Center for Uyghur Studies

The Chinese have attempted to proclaim their claims by declaring that “history cannot be tampered with”. Yet the documents they publish do exactly that. They turn intermittent garrisons into two thousand years of sovereignty and call a war of annihilation a “homecoming”. They present Turkic and Mongol khanates as China’s “local regimes” and deny two republics that actually existed. While the Uyghurs’ own dictionaries, poems and inscriptions are there for all to see, they tear them away from the Turkic world. And they rewrite more than a thousand years of Islamic faith as a foreign coercion. The Uyghur reading of the same records is far more faithful to the evidence. East Turkistan is a homeland the Manchu empire conquered in the eighteenth century and that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) seized by force in 1949. Its people are a Turkic nation with their own language, literature and memory of statehood. Islam, rooted in Kashgar since the tenth century and kept alive at shrines for centuries, is not something that came from outside, but their own faith. In the end, the real question is to whom the right to tell a people’s history belongs. The Chinese claim is that it belongs to the state that detains people, erases their language and demolishes their holy places. A more honest scholarly approach would begin with the Uyghurs’ own narrative, which these studies were written to silence. More on my article; uyghurstudy.org/chinas-destr…