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:
Visiting Xinjiang, Xi Jinping doubles down on hard-line policies against Uyghurs
Visiting Xinjiang for the second time in just over a year, President Xi Jinping vowed to double down on China’s hardline policies toward the 11 million mostly Muslim Uyghurs who live in the region.
Xi urges more work to ‘control illegal religious activities’ in Xinjiang on surprise visit
In a second visit since launching an extreme crackdown on the region’s Uyghur and Turkic Muslim population, the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, urged officials in the region to conserve “hard won social stability”.
Xinjiang officials use China’s anti-crime campaign to target ‘disloyal’ Uyghurs
Authorities in China’s far-western Xinjiang region used the Chinese government’s 100-day crackdown on criminals and fugitives to target Uyghurs deemed “religious extremists” and “two-faced,” a police officer in a major city said.
Uyghur poet and educator said to be serving 13-year prison term in Xinjiang
A prominent Uyghur poet and associate professor at a was detained as a “threat to social stability” and sentenced to 13 years in prison in 2017 on a “separatism” charge, a local police officer told RFA.
The “Xinjiang Papers”: How Xi Jinping commands Chinese policy
This report shows how the Xinjiang papers reveal the centralised decision-making behind the persecution of Uyghurs in Xinjiang.
In Xinjiang, a new normal under a new chief — and also more of the same
Ma Xingrui, the new party secretary of Xinjiang, is tasked with repairing the damage left by his predecessor, Chen Quanguo, who initiated the largest internment of a religious minority since World War II. But he will also need to execute Beijing’s new policy of thwarting what it calls the “two plots.”
In Xinjiang’s Tech Incubators, Innovation Is Inseparable from Repression
In 2017, the Urumqi High-Tech Industrial Development Zone, in the capital of Xinjiang, published a catalogue of the “entrepreneurial and innovative” projects underway in its jurisdiction. The Xinjiang University Information Technology Innovation Park Co., Ltd. aimed to improve capacity for “grassroots makerspaces.” Another company was using blockchain “to establish an Asia-Europe big data trading platform.” But the catalogue also heralded innovation of a very different kind.
Beyond the Camps: Beijing's Grand Scheme of Forced Labor, Poverty Alleviation and Social Control in Xinjiang
This report discusses how the state's long-term stability maintenance strategy in Xinjiang is predicated upon a combination of forced labor, family separation and social control under the guise of "poverty alleviation".
The Spectre of Insecurity: The CCP’s Mass Internment Strategy in Xinjiang
Based on a close reading of official sources, this article explores the evolution of China’s mass internment strategy and the key policy-drivers, institutions, and actors in Xinjiang policy over the last decade.
China's Decimation of Uyghur Minds
Academics, journalists and rights groups have recently documented the accelerating repression of the 11-million strong Uyghur population living in Xinjiang. The burgeoning security apparatus, ubiquitous surveillance, gathering of biometrics, the use of big data, and similar technological features of Chinese authoritarianism have invited comparisons of Xinjiang to an open-air prison or to the dystopian visions captured in Orwell’s 1984 or Zamyatin’s We.
China surveillance targets crime – and dissent
Video surveillance is a multibillion-dollar industry in China, bankrolled by an authoritarian Communist Party that has overseen more spending on domestic security in recent years than national defense.