The Xinjiang Emergency
Exploring the Causes and Consequences of China's Mass Detention of Uyghurs
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3608591 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Rian Thum (University of Nottingham [email protected], corresponding author) |
| Year | 2023 |
| Volume | 82 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 437-438 |
| Publication date | 2023-08-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The Journal of Asian Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0021-9118 • E-ISSN: 1752-0401 |
| Publisher | Duke University Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1215/00219118-10849462 |
| OpenAlex | W4380446306 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
As evidence of the Chinese state's atrocities against non-Han peoples in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region accumulated during 2017–19, scholars specializing in the region published numerous essays in nonacademic publications, describing and interpreting state policies for a broad public. With the appearance of two edited volumes this year (the other is Byler et al.'s Xinjiang Year Zero [2022]),1 the body of scholarly work, much of it by those same authors, has expanded substantially. As the volume's subtitle suggests, The Xinjiang Emergency's authors focus less on the well-established facts of what the state has done and more on the causes and effects of those policies. This involves substantial historical contextualization, to which the first section is devoted, including what is to my knowledge the first detailed history of the state's destruction of the Kashgar old city, by Anna Hayes. The essays collectively make a strong case that the roots of the recent crimes against humanity run much deeper than is commonly acknowledged, taking into account the Chinese Communist Party's history of strategies of control and the longer history of China's settler colonialism. The second section, “Discourses and Practices of Repression,” offers the greatest detail on how the state's policies are playing out on the ground, from the transformation of school textbooks to the role of Uyghur and Kazakh guards in the internment camps. The essay by Matthew P. Robertson gives a valuable overview of the argument for the existence of one of the few aspects of state policy on which scholars in the field have not reached a strong consensus: the forced harvesting of organs from Uyghurs. The third section offers essays on state discourse and international relations, as well as Ablimit Baki Elterish's interview-based study of collective trauma among the Uyghur diaspora.As academic publications tend to do, these essays represent the authors' thinking as it stood perhaps two or more years ago (it is the product of a 2019 conference). This is a long span of time in the context of the unfolding events in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. For example, the authors are more reticent about the term genocide in their essays than many are in their public comments today, in the wake of subsequent revelations about forced birth control and the Uyghur Tribunal's genocide finding in late 2021. But they also show the early emergence of consensus on many issues, notably including the understanding of China's presence in the region as settler colonialism. The volume is thus a valuable document of the interpretive frames that many of the field's leading scholars are bringing to bear on the recent atrocities in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. More of a collection of essays than a comprehensive overview, it will be of interest to academics and journalists seeking scholarly analysis of a host of discrete but interrelated issues
China · Citation · Download · Icon · Library science · Political science · World Wide Web · Asian Geopolitics and Ethnography · China's Ethnic Minorities and Relations · Computer Science · History · Law · Southeast Asian Sociopolitical Studies
| Citations per year | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2024 - 2025 (2) |
| Highly cited | No |