On the Consequences of Partisan Politics; Conservative Appropriation of the Uyghur Humanitarian Crisis
Protestors demonstrate outside the White House. Photo by Malcolm Brown.
Deep in the New York Times’ online archives, one finds that the first mention of the Uyghur people occurs in Karl Meyer’s 1995 opinion piece: Editorial Notebook; Asia's Lost World. The article is punctuated by a statement many Uyghurs would agree with: “In China's Xinjiang Province, the ethos of colonialism’s past survives, like a relic in a museum bell jar.” The piece describes the tense relationship between the Uyghurs and other Turks living in the “Xinjiang autonomous region” and the Chinese government located 2,915 kilometers away in Beijing. Meyer notes the colonial nature of the very name of the region in which the Uyghurs live: “Xinjiang” meaning “new territory” in Mandarin, a language both foreign and incomprehensible to many of those native to East Turkestan, the anti-colonial and true name which Uyghurs know the region by. The journalist’s stunning acceptance of “Xinjiang” as an occupied territory, rather than an autonomous region, was out of the ordinary. In almost every article written about the region in the 15 years following this publication, acknowledgement of East Turkestan would be erased or avoided.
Today one finds that piece after piece has been published that describes and emphathizes with China’s effort to control and eliminate the apparent Islamist, terrorist threat present in “Xinjiang.” The Chinese government successfully equated Uyghur resistance to Chinese colonization to an existential terrorist threat. This threat fell neatly in line with America’s war on terror. Thus, just as the United States could easily justify any occupation or invasion in the Middle East as part of their preemptive or active elimination of “Islamic-terror,” the Chinese government could do the same within their occupied territories without fear of international backlash. As a result, the century old Uyghur desire for freedom and sovereignty was no more. Instead, there existed a binary: to silently exist as an oppressed and colonized minority in China, or become a terrorist by virtue of desiring freedom from occupation. Throughout the last decade, American politicians have repeatedly tokenized the Uyghur crisis, whether it be to justify foreign intervention or fuel partisan politics. This tokenization has diluted the long history of Uyghur resistance in American media and passively condoned China’s oppression.
In reality, the Uyghur fight and desire for freedom preexisted the word “terrorist” as we know it today. This colonial confrontation began in the mid-18th century with the 1755-1759 Qing invasion of historic East Turkestan, which made the region part of imperial China. In 1765, ‘Ush Uyghurs rebelled against Qing power which had facilitated the abduction and rape of Uyghur women and the general exploitation of the Uyghur population. In response to this rebellion, the Qing executed thousands of Uyghur men and enslaved even more women and children. This oppression remained uninterrupted until Uyghur hero and revolutionary Yaqub Beg led rebellions across his homeland and gained independence in 1865. Twice more, after 1933 and in 1949, Chinese forces quashed independent Uyghur nations. From then on, Uyghurs suffered under a double edged sword of oppression. In addition to the general oppressions of the Cultural Revolution, Uyghur architecture, mosques, language, art and more were either tokenized or razed to the ground by Chinese forces.
Conditions for Uyghurs never improved. In 1990, Uyghurs suffered through the Baren Massacre where millions of Uyghur and other Turkic women were forced to undergo abortions as a part of China’s one-child policy. The Chinese government placed a ban on general mosque entry and subsidized and facilitated Chinese settlement of East Turkestan. In response to this influx of Han Chinese settlers, Uyghurs protested only to be met with 20,000 PLA troops. Thousands of Uyghurs and other Turks were slaughtered; 7,600 Uyghurs were jailed. In 1997, non-violent Uyghur protests against Chinese government violations of Uyghur rights were met with violence in the Ghulja Massacre. Dozens of Turks died, thousands were arrested, and 200 Uyghurs were sentenced to death. Four years later in 2001, the Strike Hard campaign was instituted by China’s Ministry of Public Security, implementing mass detentions, torture, and indoctrination. These policies were opposed by Uyghurs during the Urumqi Uprising— thousands took to the streets to protest the killing of Uyghur men in factories and general discrimination they faced as a people. China responded with summary executions and mass arrests, making the uprising one of the deadliest in their history— all under the auspices of America’s War on Terror rhetoric.
