Features
01.08.19
Where Did the One Million Figure for Detentions in Xinjiang’s Camps Come From?
As journalists and scholars have reported in recent months on the campaign of religious and cultural repression and incarceration taking place in the Chinese region of Xinjiang, a central question has emerged: How many people has China’s government...
Viewpoint
12.28.18
‘Now We Don’t Talk Anymore’
In an old Silk Road oasis town on China’s western border, these days a thirsty traveller can knock back a cold beer in a local mosque. The former place of worship is now a bar for tourists. And it is with the customers’ views in mind—and, perhaps,...
Features
11.28.18
Beijing’s Long Struggle to Control Xinjiang’s Mineral Wealth
The Silk Road Economic Belt—the overland component of Xi Jinping’s signature Belt and Road Initiative (BRI)—promises to bind China to Central Asia and beyond through a new infrastructural network. Connecting through China’s far western Xinjiang...
The NYRB China Archive
11.23.18
The Uighurs and China’s Long History of Trouble with Islam
from New York Review of Books
Last month, I spent several days at the Forbidden City, the gargantuan palace in the middle of Beijing where China’s emperors ruled the land for nearly five hundred years. I was there to attend a conference on religion and power in imperial China,...
Conversation
11.20.18
Has the World Lost Sight of Tibet?
Since the incarceration of roughly a million Uighurs in the northwestern Chinese region of Xinjiang over the last year, the situation in Tibet has gotten relatively less coverage in Western media. What is the current situation for human rights,...
Media
11.06.18
ChinaFile Presents: The Situation in Xinjiang
ChinaFile and the U.S.-Asia Law Institute of NYU School of Law co-hosted a discussion with historian Rian Thum and journalists Gulchehra Hoja of Radio Free Asia and James Palmer of Foreign Policy on the human rights crisis in the far-western region...
Postcard
10.24.18
China’s Government Has Ordered a Million Citizens to Occupy Uighur Homes. Here’s What They Think They’re Doing.
The village children spotted the outsiders quickly. They heard their attempted greetings in the local language, saw the gleaming Chinese flags and round face of Mao Zedong pinned to their chests, and knew just how to respond. “I love China,” the...
Features
10.02.18
Here Are the Fortune 500 Companies Doing Business in Xinjiang
News reports from the western Chinese region of Xinjiang have described alarming, widespread, and worsening violations of the human rights of its predominantly Muslim, ethnically Turkic inhabitants, primarily the region’s approximately 11 million...
Other
09.21.18
Reporting from Xinjiang
On September 20, 2018, ChinaFile and the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) co-hosted a discussion with BuzzFeed reporter Megha Rajagopalan on her reporting on state-sponsored ethnic and religious repression in Xinjiang and, in particular, on...
Features
08.23.18
What Satellite Images Can Show Us about ‘Re-education’ Camps in Xinjiang
Claims that “re-education” camps are merely vocational training centers seem even less credible after one looks at the work of Shawn Zhang. A law student focusing on jurisprudence at the University of British Columbia in Canada, in May Zhang began...
ChinaFile Recommends
08.07.18‘We’re a People Destroyed’: Why Uighur Muslims across China Are Living in Fear
Guardian
Gene A Bunin has spent the past 18 months talking to Uighur restaurant workers all over China. These conversations reveal how this Muslim minority feel the daily threat of arrest, detention and ‘re-education’
ChinaFile Recommends
07.31.18Kazakh Trial Throws Spotlight on China’s Internment Centres
Financial Times
The trial of a Chinese citizen who fled to Kazakhstan has offered rare insight into China’s secretive internment system, with Beijing’s security campaign in the western region of Xinjiang increasingly putting neighbouring countries in central Asia...
ChinaFile Recommends
07.25.18One in Five Arrests Take Place in ‘Police State’ Xinjiang
Guardian
Analysing publicly available government data, the advocacy group Chinese Human Rights Defenders (CHRD), found 21% of all arrests in China in 2017 were in Xinjiang
Conversation
06.04.18
How Should the World Respond to Intensifying Repression in Xinjiang?
