He discusses Xinjiang’s world historical role as a commercial entrepot and cultural conduit by which Buddhism, Christianity and Islam entered China and its interactions with Tibetan, Mongol and other Inner Asian empires as well as with Chinese dynasties. Eurasian Crossroads also examines the competing Chinese and Turkic nationalist visions of the region’s status in modern times and the recurring dissent and rapid development under the PRC. Within the broad perspective of this book it emerges that the factors underlying historical change in the region – its natural environment and geography, its physical location at the overlap of cultural realms and its legacy of ethno-linguistic diversity – remain as relevant to Xinjiang’s future as to its past.

Predominantly Muslim with both nomadic and settled populations, the peoples of Central Asia came under Russian and Chinese rule after the 1700s. Khalid shows how foreign conquest knit Central Asians into global exchanges of goods and ideas and forged greater connections to the wider world. He explores how the Qing and Tsarist empires dealt with ethnic heterogeneity, and compares Soviet and Chinese Communist attempts at managing national and cultural difference. He highlights the deep interconnections between the “Russian” and “Chinese” parts of Central Asia that endure to this day, and demonstrates how Xinjiang remains an integral part of Central Asia despite its fraught and traumatic relationship with contemporary China.

Uyghur historical practice emerged from the circulation of books and people during the Qing Dynasty, when crowds of pilgrims listened to history readings at the tombs of Islamic saints. Over time, amid long journeys and moving rituals, at oasis markets and desert shrines, ordinary readers adapted community-authored manuscripts to their own needs. In the process they created a window into a forgotten Islam, shaped by the veneration of local saints.

Partly insulated from the rest of the Islamic world, the Uyghurs constructed a local history that is at once unique and assimilates elements of Semitic, Iranic, Turkic, and Indic traditions—the cultural imports of Silk Road travelers. Through both ethnographic and historical analysis, The Sacred Routes of Uyghur History offers a new understanding of Uyghur historical practices, detailing the remarkable means by which this people reckons with its past and confronts its nationalist aspirations in the present day.

Drawing upon multilingual sources and archival material, Kwangmin Kim shows how the begs aligned themselves with the Qing to strengthen their own plantation-like economic system. As controllers of food supplies, commercial goods, and human resources, the begs had the political power to dictate the fortunes of governments in the region. Their political choice to cooperate with the Qing promoted an expansion of the Qing’s emerging international trade at the same time that Europe was developing global capitalism and imperialism. Borderland Capitalism shows the Qing empire as a quintessentially early modern empire and points the way toward a new understanding of the rise of a global economy.

This book explores the relationship between language, education and identity among the urban Uyghurs of contemporary Xinjiang. It considers ways in which Uyghur urban youth identities began to evolve in response to the state imposition of ‘bilingual education’. Starting by defining the notion of ethnic identity, the book explores the processes involved in the formation and development of personal and group identities, considers why ethnic boundaries are constructed between groups, and questions how ethnic identity is expressed in social, cultural and religious practice. Against this background, contributors adopt a special focus on the relationship between language use, education and ethnic identity development.

For three years Gulbahar Haitiwaji was held in Chinese detention centers and “reeducation” camps, enduring interrogations, torture, hunger, police violence, brainwashing, forced sterilization, freezing cold, rats, and nights under the blinding fluorescent lights of her prison cell. Her only crime? Being a Uyghur.

China’s brutal repression of Uyghurs, a Turkish-speaking Muslim ethnic group, has been denounced as genocide and reported widely in media around the world. In 2019, The New York Times published the “Xinjiang Papers,” leaked documents exposing the forced detention of more than one million Uyghurs in Chinese “reeducation” camps.

The Chinese government denies that these camps are concentration camps, seeking to legitimize their existence in the name of the “total fight against Islamic terrorism, infiltration and separatism” and calling them “schools.” But none of this is true. Gulbahar only escaped thanks to the relentless efforts of her daughter, with the help of the French diplomatic corps. Others have not been so fortunate.

