Xinjiang Quotes

if Afghanistan returns to its prewar status as a base for jihadist non-state organizations or as a state dedicated to jihadist policies: Pakistan above all in its entire domestic structure, Russia in its partly Muslim south and west, China with a significantly Muslim Xinjiang, and even Shiite Iran from fundamentalist Sunni trends.

In 1982, a C-130 Hercules transport aircraft belonging to the Pakistani military left Urumqi, capital of the north-western Chinese province of Xinjiang, headed for Islamabad carrying five lead-lined, stainless steel boxes, inside each of which were 10 single-kilogram ingots of highly enriched uranium (HEU), enough for two atomic bombs.43 It

I retweet hot takes about bubble tea, MSG, BTS, and some drama series called The Untamed. I learn it’s important to be anti-PRC (that’s the People’s Republic of China) but pro-China (I’m not terribly sure how that’s different). I learn what “little pinks” and “tankies” are and make sure I don’t inadvertently retweet support for either. I decry what’s happening in Xinjiang. I Stand with Hong Kong. I start gaining dozens more followers a day once I’ve started vocalizing on these matters, and when I notice that many of my followers are people of color or have things like #BLM and #FreePalestine in their bios, I know I’m on the right track. And

Jiang was not Han Chinese. She was a Turkic Uighur, a Muslim minority which emanated from the westernmost province of Xinjiang. Jiang’s family came from the desert capital Urumqi; her family had moved to Beijing when she was a child when Jiang’s father, a mid-ranking Party cadre, was posted to the Minorities Institute in the capital in the 1970s. Since her father was both an official and a Uighur, the family had been treated with a special deference reserved for select representatives of minority groups who served as symbols for the Party’s efforts to build ‘socialist solidarity’ between central China and the non-Han regions. In Beijing, Jiang had attended a special ‘experimental’ school reserved for the children of the Party élite.

In a little known fact, many Muslims from China, Xinjiang, and Tibet had chosen to settle in Saudi Arabia, often out of political expediency, and appeared to be prospering.

Savage violence has erupted in recent years across a broad swathe of territory: wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, suicide bombings in Belgium, Xinjiang, Nigeria and Turkey, insurgencies from Yemen to Thailand, massacres in Paris, Tunisia, Florida, Dhaka and Nice. Conventional wars between states are dwarfed by those between terrorists and counter-terrorists, insurgents and counter-insurgents; and there are also economic, financial and cyber wars, wars over and through information, wars for the control of the drug trade and migration, and wars among urban militias and mafia groups. Future historians may well see such uncoordinated mayhem as commencing the third – and the longest and strangest – of all world wars: one that approximates, in its ubiquity, a global civil war.

More specifically, the national minorities of Mongolia, Tibet, Xinjiang, Yunnan, and Guizhou would be afforded one of three options were the CCP to gain power over the mainland: first, to “separate from the Chinese Soviet Republic and establish their own state”; second, to “join the [Chinese] Soviet federation” or third, to “establish autonomous regions within the Chinese Soviet Republic.”48 More concretely, the 1931 congress committed the regime to the development of minority-language education, minority-language publishing houses, the use of local languages in the execution of government in minority areas, and the training of minority cadres.

Russians and Ottomans pinched off the western end of the steppes between 1500 and 1650; in central Asia, Mughals and Persians pushed the Uzbeks and Afghans back between 1600 and 1700; and in the east, China swallowed up the endless wastes of Xinjiang between 1650 and 1750. By 1727, when Russian and Chinese officials met at Kiakhta to sign a treaty fixing their borders in Mongolia, the gunpowder empires had effectively shut down the steppe highway.

The twelve branches of Indo-European included most of the languages of Europe (but not Basque, Finnish, Estonian, or Magyar); the Persian language of Iran; Sanskrit and its many modern daughters (most important, Hindi and Urdu); and a number of extinct languages including Hittite in Anatolia (modern Turkey) and Tocharian in the deserts of Xinjiang (northwestern China) (figure 1.2). Modern English, like Yiddish and Swedish, is assigned to the Germanic branch.

