August 3, 2021
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What We're Reading: A History of Uyghur Resistance
Weekly reviews of what's on our bookshelves.
By: Valentina Jovanovski
The Uyghurs: Strangers in Their Own Land
By Gardner Bovingdon
In “The Uyghurs: Strangers in Their Own Land,” author and professor of Central Eurasian studies Gardner Bovingdon explores the history of Uyghur resistance in northwest China. Though the book was published over a decade ago, it provides fresh insight and thorough background on an issue that has recently made headlines and garnered the attention of policymakers and activists across the West.
The Uyghurs are a predominantly Muslim, Turkic-speaking minority group in Xinjiang province, officially called the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. The area was first incorporated into present-day China in the mid-18th century but remained isolated from the rest of the country – in part due to the region’s physical distance from China’s core and in part due to the Uyghurs’ linguistic and cultural distinctiveness from the Han, the majority ethnic group in China.
Bovingdon offers a plethora of examples of Uyghur resistance throughout the book – too many to cover here. But suffice it to say that many involve objections to Beijing’s claims about the Uyghurs’ historical links to the Chinese nation. Beijing has, for example, long claimed that Xinjiang has been part of the Chinese nation “since ancient times,” despite the fact that it joined what is today China less than three centuries ago. Chinese officials also claim that most Uyghurs oppose separatist movements or acts of protest against the Chinese state.
It’s not hard to see why the Chinese are so adamant about asserting these historical ties – real or not. According to Bovingdon, the Hans, who comprise more than 90 percent of the population of China, have overwhelmingly bought into the notion of Chinese nationalism. The strongest resistance to this concept comes from Xinjiang and Tibet. Even the name “Xinjiang” is an area of debate; many Uyghurs prefer Eastern Turkestan or Uyghurstan, though Beijing has banned the use of both. At a conference in Xinjiang in 1951, a group of Uyghur leaders proposed the establishment of a “republic of Uyghurstan,” an idea that reemerged on several occasions thereafter but was shot down, harshly, by Chinese officials every time.
Beijing’s efforts to stamp out any hints of resistance have evolved in recent years into the establishment of internment camps that, by many accounts, involve indoctrination, organized physical and sexual abuse, and torture of the Uyghur population. Bovingdon’s book, which includes many anecdotes from his personal interactions with people from the community, provides critical context to the issue.