In How I Survived a Chinese “Reeducation” Camp, Gulbahar Haitiwaji tells her story, describing the insidious nature of oppression, the dehumanizing effects of torture and brainwashing, and the human drive to survive — and resist — under even the most horrific circumstances.

This remarkable autobiography traces the life of their transcendent leader Rebiya Kadeer from her humble beginnings to her position as an indomitable world figure struggling for Uyghur human rights in the face of the communist domination of The People’s Republic of China.

In prison, Sauytbay was put to work teaching Chinese language, culture, and politics, in the course of which she gained access to secret information that revealed Beijing’s long-term plans to undermine not only its minorities, but democracies around the world. Upon her escape to Europe she was reunited with her family, but still lives under the constant threat of reprisal. This rare testimony from the biggest surveillance state in the world reveals not only the full, frightening scope of China’s tyrannical ambitions, but also the resilience and courage of its author.

As a human rights attorney and Uyghur activist who now serves on the US Commission on International Religious Freedom, Nury Turkel tells his personal story to help explain the urgency and scope of the Uyghur crisis. Born in 1970 in a reeducation camp, he was lucky enough to survive and eventually make his way to the US, where he became the first Uyghur to receive an American law degree. Since then he has worked as a lawyer, activist, and spokesperson for his people.

Here are Tohti’s own words, a collection of his plain-spoken calls for justice, scholarly explanations of the history of Xinjiang, and poignant personal reflections. While his courage and outspokenness about the plight of China’s Muslim minorities is extraordinary, these essays sound a measured insistence on peace and just treatment for the Uyghurs.

Within weeks of the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington, the Chinese government announced that it faced a serious terrorist threat from its largely Muslim Uyghur ethnic minority. Nearly two decades later, of the 11 million Uyghurs living in China today, more than 1 million have been detained in so-called re-education camps, victims of what has become the largest program of mass incarceration and surveillance in the world.

Drawing on extensive interviews with Uyghurs in Xinjiang, as well as refugee communities and exiles, Sean Roberts tells a story that is not just about state policies, but about Uyghur responses to these devastating government programs.

In Land of Strangers, Eric Schluessel explores this encounter between Chinese power and a Muslim society through the struggles of ordinary people in the oasis of Turpan. He follows the stories of families divided by war, women desperate to survive, children unsure where they belong, and many others to reveal the human consequences of a bloody conflict and the more insidious violence of reconstruction. Schluessel traces the emergence of new struggles around essential questions of identity, showing how religious and linguistic differences converged into ethnic labels. Reading across local archives and manuscript accounts in the Chinese and Chaghatay languages, he recasts the attempted transformation of Xinjiang as a distinctly Chinese form of colonialism. At a time when understanding the roots of the modern relationship between Uyghurs and China has taken on new urgency, Land of Strangers illuminates a crucial moment of social and cultural change in this dark period of Xinjiang’s past.

Darren Byler, one of the world’s leading experts on Uyghur society and Chinese surveillance, draws on a decade of research on the region, examining thousands of government documents and conducting many hours of interviews with both detainees and camp workers. Byler tells the stories of people like U.S. college student Vera, police contractor Baimurat, camp instructor Qelbinur, Kazakh farmer Adilbek, and truck driver Erbakyt, who show how a sophisticated network of facial surveillance, voice recognition, and smartphone tracking technology, built by private corporations, enabled authorities to blacklist Muslims for “pre-crimes” that sometimes consist only of having installed social media apps. Their stories narrate a process of surveillance overwhelming life, and push Byler to examine how technological tools that are being built in locations from Seattle to Beijing are being adapted to create forms of unfreedom for vulnerable people around the world.

When fourteen-year-old Mehrigul’s brother leaves home she must give up school to help on the family farm. That makes her a prime candidate to be sent to work in a Chinese factory. She alone knows the truth of her brother’s departure – and that he will not return. Whether she is sent thousands of miles away or tied to farm work, her future looks bleak.

How Mehrigul takes a hand in shaping her destiny is at the heart of a story that celebrates creativity, determination, and dreams.