In 2022, Israel installed a remote-controlled system for crowd control in Hebron, a tool with the ability to fire tear gas, sponge-tipped bullets, and stun grenades. It was created by the Israeli company Smart Shooter, which claims to successfully use artificial intelligence when finding targets. Smart Shooter is a regular presence on the international defense show circuit and has sold its equipment to more than a dozen countries. Blue Wolf was a smaller version of the Wolf Pack database, which contained the personal details of virtually every Palestinian in the West Bank, including educational status, photos, security level, and family history. Soldiers in the West Bank were instructed in 2022 to enter the details and photos of at least fifty Palestinians into the Blue Wolf system every shift and were not allowed to end their shift until they did so.49 There was no security rationale for these actions. This is a similar set-up to what China does against the Uighurs in its Xinjiang province, using surveillance and technology to both track and intimidate the residents, though Beijing receives far more international condemnation than the Jewish state.

He spoke English, which is perhaps why he felt he could be outspoken despite the audience watching us play. I didn’t have to ask leading questions to get Majid to talk about the situation in his homeland. ‘Most Uighurs want independence, but Xinjiang has too much oil and gas for the Chinese to let that happen. It’s cruel, because if we were independent then all our resources would enable us to develop very quickly. We could sell them and use the money to raise our living standards. But there’s no hope of that. Uighurs have tried to be independent many times and it has never worked,’ he said.

I realised then that Hotan isn’t just the unofficial capital of Uighurstan; it is the current front line in Beijing’s battle to subjugate all Xinjiang. Not long after my visit, eighteen people died when the police station close to the bazaar was stormed by a group of Uighurs armed with petrol bombs and knives. They tore down the Chinese flag and raised a black one with a red crescent on it, before being killed or taken prisoner. Uighurs said the attack was prompted by the city government trying to stop women from wearing all-black robes and especially veils, an ongoing campaign by the Chinese across all Xinjiang. They claimed, too, that men were being forced to shave their beards. The Xinjiang government said the assault was an act of terrorism and that the attackers had called for a jihad. But no evidence was produced to demonstrate any tangible link between Uighur nationalists and the militant Islamic groups in Afghanistan, Pakistan and central Asia.

China’s Koreans enjoy advantages denied to other minorities, which only reinforces the sense that Yanbian is more like a mini-state than just another autonomous area. The most notable of these is the right to education in their own language at school as well as college. Unlike in Xinjiang, where the government has closed down Uighur-only schools, or Xishuangbanna and Tibet, where the only way to study Dai or Tibetan is to become a monk, the Yanbian government actually funds schools that teach in Korean.

While I was in Urumqi, a Uighur man drove an electric cart into a crowd in the city of Aksu in western Xinjiang, and detonated a bomb that killed seven people.

Nothing illustrates the CCP’s success in rewriting history more than the irony that all Han will acknowledge how the people and landscapes of Tibet and Xinjiang are so unlike them and anywhere else in China. But they will never admit that those regions have ever been anything but part of the Chinese empire.

Savage violence has erupted in recent years across a broad swathe of territory: wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, suicide bombings in Belgium, Xinjiang, Nigeria and Turkey, insurgencies from Yemen to Thailand, massacres in Paris, Tunisia, Florida, Dhaka and Nice. Conventional wars between states are dwarfed by those between terrorists and counter-terrorists, insurgents and counter-insurgents; and there are also economic, financial and cyber wars, wars over and through information, wars for the control of the drug trade and migration, and wars among urban militias and mafia groups. Future historians may well see such uncoordinated mayhem as commencing the third – and the longest and strangest – of all world wars: one that approximates, in its ubiquity, a global civil war. Unquestionably,

quarter of the police in Shanghai began carrying guns during routine patrols for the first time this week as part of a China-wide boost in police firepower following a deadly mass knifing blamed on Xinjiang separatists.

the police in Shanghai began carrying guns during routine patrols for the first time this week as part of a China-wide boost in police firepower following a deadly mass knifing blamed on Xinjiang separatists. Ordinary police in China generally don't carry firearms, and none of the officers patrolling the train station in the southwestern city of Kunming on March 1 was armed when at least five assailants began rapidly hacking at victims with long knives. Before armed reinforcements arrived to subdue the attack, the assailants

Last week, the Xinjiang legislature approved banning the burqa from public spaces in Urumqi,

