art of life in chinese central asia

Reeducation Time: A Decade Of Stories Of Loss In Xinjiang

All names in this story have been changed to protect the identities of the interviewees. I met Ablikim for the first time in late 2014 at a Uyghur house party in a neighborhood in Southern Ürümchi. He was a thin man with a closely-trimmed moustache. He sat hunched over, his shoulders drawn in. We told each other our names, but I wasn’t really sure...

“You have a health problem, but the ‘Chinese medicine’ won’t help you now – only ‘Kazakh medicine’ can.”

In May 2018, Qaisha Aqan – an ethnic Kazakh businesswoman from Xinjiang – fled the region and escaped to Kazakhstan, where she would remain illegally until finally going public in the September of this year. At the time of writing, she stands trial for illegally crossing the border and is simultaneously applying for asylum in Kazakhstan, a country that is yet to formally grant...

“There was no learning at all.”

What follows is an abridged first-person account of Xinjiang camp eyewitness Nurlan Kokteubai, delivered at the office of the Atajurt Kazakh Human Rights organization on November 5, 2019. The summary and English translation were done by Kaster Bakyt. Gene A. Bunin did the English editing and smoothing. I was born and raised on the Akkoi stud farm in Chapchal County. From September 1979 to July...

“The camps are bad, but this school system that will produce even more lasting damage.”

The “bilingual” education system introduced over the past decade in Xinjiang is better characterized as an attempt to transform minority education systems in the region. There have been frightening consequences for Uyghur culture. Names have been changed to protect the identities of the individuals. In March of this year, Kaiser noticed that his 15-year-old sister Abida began to interject Chinese phrases into their Uyghur conversations. Up until...

The Xinjiang Ketchup Shirt

Are you interested in finding ways to stand with Turkic Muslims in their struggle for human rights in Northwest China? One of the ways to amplify knowledge about their struggle is by wearing it, making it a part of your everyday life. Many of the retailers who sell us clothes and tomato products are complicit in the oppression of Muslims in China. This shirt...

“Because you had to do it very quickly, or you could be punished.”

The following is a summary of the interview with Xinjiang camp eyewitness Tursunay Ziyawudun, done at the office of the Atajurt Kazakh Human Rights organization on October 15, 2019. The summary and English translation were done by Kaster Bakyt. Gene A. Bunin did the English editing. After falling ill, Tursunay went back to China in 2016 for a gall bladder operation. The Kazakh government...

How Companies Profit From Forced Labor In Xinjiang

On November 3, 2018, Erzhan Qurban, a middle-aged Kazakh man from a small village 50 kilometers from the city of Ghulja in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, was released from the camp where he had been held for nine months. He thought that perhaps now he would be free to return to his former life as an immigrant in Kazakhstan. Yet just a few...

From camps to prisons: Xinjiang’s next great human rights catastrophe

Just a little over a decade ago, the facility on 1327 Dongzhan Road, a few kilometers north of the forlorn freight station in the northern outskirts of Xinjiang’s Urumqi, was mostly trees and grass. On September 16, 2009, it officially became the new location of the Xinjiang Women’s Prison and of the Qixin Clothing Factory (run by “marketing specialist” Zong Liang, a Party member...

Friends from Xinjiang: Fight Back with Your Art!

CALL FOR ART! Join the scholar Yixiaocuo and contribute to the Camp Album Project   The Camp Album is a multimedia project envisioned as a way for people from the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region to express their feelings in a safe and anonymous way while raising awareness of the ongoing human rights abuse and cultural genocide that confronts Uyghurs and other Turkic and Muslim minorities...

Uyghur Love In A Time Of Interethnic Marriage

In May 2019, a young Uyghur graduate student in Europe who I’ll refer to as Nurzat received a WeChat video call from his panic-stricken girlfriend in a small city in southern Xinjiang. The young woman, who I’ll call Adila, told him that she would break up with him if he didn’t come back within the next several months to marry her. She said her...