Deliberate, systematic human rights abuses are happening in China’s northwest. Reporting and research published in recent weeks shows that the Chinese government is targeting the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region’s roughly 11 million Muslims for “re...
ChinaFile Recommends
05.15.18What Really Happens in China’s ‘Re-education’ Camps
New York Times
New study provides a glimpse into the vast scale of Uighurs detention network.
ChinaFile Recommends
05.14.18Chinese Uyghurs Forced to Welcome Communist Party into Their Homes
CNN
Over a million Chinese Communist officials are being dispatched to live with local families in Xinjiang.
Features
05.11.18
Central and Regional Leadership for Xinjiang Policy in Xi’s Second Term
from China Leadership Monitor
After the 19th Party Congress last fall and the recent “two meetings” in March, the Party-state has now completed its quinquennial leadership turnover and announced a major restructuring of a number of Party and state entities. This institutional...
ChinaFile Recommends
03.15.18Chinese Crackdown Separates Pakistani Husbands from Uighur Wives
Guardian
“Where is Mama?” screams Ahmed’s 10-year-old daughter in a WeChat message he can hardly bear to replay.
ChinaFile Recommends
03.01.18A Summer Vacation in China’s Muslim Gulag
Foreign Policy
Since announcing a “people’s war on terror” in 2014, the Chinese Communist Party has created an unprecedented network of re-education camps in the autonomous Xinjiang region that are essentially ethnic gulags.
ChinaFile Recommends
02.27.18China: Big Data Fuels Crackdown in Minority Region
Human Rights Watch
Chinese authorities are building and deploying a predictive policing program based on big data analysis in Xinjiang, Human Rights Watch said today. The program aggregates data about people – often without their knowledge – and flags those it deems...
ChinaFile Recommends
02.20.18Battleground Malaysia: China Extends Crackdown on Uygurs across Borders
South China Morning Post
Malaysia has emerged as the latest battleground pitting Chinese efforts to export its security notions against principles of the rule of law.
Sinica Podcast
02.06.18
China’s Uighur Muslims, Under Pressure at Home and Abroad
from Sinica Podcast
By traveling not just to China’s Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, where 10 to 15 million Uighurs live, but also to Syria, where some have fled and taken up arms with militant groups, Associated Press reporter Gerry Shih sought to answer the most...
ChinaFile Recommends
12.22.17AP Exclusive: Anger with China Drives Uighurs to Syria Fight
ABC
Since 2013, thousands of Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking Muslim minority from western China, have traveled to Syria to train with the Uighur militant group Turkistan Islamic Party and fight alongside al-Qaida.
ChinaFile Recommends
12.13.17China: Minority Region Collects DNA from Millions
Human Rights Watch
Chinese authorities in Xinjiang are collecting DNA samples, fingerprints, iris scans, and blood types of all residents in the region between the age of 12 and 65, Human Rights Watch said today. This campaign significantly expands authorities’...
ChinaFile Recommends
09.14.17China's New Campaign to Instill Official Historical Narrative in Xinjiang
South China Morning Post
Yu Zhengsheng, the party’s fourth-ranking official who is in charge of religion and ethnic minorities, presided at a high-level meeting in Beijing this week to address “several historical issues” regarding the restive region, Xinhua reported.
ChinaFile Recommends
09.12.17China Jails Muslim Man for 2 Years over Islam WeChat Groups
South China Morning Post
A member of a Muslim minority group has been sentenced to two years in a Chinese prison after forming online discussions groups to teach Islam.
Viewpoint
08.14.17
China is Forcing Uighurs Abroad to Return Home. Why Aren’t More Countries Refusing to Help?
The campaign began quietly. Students studying abroad were told to return home. Many did, and their classmates didn’t hear from them afterwards. For those who needed extra incentive to get moving, police detained their families back home. Finally,...
ChinaFile Recommends
06.01.17China Is Touting Its Protection of Human Rights in a Muslim-Majority Region Riven by Violence
Quartz
China put out a policy paper today on human rights in the Muslim-heavy Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, where the Chinese government has been cracking down extensively in recent years.
