps in Xinjiang: enough space to detain more than 1 million people.
No Space Left to Run: China’s Transnational Repression of Uyghurs
This report is the product of an effort to understand the means by which China targets Uyghurs beyond its borders to silence dissent, gathering cases of China’s transnational repression of Uyghurs from public sources, including government documents, human rights reports, and reporting by credible news agencies to establish a detailed analysis of how the scale and scope of China’s global repression are expanding.
China: Draconian repression of Muslims in Xinjiang amounts to crimes against humanity
Uyghurs, Kazakhs and other predominantly Muslim ethnic minorities in China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region face systematic state-organized mass imprisonment, torture and persecution amounting to crimes against humanity, Amnesty International said as it launched a new report and campaign today.
“Like We Were Enemies In a War” - China’s Mass Persecution of Muslims in Xinjiang
This report, based on first-hand testimonies and satellite imagery data analysis, gives an extensive account of life inside the internment camps.
“Break Their Lineage, Break Their Roots” - China’s Crimes against Humanity
This report outlines the evidence for the conclusion that the Chinese government has committed crimes against humanity against the Turkic Muslim population.
The Uyghur Genocide: An Examination of China’s Breaches of the 1948 Genocide Convention
This report is the first independent expert application of the 1948 Genocide Convention to the ongoing treatment of the Uyghurs in China. It was undertaken in response to emerging accounts of serious and systematic atrocities in Xinjiang province, particularly directed against the Uyghurs, an ethnic minority, to ascertain whether the People’s Republic of China is in breach of the Genocide Convention.
The Human Rights Situation of Uyghurs in Xinjiang, China
This report from the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs outlines the repression of Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims in Xinjiang and considers Canada’s international obligations under the Genocide Convention.
Inside A Xinjiang Detention Camp
It started as a single small compound. Within 18 months, it had grown to more than 10 times its original size, capable of holding about 3,700 detainees. China's mass internment system for Muslims in Xinjiang is so secretive that, despite a growing international outcry, little is known about any one detention camp. Interviews and architectural modeling offer a rare and terrifying view into a massive internment complex.
Cultural erasure: Tracing the destruction of Uyghur and Islamic spaces in Xinjiang
The Chinese government has embarked on a systematic campaign to rewrite the cultural heritage of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) in northwest China by desecrating or “rectifying” mosques and indigenous sacred sites. This report maps over 900 mosques and other important Uyghur religious-cultural sites across Xinjiang, analyses their condition before and after 2017, and then used statistical extrapolation to estimate the full extent of their destruction and alteration.
Documenting Xinjiang’s Detention System
This database of nearly 400 suspected detention facilities in Xinjiang highlights ‘re-education’ camps, detention centres and prisons that have been newly built or expanded since 2017.
China’s system of oppression in Xinjiang: How it developed and how to curb it
This report describes the history of Uyghur oppression in Xinjiang, outlining the current conditions in the region and Chinese surveillance policies, as well as policy recommendations for addressing the ongoing oppression.
China Secretly Built A Vast New Infrastructure To Imprison Muslims
Using satellite images and interviews with former detainees, this investigation of China’s internment camp system identified more than 260 structures built since 2017.
The Global Implications of “Re-education” Technologies in Northwest China
This terrain assessment describes how Turkic Muslims in Xinjiang were targeted by digital and biometric surveillance technologies of the “re-education” system. Its main conclusion is that the world is witnessing the birth of a new form of technology-enabled systems of social and behavioral control. This rise in authoritarian statecraft coincides with breakthroughs in face surveillance, voice recognition, automated data recovery tools and algorithmic assessments of social media histories in China’s private and public technology industry.
“Ideological Transformation”: Records of Mass Detention From Qaraqash, Hotan
This report describes and analyzes a leaked government document known as the Karakax List which contains in-depth information about the familial and social circles of internees from eight Uyghur neighborhoods.