Category Archives: East Turkestan

Block China With An Independent East Turkistan

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Journal of Political Risk, Vol. 7, No. 5, May 2019 

A Uyghur protest in Berlin. Protestors are photographed waving blue and white flags against the background of an old building.

Uyghur protest Berlin, July 2009. Source: Claudia Himmelreich via Wikimedia Commons.

Rukiye Turdush
Uyghur Research Institute

People of East Turkistan, called Xinjiang by the Chinese Communist Party, have endured the long and oppressive colonisation of China for many years. Although China did not round up people of East Turkistan and shoot them with machine guns in front of the world, they have locked them up and are eliminating them one by one in concentration camps. [1]

Every Uyghur living outside China is searching and asking for the location of their disappeared family members.  Uyghur girls are forced to marry Han Chinese as a part of their gene washing policy. Uyghur children are forcibly removed from their families as Chinese officials with genocidal intention proclaim, “cut the lineage, cut the roots, cut the connection.” [2]

Around three million Uyghurs and other ethnic Muslims are currently locked up in concentration camps and are being subjected to torture and death.[3] The religion, culture and identity of Muslims in East Turkistan are now entirely banned. The world has remained silent in its moral obligation to do something about this tragedy.

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East Turkistan Needs You

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Journal of Political Risk, Vol. 7, No. 3, March 2019

East Turkestanis and their supporters demonstrate in front of the White House. They are photographed holding blue and white flags and banners.

East Turkestanis and their supporters demonstrate in front of the White House, calling for US support for an independent East Turkestan, currently occupied by China. The demonstration occurred on November 12, 2018, the anniversary of the founding of the First and Second East Turkestan Republics. Photo: ETNAM

Salih Hudayar
Founder and Political Affairs Officer of the East Turkistan National Awakening Movement 

Few Americans have ever heard of “Xinjiang”. Even fewer have ever heard it called by its proper name (the name its oppressed inhabitants use): “East Turkistan”. This strategically-significant region, my ancestral Homeland, is home to an ethnically Turkic, Muslim population of people called the Uyghurs. On official maps, it borders eight countries, but most Uyghurs will count China and Tibet as separate, independent countries and tell you that it borders ten. And therein lies the issue.

The vast majority of Uyghurs, like the vast majority of Tibetans, don’t see themselves as part of China. They see China as an occupying force, and rightly so. Up until late 1949 — when the Chinese Communist Party invaded the region and overthrew our government — it was an independent Republic. Most Uyghurs feel no connection to Beijing. Imagine for a moment that the United States Army invaded the Canadian province of Alberta. Surely the residents of Alberta would feel no connection to Washington, D.C.

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State Sponsorship of Uyghur Separatists: the History and Current Policy Options for East Turkestan (Xinjiang, China)

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Journal of Political Risk, Vol. 7, No. 3, March 2019

The map depicts China highlighting the different provinces of the country. It appears to be an old map.

A 1922 map of China. Source: John Bartholomew, The Times Atlas, London, 1922.

Anders Corr, Ph.D.
Publisher of the Journal of Political Risk

This article is a slight revision of a talk given on March 25, 2019, in Oxford, England. The associated university is not named at the request of the host organization’s president, who was concerned about possible repercussions.

I would like to thank the Terrorism Research Society (TRS) for kindly hosting this event. 

The historical map shown here is from 1922, and shows what China looked like when the Chinese Communist Party was founded in 1921 in Shanghai. It shows East Turkestan and Tibet in the west as autonomous regions — much more autonomous than they are today.

East Turkestan is now occupied militarily by China and officially called the Xinjiang region of northwestern China. In Chinese, “Xinjiang” means “new frontier”. But Xinjiang has an ancient history as a culturally diverse crossroads of trading on what the Chinese call “the silk road”, but which was actually more Iranian than Chinese. It was central to the ancient Persian trading areas called the Sogdian network by historians. It has been home to Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims, to Mongolians, Indians, Greeks, Koreans, Buddhists, and Christians. Since at least the First East Turkestan Republic of 1933 is has been called East Turkestan by Turkic Muslim residents. The Chinese Communist Party in Beijing has indiscriminately labeled Uyghurs who support an independent East Turkestan today, as separatist and terrorist in their goals and means. The acronym of the Chinese Communist Party is the “CCP”. The CCP seeks to colonize and extinguish all linguistic, ethnic and religious diversity in Xinjiang today, in order to assimilate the territory under its own preferred Han Chinese race, and their own atheist communist ideology.

In the face of such extreme repression, some Uyghurs have indeed advocated separatism and utilized terrorism and violence, including street riots, as a means.

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