‘China’s Mandela’ draws attention to the shamefully overlooked plight of an ethnic group facing genocide.
Only a few years ago the Uyghur minority in China was unknown to most people in the west. China’s record on human rights, however, was an open secret, albeit covered in a miasma of hypocrisy by foreign governments intent on expanding their trading opportunities. In the last few years the sites in Xinjiang province where the Uyghur Muslim people are detained have turned into something akin to concentration camps, with between 1 million and 3 million prisoners; the evidence points to a planned programme to erase an entire ethnic identity.
Recent years have seen more and more evidence of atrocities against the Uyghurs. As well as mass internment, there are accounts of forced labour, torture, death, disappearances, and the removal of children from their parents to orphanages in order to “de-racinate” them. Satellite and drone evidence has shown that mosques and Muslim burial grounds have been demolished. There are reliable reports of rapes, and of camp doctors sterilising Uyghur women. In 2020 the Jamestown Foundation released a report analysing Chinese government documents, including family planning records, which showed that between 2015 and 2018 forced sterilisations and abortions decreased the birthrate in two of the largest Uyghur prefectures by 84%.
We Uyghurs Have No Say comprises a set of essays and articles by the economist and social commentator described by some as “China’s Mandela”, Ilham Tohti, written before he was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2014. They include a number preserved by dissidents after the website on which they were published was shut down. In his writings, he explains that discrimination against the Uyghur people is not a recent phenomenon, but nor was it always so. Although he is no champion of “command and control” government, he argues that in the period when there was a planned economy, resources were distributed more fairly and equally, creating a positive sense of equality among ethnic groups. The constitution of 1982 and a protective law introduced in 1984 made Xinjiang the Uygur Autonomous Region (XUAR), allowing its inhabitants to preserve their own written and spoken language, their customs, traditions and religious freedom, and giving them the right to hold key positions in local government. read more