It is important to note that it is precisely because of the region’s low population density and remote location that these events are able to take place. Despite increasing suspicion of human rights violations, there is limited documentation and evidence. China has been highly effective at both denying access to sites and controlling the narrative about Xinjiang to its own citizens, such that most people within mainland China are complete unaware of what is happening to the Uyghurs and other Muslim minority groups. If these same actions were pursued in high-density urban areas, keeping them hidden and secret would be nearly impossible, but the geographic remoteness of the region and the successful public intimidation of the Uyghurs keep these violations invisible. As such, I am deeply indebted to the dedicated scholarship of Adrian Zenz and Shawn Zhang, who have each painstakingly worked to expose this atrocity with almost no official data and without physical access to Xinjiang.
See Wendy Harding, The Myth of Emptiness and the New American Literature of Place (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2014); Catrin Gersdorf, The Poetics and Politics of the Desert: Landscape and the Construction of America (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009).
It is important to note that many non-European cultures have viewed deserts as spaces of rich culture and ecologies. The most prominent examples are the Hohokam people of the southwestern United States, the Rajasthani pastoralists in the Indian subcontinent, and the ancient Egyptians.
Vittoria Di Palma, Wasteland: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 3–4.
Valerie L. Kuletz, The Tainted Desert: Environmental and Social Ruin in the American West (New York: Routledge, 1998), 13.
Global land cover datasets have been used since the 1970s. Since the 1990s, NASA and the USGS have produced the most comprehensive and widely accepted datasets that are used throughout the world by governments and institutions to track and monitor land cover change. G. Gutman et al., “Towards Monitoring Land-Cover and Land-Use Changes at a Global Scale: The Global Land Survey 2005,” Photogrammetric Engineering and Remote Sensing 74, no. 1 (2008): 5; Peng Gong et al., “A New Research Paradigm for Global Land Cover Mapping,” Annals of GIS 22, no. 2 (April 2, 2016): 87–102.
James R. Anderson et al., “A Land Use and Land Cover Classification System for Use with Remote Sensor Data,” (Washington, DC: United States Geological Survey, Department of the Interior, 1976), 18.
Stanley Toops, “Spatial Results of the 2010 Census in Xinjiang,” Asia Dialogue, March 7, 2016, ➝.
Nick Holdstock, China’s Forgotten People: Xinjiang, Terror and the Chinese State (New York: I.B. Tauris, 2015), 13; Xinhua, “Man-Made Oasis: Xinjiang’s ‘Green Wall’ Fights Expanding Desert,” China Daily, October 19, 2018, ➝.
James A Millward, Eurasian Crossroads: A History of Xinjiang (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 43.
Rian Thum, The Sacred Routes of Uyghur History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014), 17.
Valerie Hansen, The Silk Road: A New History with Documents (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 199.
James A. Millward, “Historical Perspectives on Contemporary Xinjiang,” Inner Asia 2, no. 2 (2000): 130.
In principle, this is meant to give members of that minority rights not afforded to others. There are five autonomous regions in China that are each associated with one or more ethnic minority: Zhuang Autonomous Region, Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, Tibet Autonomous Region, Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, and Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. It is important to note that despite the acknowledgement of ethnic diversity, these populations have been substantially disenfranchised socially, politically, and economically. Tibetans are perhaps the most well-known example, but they are by no means the only ones to have experienced such marginalization. It is important to note that Tibet’s status as an Autonomous Region is a delineation that has been ascribed by the Chinese state but is highly contested by Tibetans and much of the international community, who believe that Tibet is a sovereign nation.
Millward, Eurasian Crossroads, 4.
Tom Phillips, “China ‘Holding at Least 120,000 Uighurs in Re-Education Camps,’” The Guardian, January 25, 2018, ➝.
Adrian Zenz, “Brainwashing, Police Guards and Coercive Internment: Evidence from Chinese Government Documents about the Nature and Extent of Xinjiang’s ‘Vocational Training Internment Camps,’” Journal of Political Risk 7, no. 7 (July 2019), ➝.
See Zenz, “Brainwashing, Police Guards and Coercive Internment”; Ben Mauk, “Can China Turn the Middle of Nowhere into the Center of the World Economy?,” The New York Times, January 29, 2019, ➝.