Books
05.15.17

A World Trimmed with Fur
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, booming demand for natural resources transformed China and its frontiers. Historians of China have described this process in stark terms: pristine borderlands became breadbaskets. Yet Manchu and Mongolian archives reveal a different story. Well before homesteaders arrived, wild objects from the far north became part of elite fashion, and unprecedented consumption had exhausted the region’s most precious resources.In A World Trimmed with Fur, Jonathan Schlesinger uses these diverse archives to reveal how Qing rule witnessed not the destruction of unspoiled environments, but their invention. Qing frontiers were never pristine in the nineteenth century—pearlers had stripped riverbeds of mussels, mushroom pickers had uprooted the steppe, and fur-bearing animals had disappeared from the forest. In response, the court turned to “purification”; it registered and arrested poachers, reformed territorial rule, and redefined the boundary between the pristine and the corrupted. Schlesinger’s resulting analysis provides a framework for rethinking the global invention of nature. —Stanford University Press{chop}
ChinaFile Recommends
05.08.17Syria Says up to 5,000 Chinese Uighurs Fighting in Militant Groups
Reuters
Up to 5,000 ethnic Uighurs from China's violence-prone far western region of Xinjiang are fighting in various militant groups in Syria, the Syrian ambassador to China said on Monday, adding that Beijing should be extremely concerned about it...
Viewpoint
04.06.17
What Do Trump and Xi Share? A Dislike of Muslims
During the 1980s, as an idealistic, ambitious Uighur growing up under repressive Chinese conditions in the city of Kashgar, there was one nation to which I pinned my hopes for freedom and democracy. To me, the United States was a symbol of my...
ChinaFile Recommends
03.02.17‘All-out Offensive’ in Xinjiang Risks Worsening Grievances
BBC
China is in the midst of what it calls a “people's war on terror” in its far west. What sparked this latest campaign was a knife attack...
ChinaFile Recommends
03.01.17ISIL Video Threatens China with ‘Rivers of Bloodshed’
Al Jazeera
ISIL fighters from China’s Uighur ethnic minority have vowed to return home and “shed blood like rivers” in what security experts said marked the first such threat against Chinese targets.
ChinaFile Recommends
02.21.17China Orders GPS Tracking of Every Car in Troubled Region
Guardian
Security officials in China’s violence-stricken north-west have ordered residents to install GPS tracking devices in their vehicles so authorities are able to keep permanent tabs on their movements
Sinica Podcast
01.19.17
The State of Journalism in China—Ed Wong’s Exit Interview
from Sinica Podcast
Edward Wong became a reporter for The New York Times in 1999. He covered the Iraq war from Baghdad from 2003 to 2007, and then moved to Beijing in 2008. He has written about a wide range of subjects in China for the Times, and became its Beijing...
ChinaFile Recommends
12.29.16Xinjiang Attack: Four 'Terrorists' and One Bystander Killed, Says China
Guardian
Assailants shot dead after driving up to regional Communist party headquarters and setting off bomb, according to official media, in flare-up in Uighur region
ChinaFile Recommends
11.28.16China is Confiscating the Passports of Citizens in its Muslim-Heavy Region
Quartz
China is requiring all residents in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region to turn in their passports to help the government “maintain social order”
ChinaFile Recommends
10.12.16China Targets Parents With Religion Rules in Xinjiang
Al Jazeera
Government denies committing abuses and says legal rights of Uighur people are protected as new laws are announced
ChinaFile Recommends
06.07.16Xinjiang Residents Must Submit DNA Samples For Passports, Local Officials Say
ABC
Members of predominantly Muslim Uighur community are denied passport renewals and face discrimination, just in time for Ramadan....
Depth of Field
04.29.16
April’s Best Chinese Photojournalism
from Yuanjin Photo
Over the past few weeks, the publications Sina, Tencent, Caixin, China Youth Daily, and the publishing duo Sixth Tone/The Paper published photo stories on the intimate, the industrial, the private, and the political. Journalists Yan Cong and Ye Ming...