Since the initial establishment of parallel policies in China and the United States, however, the Sino-American political relationship has soured. Previously, these two governments mutually utilized “terror” rhetoric to justify and corroborate each other’s uninhibited attacks on Muslims domestically and abroad. Now, however, the Chinese government is almost as feared in American popular imagination as the abstract “Muslim terrorist.” As a result, the genocide of the Uyghurs remains a deeply politicized issue, but now is constructed within the framework of partisan politics. China’s threat as an economic superpower means that American politicians no longer find it helpful to justify Chinese oppression of Uyghurs as anti-terror measures. Instead, American politicians, particularly those on the right who find themselves in need of positive press, have begun to use the ongoing Uyghur genocide as a weapon in their antagonization of China. While the American political left maintains their image by advocating for the civil liberties of Americans relative to their conservative counterparts, the right relies on anti-Chinese rhetoric to demonstrate their moral superiority. For example, during his last few days in office, Mike Pompeo, who served first as Director of the Central Intelligence Agency from 2017 to 2018 and then as the 70th United States Secretary of State from 2018 to 2021, formally declared China’s treatment of Uyghurs a genocide— justifying sanctions against some Chinese officials. Conservatives have been most vocal on bills targeting Uyghur forced labor, and the Trump administration deemed China’s treatment of the Uyghurs to be genocide more than three months before the Biden campaign did.
Senators Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, two conservatives representing Texas and Florida respectively, were hit with both a travel ban as well as sanctions by the Chinese government for their frequent critique of China’s oppression of Uyghurs. Most progressive politicians have remained unnoticed and unscathed by the Chinese government’s vengeful gaze. However, one can’t help but question where this outrage from conservative politicians was when children were being held in cages within the borders of the country they themselves serve. Americans who are outraged at the caging of families and separation of children from their parents at the border are understandably skeptical of the motives and reasoning behind those politicians who excuse the former yet critique China for its policies which break apart Uyghur families and society.
To be clear, it is not that the American political left categorically denies the existence of Chinese crimes against the Uyghurs, but rather, that the right acknowledged the crisis first— marking the issue in American popular media as conservative domain. This humanitarian crisis thereby turns into a partisan issue where progressives are hesitant to join in or sign on lest they appear too close to their conservative peers. In response to conservative utilization of the cause, some members of the left have resorted to deeming the Uyghur crisis as anti-China propaganda, or simply say it has been overblown for the purpose of conservative virtue-signaling. The messy appropriation, utilization or underestimation of this painful humanitarian crisis has left the door wide-open for misinformation to spread and fester. One need not scroll far to find instagram accounts or articles dismissing the entire genocide as fallacy and propaganda— using conservative espousal of the cause as proof of its nefarious origin.
It is painful to imagine the responses of those who have been fighting for the freedom and wellbeing of the Uyghurs for years, or whose parents and grandparents have been fighting as Uyghurs themselves for generations. The cause of their people has been coopted by the American right, and either partially dismissed by progressives and anti-American imperialists as nothing more than anti-communist/China propaganda, or hesitantly and belatedly acknowledged. While those latter individuals would be wrong, it is impossible to feign ignorance as to why they believe in the crisis being propaganda. The list of American politicians who have most vocally advocated for this cause is red— and those same politicians have proven time and time again that they are not advocates for Muslims, nor for human rights in general.
As one can imagine, for an Uyghur in diaspora who went to rallies in Washington DC in the 80s or 90s to protest Chinese nuclear testing in his homeland, this dismissal is heartbreaking. For someone whose family was dispossessed of their ancestral home in East Turkestan and whose aunts and uncles were barred from entering mosques, or someone whose grandparents scoffed at being called “Chinese” when they so deeply felt their Turkic heritage and dreamt of a free East Turkestan, regarding this crisis as “propaganda” is heartbreaking. To add insult to injury, those critics of America, Western Imperialism, Capitalism, etc. who are the most adamant about the crisis’ inauthenticity are the same people who fight for the rights of other colonized groups like Palestinians against the American backed Zionist project.
While this confusion is understandable, it is not acceptable. One can easily read or look up the political and social aspirations of Uyghurs who have been living in exile for almost 100 years in Russia, Central Asia, and the Middle East to see that this is no recent American invention. This oppression is longstanding. Al Jazeera’s coverage of the Uyghurs living in Kyrgyzstan demonstrates this in a simple way. Journalists spoke to Uyghurs whose grandparents fled to other nations in Central Asia to be with their ethnic kin and away from the abuses of Chinese colonial power; now, their own grandchildren are born and reside in Kyrgyzstan—displaced and estranged from their homeland. How can the Uyghur genocide be mere “CIA propoganda” when the existence of generations of Uyghur refugees proves otherwise? How can this crisis be mere conservative propaganda when there exists photos of and stories from veterans who served in the East Turkestan Liberation Army and fought under the flags of the first and second republics against their ongoing oppression at the hands of various Chinese governments? To deny the genocide of the Uyghurs because one is too caught up in American partisan politics is not only to be woefully blinded by a gross American centrism, but to be complicit in the genocide itself.
Toqa Badran is a second year masters student at Columbia’s Middle East Institute, and a graduate of Columbia College. She is a native New Yorker of Egyptian heritage, and is passionate about fighting against colonialism and for the freedoms of East Turkestan and Palestine. Her interests also largely include Islamic intellectual history and post/decolonial theory.
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