Rémi Castets, “What’s Really Happening to Uighurs in Xinjiang?,” The Nation, March 19, 2019, ➝.
Nick Cumming-Bruce, “U.N. Panel Confronts China Over Reports That It Holds a Million Uighurs in Camps,” The New York Times, August 10, 2018, ➝.
Chris Buckley and Amy Qin, “Muslim Detention Camps Are Like ‘Boarding Schools,’ Chinese Official Says,” The New York Times, March 12, 2019, ➝.
Despite Xinjiang only accounting for approximately 1.5 percent of the country’s total population, 21 percent of all arrests in 2017 were made in Xinjiang, according to the human rights advocacy group Chinese Human Rights Defenders. Lily Kuo, “China Denies Violating Minority Rights amid Detention Claims,” The Guardian, August 13, 2018, ➝.
Reuters, “China Warns US: Criticism of Uighur Detentions Is Not ‘helpful’ for Trade Talks,” The Guardian, October 30, 2019, ➝.
Jun Zhang, “Statement by Ambassador Zhang Jun on Human Rights during Dialogue with Chairperson of CERD at Third Committee of United Nations General Assembly,” Permanent Mission of the People's Republic of China to the UN, October 30, 2019, ➝.
The Uyghur community believes that the Chinese government unjustly colonized them and, as a result, they have actively contested their control by the Chinese government. They have fought for their independence from the Chinese state unsuccessfully since the Qing imperial dynasty conquered them in the eighteenth century.
Communist Party of China, “Terrorist Activities Perpetrated by ‘Eastern Turkistan’ Organizations and Their Links with Osama Bin Laden and the Taliban,” Permanent Mission of the People’s Republic of China to the UN, November 29, 2001, ➝.
Sean R. Roberts, “The Biopolitics of China’s ‘War on Terror’ and the Exclusion of the Uyghurs,” Critical Asian Studies 50, no. 2 (April 2018): 238.
It should be noted that prior to his post in Xinjiang, Chen had been Party Secretary of Tibet (2011-2016) where his successful policies to suppress dissent were widely lauded by the Chinese Community Party. Many of his tactics in Tibet have been instituted and intensified in Xinjiang.
Adrian Zenz, “‘Thoroughly Reforming Them Towards a Healthy Heart Attitude’: China’s Political Re-Education Campaign in Xinjiang,” Central Asian Survey (September 2018): 3.
James A. Millward, “What It’s Like to Live in a Surveillance State,” New York Times, February 3, 2018, ➝.
Chris Buckley and Paul Mozur, “How China Uses High-Tech Surveillance to Subdue Minorities,” New York Times, May 22, 2019, ➝.
Adrian Zenz and James Leibold, “Chen Quanguo: The Strongman Behind Beijing’s Securitization Strategy in Tibet and Xinjiang,” China Brief 17, no. 12 (2017): 18.
Zenz and Leibold, “Chen Quanguo,” 18.
Roberts, “The Biopolitics of China’s ‘War on Terror’ and the Exclusion of the Uyghurs,” 246.
Meng Jianzhu, secretary of the CCP and Legal Affairs Commission, said in 2018: Through “religious guidance, legal education, skills training, psychological interventions, and multiple other methods, the effectiveness of transformation through education must be increased, thoroughly reforming them towards a healthy heart attitude.” Zenz, “‘Thoroughly Reforming Them towards a Healthy Heart Attitude,’” 15.
See Cumming-Bruce, “U.N. Panel Confronts China Over Reports That It Holds a Million Uighurs in Camps.”
Zenz, “‘Thoroughly Reforming Them towards a Healthy Heart Attitude,’” 12.
Zenz, “‘Thoroughly Reforming Them towards a Healthy Heart Attitude,’” 12.
Stephanie Nebehay, “1.5 Million Muslims Could Be Detained in China’s Xinjiang,” Reuters, March 13, 2019, ➝.
Shawn Zhang, “Satellite Imagery of Xinjiang ‘Re-Education Camp’ Number 01,” Medium, October 1, 2018, ➝.
Zenz, “‘Thoroughly Reforming Them towards a Healthy Heart Attitude,’” 19.
Austin Ramzy and Chris Buckley, “‘Absolutely No Mercy’: Leaked Files Expose How China Organized Mass Detentions of Muslims,” New York Times, November 16, 2019, ➝.