The Tarim Mummies’ (Tarim being the name of the river that once drained the now waterless Tarim basin of eastern Xinjiang) are mostly not of Mongoloid race but of now DNA-certified Caucasoid or Europoid descent. Some had brown hair; at least one stood 2 metres (6.5 feet) tall. They are similar to the Cro-Magnon peoples of eastern Europe. So are their clothes and so probably was their language. It is thought to have been ‘proto-Tocharian’, an early branch of the great Indo-European language family that includes the Celtic, Germanic, Greek and Latin tongues as well as Sanskrit and Early Iranian. But Mair and his disciples would not be content to stop there. Several hundred mummies have now been discovered, their preservation being the result of the region’s extreme aridity and the high alkaline content of the desert sands. The graves span a long period, from c. 2000 BC to AD 300, but the forebears of their inmates are thought most probably to have migrated from the Altai region to the north, where there flourished around 2000 BC another Europoid culture, that of Afanasevo. Such a migration would have consisted of several waves and must have involved contact with Indo-European-speaking Iranian peoples as well as Altaic peoples. Since both were acquainted with basic metallurgy and had domesticated numerous animals, including horses and sheep, the mummy people must themselves have acquired such knowledge and may have passed it on to the cultures of eastern China. According to Mair and his colleagues, therefore, the horse, the sheep, the wheel, the horse-drawn chariot, supplies of uncut jade and probably both bronze and iron technology may have reached ‘core’ China courtesy of these Europoid ‘proto-Tocharians’. By implication, it followed that the Europeans who in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries AD would so embarrass China with their superior technology were not the first. ‘Foreign Devils on the Silk Road’ had been active 4,000 years ago; and thanks to them, China’s ancient civilisation need not be regarded as quite so ‘of itself’. It could in fact be just as derivative, and no more indigenous, than most others. Needless to say, scholars in China have had some difficulty with all this.

The internment camps in Xinjiang, the betrayal of Hong Kong, hostage diplomacy, intense focus on national security issues, truculent secrecy around Covid-19, and, most of all, economic weakness have shown the world that China’s apparent desire to integrate into the global system of governance was temporary, provisional, and opportunistic rather than ideological.

The oldest extant manuscript (the Bower manuscript) in Sanskrit was found in Chinese Turkestan, the troubled Xinjiang Province in modern China. Written on birch bark the script is dated to the Gupta Era (5th – 6th century CE). The manuscript contains treatises on medicine, future telling (by casting a die) and spells to counter snakebite.

I realized that everyone becomes a homeless wanderer after they are born and has difficulty finding a proper place for themselves as soon as they touch the ground and let out their initial cry. They will spend their whole life trying to determine their position—becoming anxious and griping about its vagueness. Everyone is a wanderer in space. Even the notion of possession carried out by those who own land, palaces, and mansions is in fact just an assumption based on imitation. Some people aren’t even satisfied by owning their own lands, palaces, and mansions, but to make it their own instead want to own whole cities, countries, and the universe itself. All of this comes from a kind of worry that is based on the feeling that a person can’t determine a lasting position in the universe. The more this happens, the more a person wants to own their place in the world and deny the idea that nothing can really belong to them. Or that they themselves were born into this world for no other reason than to be a wanderer for their whole life. They want to deny all of this by madly thinking that they can own things unceasingly.

The system is premised on a rhetoric of a war on Muslim “terrorism” that the Chinese state has imported from the US and its allies post–September 11, 2001. As recently as 2017, Xinjiang authorities hosted British counter-terrorism experts as part of a diplomatic exchange called “Countering the root causes of violent extremism undermining growth and stability in China’s Xinjiang Region by sharing UK best practice.” In the Chinese context, countering violent extremism—something that British experts refer to simply as Prevent—is premised on detaining hundreds of thousands of Muslims deemed “untrustworthy” in camps and prisons, and placing still other Muslim adults in jobs far from their homes.

Because the authorities have forced all residents of Xinjiang to register for a new state-issued ID card, they have a base library of high-definition images of each person’s face, and in addition, they have collected tens of millions of images of the faces of residents who pass through the checkpoints. The Face++ and similar algorithms such as those from companies like YITU and Sensetime run extremely fast. As the Shawan study notes, in 0.8 seconds it can run a match of a face, and register and record notification alarms related to up to three hundred thousand targeted people.

Since the camp system began, in some areas of Southern Xinjiang, birth rates among Uyghurs have plummeted by between 50 and 80 percent due in part to these restrictions on Muslim reproductive rights.

In steps that it too has come to regret, China also encouraged, recruited and trained Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang, before helping them make contact with and join the Mujahidin.115 The radicalisation of western China has proved problematic ever since.

With the division of Central Asia between Russia and China, the historic Turkic territories of the Tarım basin and vicinity passed under Chinese rule in 1759 as Xinjiang, the “new province”—a province larger than Alaska and three times the size of France.43

But, in adding to its size, China also added to its problems. Xinjiang, a region populated by Muslims, was a perennial source of instability, indeed insurrection, as were other regions; but for the Han the buffer was worth the trouble, even more so after the fate which befell the country in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with the coming of the Europeans.

