Introduction In the middle of the 8th century, Uyghurs, a Turkic speaking nomadic tribe, established their Empire, the East Uyghur Kaganate (ca. 744–840), in Mongolia. After the demise of this Kaganate, most of them moved into the eastern part of the Tianshan (天山) area, where they founded a new kingdom, the West Uyghur Kingdom (second half 9th c.–13th c.). This kingdom continued to exist even after the rise ...

Abstract “The issue is more than religion, the issue is more than cultural identity, the issue is more than racism, it is a humanitarian crisis against humanity; it is a comprehensive genocide towards against Uyghurs in terms of culture, religion, language and identity”. I do claim these statements for last few years starting from year 2016. I used to be a neutral academician who mainly focus on academia an ...

by Subhash Kak Most people do not know that until about a thousand years ago, the Tarim Basin (northwest of Tibet, which is the part of Xinjiang below the Tian Shin Mountains) was Indic in culture and it was a thriving part of the Sanskritic world; its people spoke the Gāndhārī language which many see as descended from Vedic Sanskrit, and Khotanese Saka, which is also closely related to Sanskrit. Perhaps th ...

JamesTown Foundation Editor’s Note: This article continues coverage by China Brief of the ongoing efforts by the Chinese government to suppress dissent in Xinjiang (see China Brief, May 15 2018; and China Brief, November 5 2018). This article examines commonalities between the situation in Xinjiang and the government’s prior (and ongoing) efforts to suppress and “transform” practitioners of Falun Gong. Due ...

e-international Relations Xinjiang has recently been in the international spotlight due to the advent of what observers in the media and scholarly communities have described as a ‘security’, ‘police’, or ‘surveillance’ state (Rajagopalan 2018, Chin and Bürge 2017, Millward 2018). This refers to a conglomerate of security practices implemented by the Chinese authorities and mainly aimed at the Uyghur ethnic ...