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:
‘As if you’ve spent your whole life in prison’: Starving and subdued in Xinjiang detention centers
When Chinese state authorities prepared to release Gulbahar Jelil, an ethnic Uyghur woman born and raised in Kazakhstan, they told her that she was forbidden to tell anyone about what she had experienced over the one year, three months, and 10 days in which she was detained…
She didn’t listen.
In China’s Xinjiang, surveillance is all pervasive
There are few more difficult places for a foreign journalist to report from in China than Xinjiang. The surveillance is all pervasive. Streets bristle with CCTV cameras. In some cities, there are now police posts every 30 metres.
Xinjiang’s Re-Education and Securitization Campaign: Evidence from Domestic Security Budgets
In August 2018, at a meeting of the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, the PRC flatly denied the existence of “re-education camps”, stating that they were instead “vocational education and employment training centers to acquire employment skills and legal knowledge”. But the PRC government’s own budgets appear to contradict these assertions.
Interview: ‘I Did Not Believe I Would Leave Prison in China Alive’
Tursun was taken into custody several times, including at one of a network of political “re-education camps,” where Chinese authorities began detaining Uyghurs accused of harboring “strong religious views” and “politically incorrect” ideas in April 2017. Tursun said she was targeted because she had lived in Egypt—one of a number of countries blacklisted by authorities in the XUAR because of a perceived threat of religious radicalization.
Mapping Xinjiang’s Detention Camps
This November 2018 report by ASPI’s International Cyber Policy Centre collates and adds to the current open-source research into China’s growing network of extrajudicial ‘re-education’ camps in Xinjiang province.
“The Uyghurs of Kazakhstan have been pressured into inactivity”
The Kazakhstan Uyghur Association has not been active in searching out relatives arrested in Xinjiang, nor has it made many statements regarding the issue. Azattyq talked to a main advisor of the World Uyghur Congress, Kakharman Kozhamberdi, about the reasons behind this state of affairs.