Once, the majority of the population of Manchuria, Inner Mongolia and Xinjiang were ethnically Manchurian, Mongolian and Uighur; now all three are majority Han Chinese, or approaching the majority. So it will be with Tibet.

Inter-ethnic rioting erupted in 2009, leading to over 200 deaths. Beijing responded in three ways: it ruthlessly suppressed dissent, it poured money into the region, and it continued to pour in Han Chinese workers. For China, Xinjiang is too strategically important to allow an independence movement to get off the ground: it not only borders eight countries, thus buffering the heartland, but it also has oil, and is home to China’s nuclear weapons testing sites. The territory is also key to the Chinese economic strategy of ‘One Belt, One Road’. The road is, oddly enough, a sea route – the creation of an oceangoing highway for goods; the belt is the ‘Silk Road Economic Belt’ – a land-based route formed from the old Silk Route, which goes straight through Xinjiang and will in turn connect down southwards to the massive deep-water port China is building in Gwadar, Pakistan. In late 2015 China signed a forty-year lease on the port. This is part of the way in which ‘the belt and the road’ will be connected.

Chinese chroniclers of the Han and Tang dynasties report tall, fiery-haired, and light-eyed barbarians with full beards and in felt caps and leather leggings in the Western Regions (today Xinjiang), who traded in jade and horses.20 Wall frescoes of the rock-cut Kizil Cave monasteries dating to the fourth through sixth centuries depict some native rulers, merchants, or Buddhist monks with red hair and fair-skinned features. The complex, often known as the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas, is seventy-five miles west of Kucha, a major oasis city on the northern side of the Tarim Basin. Kucha has yielded many documents in Tocharian B. The murals, dating between the third and sixth centuries AD, depict scenes from the life of the Buddha, and share close stylistic similarities to the contemporary art of Gandhara.21

Blue Wolf was a smaller version of the Wolf Pack database, which contained the personal details of virtually every Palestinian in the West Bank, including educational status, photos, security level, and family history. Soldiers in the West Bank were instructed in 2022 to enter the details and photos of at least fifty Palestinians into the Blue Wolf system every shift and were not allowed to end their shift until they did so.49 There was no security rationale for these actions. This is a similar set-up to what China does against the Uighurs in its Xinjiang province, using surveillance and technology to both track and intimidate the residents, though Beijing receives far more international condemnation than the Jewish state.

In China, the one holdout from Beijing time is Xinjiang, a mountainous and desert region in the west that partially observes Xinjiang Time (or Ürümqi Time, named after the capital of Xinjiang). Situated on China’s border with Kazakhstan, Xinjiang is home to the Uyghur, whose pan-Islamic and pan-Turkic identity has never sat well with the Chinese Communist Party. Although Xinjiang was designated an autonomous region in the 1950s, China began trying to assimilate it politically, a project that included an effort to officially abolish Xinjiang Time in 1968. On the one hand, Xinjiang Time appears merely practical: Xinjiang is more than a thousand miles west of Beijing, which puts its solar time two hours behind that of the capital. A sanitation worker in Ürümqi told The New York Times he thought they must be the only people who eat dinner at midnight (by which he meant Beijing midnight). But Xinjiang Time is fundamentally cultural, running along ethnic lines: Local TV networks put their schedules for Chinese channels in Beijing time, while Uyghur and Kazakh channels are in Xinjiang Time. In a period when the Chinese Communist Party’s efforts have moved from assimilation to anti-Islamic annihilation, observation of Xinjiang Time could not be more political. Uyghurs have been subjected to sterilization, forced labor, detainment in reeducation camps, and bans on Uyghur cultural materials and practices.

Indian Nationalist's support means nothing. They will support anyone who is against Muslims. Heck they support China when it comes to Xinjiang, even though Indian soldiers have died in conflict with the Chinese in the recent past

Koestler wrote more than seven decades ago, so surely we have learned our lesson by now. But when the Burmese military attempts to eradicate the Rohingya people of Myanmar; when the Chinese government locks up over a million Muslim Uighurs in prison camps across Xinjiang; when white supremacists march on an American city chanting “Jews will not replace us”; and when Holocaust denial is enjoying a resurgence, we are reminded that every day each of us has a duty to bear witness, to seek accountability, to pursue justice, and to act in the spirit of Jan Karski.