ChinaFile Recommends
04.26.16Visa Rejection Flap Shows China Wants Tighter Grip On Muslim Far West
Forbes
Beijing has pressured India into canceling the visas for a pair of independence activists from Xinjiang.
Environment
03.29.16
Xinjiang Ban on Glacier Tourism Ignores the Bigger Problem
from chinadialogue
The Xinjiang government has banned tourists from glaciers under the 13th Five-Year Plan in order to try and save the far northwestern province’s fast-disappearing ice caps. Home to China’s largest glaciers, the Xinjiang province has seen its...
ChinaFile Recommends
03.11.16China Premier Urges More Efforts in Restive Uighur Heartland
Reuters
China's violence-prone region of Xinjiang needs to make more efforts at development to ensure young people have "something to do and money to earn."...
ChinaFile Recommends
01.12.16Manchu, Former Empire's Language, Hangs On at China's Edge
New York Times
Descendants of the settlers struggle to keep a nearly vanished tongue alive
Viewpoint
12.30.15
No, Pu Zhiqiang’s Release Is Not A Victory
Pu Zhiqiang is a well-known Chinese human rights lawyer and outspoken intellectual who has taken on many precedent-setting cases defending freedom and protecting civil liberties. But his outstanding contributions in the judicial realm and his...
ChinaFile Recommends
12.26.15Another Journalist's Effective Expulsion From China
Atlantic
A French journalist has managed to incite “the outrage of the Chinese people” with an article on Beijing’s relationship with Uighurs.
ChinaFile Recommends
12.01.15Can Beijing Sell Silk Road as a Marshall Plan Against Terror?
Wall Street Journal
China needs West’s buy-in on stabilizing effects of its Silk Road project.
ChinaFile Recommends
11.25.15Q. and A.: Christina Lin on China’s Antiterrorism Efforts
New York Times
Chinese leaders have long been wary of joining global efforts against terrorism.
ChinaFile Recommends
11.23.15China Cuts Mobile Service of Xinjiang Residents Evading Internet Filters
New York Times
The Chinese government is shutting down the mobile service of residents in Xinjiang.
ChinaFile Recommends
11.23.15China Shuts Down Service For Some Phones With Foreign Messaging Apps
Verge
As mobile users try to evade censorship in China through software, the government appears to be trying a new technique to head off such attempts.
ChinaFile Recommends
11.23.15China's Own 'Double Standard' on Terrorism
Diplomat
China continues to lump terrorist groups and peaceful activists together — and to censor media coverage of both.
ChinaFile Recommends
11.20.15China Acknowledges Killing 28, Accusing Them of Role in Mine Attack
New York Times
The Chinese authorities had killed 28 people suspected of taking part in an attack on a coal mine in the country’s turbulent western frontier.
Media
11.20.15
China Censors Online Outcry After ISIS Execution
On November 18, the Islamic State (IS) released photos of what it claimed were two executed hostages. The photos, appearing in the terrorist group’s English-language magazine Dabiq, depict two men with bloodied faces, the word “executed” emblazoned...
Conversation
11.19.15
Is China a Credible Partner in Fighting Terror?
In the wake of the terror attacks in Paris China’s foreign minister Wang Yi said, “China is also a victim of terrorism. The fight against the ‘East Turkestan Islamic Movement’… should become an important part of the international fight against...
ChinaFile Recommends
11.19.15Islamic State Claim of Hostage Killing Complicates China’s Terror Debate
Washington Post
China vowed "justice" for a Chinese national kidnapped and apparently slain by the Islamic State...
ChinaFile Recommends
11.18.15Chinese security forces kill 17 in Xinjiang: Radio Free Asia
Reuters
China has appealed for the international community to provide more help in its campaign against Xinjiang militants following the attacks in Paris.
ChinaFile Recommends
11.16.15China Is Using the Paris Attacks to Tout Its Anti-Terror Efforts at Home
Quartz
Condolence and support from heads of state across the globe poured in to France after Friday’s terror attacks in Paris.