Global Cafe will host a meeting focused on the humanitarian crisis affecting China’s Uighurs across Xinjiang province at 3:30 p.m. Feb. 18 via Zoom.
Since 2017, the People’s Republic of China has been engaged in the massive detention of up to 1.5 million ethnic Uighurs in hidden camps across Xinjiang province as part of its “people’s war on terror.” These camps have been condemned by many in the international community as a grave violation of human rights and tantamount to cultural genocide or forced assimilation. These brutal dehumanizing policies did not emerge in a vacuum.
Discussions surrounding China’s hidden camps in Xinjiang are often obscured further behind a rarely spoken of historical context of conquest, conflict, colonization and tensions in religious and cultural identity in a modern secular Han-Chinese nation-state. This history informs, whether consciously or not, the way the Chinese government views Uighurs in Xinjiang and enacts draconian policies of mass detention.
Register for this session to explore and discuss this history from the Qing conquest of Xinjiang and the Dzungar genocide in the 1750s to China’s war on terror and anti-muslim policies in the 2000s.