In Xinjiang, Uighurs and other Muslim groups struggle against Sinification and are developing relations with their ethnic and religious kin in the former Soviet republics.

In reality, two factors often tied to the emergence of nationalism in the early modern West, general education (as distinct from specialized training) and commercial printing, already existed in China by the eleventh century.20 Under such circumstances, one might expect the appearance of a new form of collective consciousness in Northern Song China as well. The relationship between the Song nation and the modern Chinese nation is, however, complex. Besides adhering to a very different ideology of political legitimacy, Northern Song Chinese differed from modern nationalists in how they defined the boundaries of their state. Contemporary China is conceived today to be a multiethnic state composed of fifty-six “nationalities.” Its “natural” territory extends deep into Central Asia. In its Song iteration, as will be clear in a later chapter, China was imagined to be a monoethnic nation that controlled neither Manchuria, nor the modern peripheral provinces of Guizhou, Yunnan, Tibet, and Xinjiang.

Kuche and Khotan in today’s Xinjiang were the hubs of a flow from India that reached the very centre of China then. Rulers of these kingdoms along the road had Sanskrit names that testified to their connection with India.

Instead, nationalist forces under Chiang Kai-shek and Communist armies under Mao Zedong battled for supremacy until 1949, when the Communists emerged victorious and the Nationalists withdrew to Taiwan. That same year Radio Beijing announced: ‘The People’s Liberation Army must liberate all Chinese territories, including Tibet, Xinjiang, Hainan and Taiwan.’ Mao centralised power to an extent never seen in previous dynasties. He blocked Russian influence in Inner Mongolia and extended Beijing’s influence into Mongolia. In 1951 China completed its annexation of Tibet (another vast non-Han territory), and by then Chinese school textbook maps were beginning to depict China as stretching even into the Central Asian republics. The country had been put back together; Mao would spend the rest of his life ensuring it stayed that way and consolidating Communist Party control in every facet of life, but turning away from much of the outside world. The country remained desperately poor, especially away from the coastal areas, but unified.

Beijing’s response has been to incarcerate huge numbers of Ui-ghurs in ‘re-education camps’. How many people are being held is known only to the Chinese authorities, but estimates range from 150,000 to 1 million. It is alleged that inmates are banned from pray-ing or growing beards as part of a policy designed to strip the Uighurs of their religious beliefs. In April 2019 China denied the allegations, called the camps ‘boarding schools’ and said it had arrested about 13,000 terrorists and ‘broken up hundreds of terrorist gangs’. In 2016, local government officials said that the de-radicalisation effort had ‘markedly weakened’ the nascent Islamist movement. However, given that the Turkish Army said it had arrested 324 suspected jihadists from Xinjiang en route to Syria in 2015, that seems unlikely. The routing of Islamic State in Iraq and parts of Syria in 2017 has also increased the dan-gers of foreign fighters returning home but not retiring.

For China, Xinjiang is too strategically important to allow an independence movement to get off the ground: it not only borders eight countries, thus buffering the heartland, but it also has oil, and is home to China’s nuclear weapons testing sites. The territory is also key to the Chinese economic strategy of ‘One Belt, One Road’. The road is, oddly enough, a sea route – the creation of an oceangoing highway for goods; the belt is the ‘Silk Road Economic Belt’ – a land-based route formed from the old Silk Route, which goes straight through Xinjiang and will in turn connect down southwards to the massive deep-water port China is building in Gwadar, Pakistan. In late 2015 China signed a forty-year lease on the port. This is part of the way in which ‘the belt and the road’ will be connected.

first time this week as part of a China-wide boost in police firepower following a deadly mass knifing blamed on Xinjiang separatists. Ordinary police in China generally don't carry firearms, and none of the officers patrolling the train station in the southwestern city of Kunming on March 1 was armed when at least five assailants began rapidly hacking at victims with long knives. Before armed reinforcements arrived to subdue the attack, the assailants were able to kill 29 people and wound more than 140, raising concerns about the safety of crowded public places and fears that militants from the far western region of Xinjiang may seek to strike soft targets farther east. China plans to introduce

SHANGHAI (AP) — A quarter of the police in Shanghai began carrying guns during routine patrols for the first time this week as part of a China-wide boost in police firepower following a deadly mass knifing blamed on Xinjiang separatists. Ordinary police in China generally don't carry firearms, and none of the officers patrolling the train station in the southwestern