Welcome or welcome back to springtime of nations! It’s time for another worthy struggle for independence for self determination and a push against the centralizing power of the state.

The fate of the Uyghur Muslims in the Xinjiang province of China has been a hot topic now for years. The Chinese Communist government has been imposing outrageous restrictions on the life of the Uyghurs since 2017 under the auspices of preventing terrorism in the region, with credible claims of such things as forced labor, forced marriages, and starvation tactics being used on Uighur subjects in “re-education camps”. Why has the Chinese State resorted to these barbaric practices? Why is there terrorism being conducted against them by Uighur Muslims? We will start to answer this by turning to the beginning of this conflict.

In the early middle ages (beginning in around 740 A.D.) the Uyghur Khaganate ruled a large territory and many different Turkic clans in what is now Mongolia. A century later when it collapsed, the Uyghurs migrated to their current homeland in Xinjiang (also known as east Turkestan). Over the next several centuries the Uyghurs and their Turkic neighbors maintained autonomy as tribal confederations who often engaged in raiding of the Chinese empire, later followed by a long period of Mongol leadership and alliance starting in 1209, lasting from the reign of Genghis Khan, through the conversion of the region by Muslim Mongolians in 15th century and finally to the defeat of the Dzungar Khanate in 1755 by the Qing Dynasty.

After their conquest, the Uyghurs did not settle into quiet servitude, engaging in a Holy War that turned cold and hot many times beginning in 1759, with a particularly successful uprising in 1826 temporarily regaining independence from the Chinese before it was crushed and its leader Jahangir Khoja sliced apart in a gruesome manner in 1828, the legendary “death by 1000 cuts”. In 1862 a more widespread uprising also involving the Hui Muslims who inhabited other parts of China, called the Dungan Revolt (supported by a Russian empire eager to weaken the Qings) allowed the Uyghurs to establish a longer term rebel state known as Yettishar from 1865 until 1877. This was an extremely bloody war, with both sides massacring huge numbers of civilians. After the war, the Qing engaged in a Sinicization of their outer provinces, forcibly deporting large numbers of Hui and Uyghurs and settling Han Chinese in their place.

Two world upheavals gave new life to the Uyghur cause. These were the collapse of the Qing Dynasty and the creation of the Chinese Republic in 1911, and the Russian Revolution in 1917. The weakened central government of China could do little or nothing to prevent independence movements in their outer provinces, and the Soviet Union committed to supporting Marxist led national revolutions in central and east Asia, in a new twist on Russian interest in expanding their influence into China. The local warlord of Xinjiang Jin Shuren enraged the local Muslim populace by banning the hajj to Mecca during his reign beginning in 1928 and replacing local Uyghurs with Han officials. In 1933 riots against these measures turned into a full revolt which dethroned Jin and led to yet another short lived Uyghur state, the East Turkestan Republic, supported militarily and economically by the USSR. By early 1934, Stalin had changed his mind about the Uyghurs, fearing nationalist/Islamism fervor spreading to his central Asian subjects and supported their defeat by the Chinese Nationalists under Chiang Kai-Shek. However, the USSR still had considerable economic influence in the region and worked to engineer an annexation of the province while Nationalist China was still weak. During World War Two the provincial governor expelled Soviet assets there, which led to the USSR supporting a second East Turkestan Republic in 1944. This second Republic was considerably anti-Han and engaged in genocidal killings of those Han who remained in the province. The Soviets assassinated the ETR’s leaders in 1949 once they lost their usefulness, as the central government in China was now the Chinese Communist Party, their bosom friend.

World power politics again affected the Uyghur people in 1962 with the Sino-Soviet split. The soviets encouraged Uyghur and other central Asian nationalist movements, which resulted in over 60,000 of them fleeing to the Kazakh SSR. This and other events such as the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan led to the Chinese state resuming sinicization policies, flooding Xinjiang with Han settlers to secure their border regions. The central Chinese government kept a tight lid on the Uyghurs during most of their rule, only allowing them to make Hajj to Mecca in the 1980s. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the independence of the central Asian republics formerly under their rule rekindled an interest for Turkestan independence, and Islamic fundamentalism had also spread to some Uyghurs, resulting in the formation of the Turkestan Islamic Party, which has carried out terror attacks on Han Chinese and PRC government buildings since 1992. These include the bombing of buses and mass stabbing attacks, and the total death toll amounts to almost a thousand. The Chinese Communist government has gradually increased surveillance and restrictions on Uyghur civilians, including the 2014 “Strike Hard Campaign” which banned the growing of long beards and the wearing of veils and installed CCTV systems on the homes of Uyghurs. They also now track their movements with specially issued ID cards. This adds to a litany of infringements on religious liberty, from only “official” (aka edited) Korans being allowed in the country to “collective punishment” for communities who allow basic exercises of Islam such as fasting during Ramadan.

Since 2017, The West has learned that tens to hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs have been displaced due to concerns of “extremism” and have been sent to what must be described as “re-education” camps designed to turn them into ideal communist subjects. All of the policies, forced labor and starvation, forced marriage to non-Uyghurs, forced education in and compliance with Han culture have the intention of destroying the Uyghur religious and civic culture and assimilating them fully into the Chinese Nation.

The Uyghur independence movement is the first one in our series that utilizes ugly, immoral and perhaps most dangerous for this channel, non-historical terror actions. We here at Springtime of Nations do NOT endorse the killing of civilians, especially those targeted specifically for their ethnicity. The actions of the Chinese are at least as horrific, and probably more so due to their mass scale and are just another act of terror in their 350 year oppression of the Uyghur people. Those who correctly condemn the terror campaign of the Turkestan Islamic Party should acknowledge that they are reacting to a brutal state terror campaign not seen in Europe since the Soviet Union. Ukrainian terror actions on Russian civilians WOULD be immoral. I would tend to categorize it however as a lower priority than the Soviet murder/mass deportation campaigns on Ukrainians (or Poles, or Tartars, or Koreans, etc etc etc). And let us keep in mind that most Uyghurs are emphatically not terrorists, nor are they insane extremist Muslims. They are normal people who want to live normal lives, and if a majority of them want self-determination without the overbearing hand of Beijing over their lives, they have the moral right to resist the inexcusable actions of that truly Evil state. Next week we will be covering American Dixie. May a Thousand Flowers bloom.