The cycle of violence in Southern Xinjiang's Bay County built up slowly over the past decade. It started with Islamophobic fears among Han authorities regarding changes in Uyghur piety. For much of its recent history, this small county of around 200,000 mostly Uyghur people located right at the foot of the Tian Shan mountains was known as peaceful farming country. Yet as scholars such as Sean Roberts and Joanne Smith Finley have shown, after the violent street protests in the capital of Ürümchi in 2009, police surveillance and brutality intensified across the region.Footnote ¹ Over the past five years, the cycles of violence confronting Uyghurs culminated in one of the most pressing human rights crises in the contemporary world. As Adrian Zenz has demonstrated, hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims have been detained in new purpose-built “reeducation” camps.Footnote ²

In 2014, as the state began a religious “deextremification” campaign that conflated religious piety with “separatism and terrorism,” hundreds of Uyghur men and women in Bay County were detained due to unauthorized activities such as studying the Quran or discussing pious practice. They “disappeared” (Uy. ular yok) behind the county's “black gate” (Uy. qara derweze), where they began receiving religious “reeducation.” Police officers armed with digital cameras began to enter the homes of villagers on a regular, sometimes daily, basis. They were tasked with a kind of violent paternalism, correcting the daily behavior of “backward” Uyghurs. They were looking for men with facial hair or women with veiled faces. Phones and computers were scanned regularly. When I visited Bay County in January 2015 as an ethnographer, I myself had my phone checked by a police officer during one of the nightly inspections.

A month after my visit, on February 17, a Uyghur man and several of his neighbors, whose brothers and friends had disappeared in the “deextremification” police sweep, attempted to grab the gun of the police officer who regularly checked his home and threatened to arrest him and his wife unless he shaved his beard and she removed her Islamic veiling.Footnote ³ Fortunately, he was unable to shoot the gun, but he and his neighbors used knives to stab the police officers. Within minutes the armed police arrived and began shooting indiscriminately into the melee. All of the assailants were killed along with the police officer and three of his assistants. The man's wife and their elementary school-aged daughter and several other bystanders were also killed. Over the next several months, approximately one thousand farmers in the community were arrested as tangential co-conspirators in the incident. Five uncles of one of my interviewees were arrested. Each of them were sentenced to prison terms of five or more years in closed trials. According to those I interviewed from the community, at least eight people were known to have died during their interrogations.

Eight months into this cycle of violence, on September 22, 2015, young Uyghur men attacked Han coal miners with knives while they were sleeping in their dormitories at a mine in Bay County.Footnote ⁴ As many as thirteen civilian miners were killed along with three police officers. Over the next two months, the local authorities organized a manhunt to scour the foothills of the mountains looking for the assailants and their families. On November 14, 2015, Chinese state authorities announced that they had killed twenty-eight “assailants” after flushing them out of a cave using flamethrowers.Footnote ⁵ Those I interviewed from the community confirmed that at least ten of those killed were women and children.

This specific cycle of violence did not stop in Bay County; instead, it moved into a discursive domain. In making their announcement of the death of the twenty-eight Uyghurs, state officials compared the actions of the Uyghur attackers to that of the Charlie Hebdo attacks that had taken place in Paris a day prior. In response, the French journalist Ursula Gauthier wrote a short essay outlining the differences between the two violent incidents.Footnote ⁶ Gauthier was subsequently expelled from China for “openly supporting terrorists” and “insulting” the Chinese people.Footnote ⁷ In response, the scholar Colin Mackerras, an author whose work is featured as one of the central chapters of The Uyghur Community, wrote that he too found Gauthier's essay “deeply offensive.”Footnote ⁸ He accused her of being “one-sided” in her analysis of Chinese persecution of the Uyghurs and “insensitive” to the deaths of Han settlers.

I begin this review essay of The Uyghur Community with this recounting of the events of Bay County in 2015 as a way of conveying, on a more granular level, how cycles of violence have swept through the community, as well as Mackerras's positioning in relation to them. Before analyzing his position, however, I will first summarize the primary arguments of the book concerning the structural violence confronting Uyghur society.

Much of The Uyghur Community provides a welcome addition to scholarship on the Uyghur community outside of its current place of crisis. Its editors, Güljanat Kurmangaliyeva Ercilasun and Konuralp Ercilasun, both of whom have lived in Kyrgyzstan and now work in Turkey, have compiled essays that provide a nuanced history of the Uyghur community from the position of exile. This mode of argumentation stresses a bottom-up and lateral view of the Uyghurs from Central Asia and Turkey rather than a more top-down reading of Uyghur sociality through the lens of Chinese political history and governance.

The former view is strikingly exemplified in the second chapter where Kurmangaliyeva Ercilasun analyzes the works of the nineteenth-century Kazakh explorer Chokan Valikhanov. She finds in Valikhanov's work a rich archive concerning Turkic-Chinese cultural relations in the 1850s. For instance, Valikhanov noted food borrowings from Chinese traditions, such as marinated vegetables, among Turkic peoples and the way Chinese traders learned Turkic languages in order to barter. Yet, in the end, Kurmangaliyeva Ercilasun finds that, although Turkic peoples and Chinese were affected by each other, they remained “strangers to each other” (p. 26). This claim and her focus on Chinese borrowings of Turkic language demonstrate that flows of power and resistance were multidirectional during earlier periods of Turkic colonization.

The same is true of chapter 3, written by the Uyghur historian and novelist Nabijan Tursun. Looking at archives of Uyghur-language newspapers from the 1920s to the 1940s, he demonstrates the way Turkic peoples initially saw themselves as engaged in “anti-colonial” movements with Russian and Chinese allies. Yet, over time, these movements toward self-determination came to be dominated by forms of socialist multiculturalism that deeply undermined native Turkic sovereignty, a line of argumentation that resonates with decolonial scholarship in other contexts.Footnote ⁹

The analytic core of the volume begins with the fifth chapter, where Işık Kuşçu Bonnenfant argues that Uyghur intellectuals who fled to Turkey following the establishment of the People's Republic of China used their Turkic identity as a “master frame” (p. 92) to mobilize the Uyghur diaspora in opposition to Chinese efforts to assimilate the Uyghur population.

The next essay, written by Suchandana Chatterjee, examines the waves of Uyghur migration to Kazakhstan that intensified after 1949. Using an analytic that recalls Homi Bhabha's discussion of the negotiation of decolonial, transnational forms of identification, she argues that these waves have produced a “bordered consciousness”—a feeling of in-betweenness—in the Uyghur diaspora.Footnote ¹⁰

This essay is followed by a chapter from Yitzhak Shichor on the way the Chinese state has constrained the activism of Uyghurs in the diaspora. Shichor concludes that, unlike the role of state authorities in relation to minority-led political movements from Palestine to Québec, Chinese state authorities are not interested even in dialogue regarding forms of greater self-determination for Uyghurs (p. 133).

The final two chapters deal more directly with the current situation confronting the twelve million Uyghurs who live in northwest China. In these chapters, the Uyghur scholars Erkin Emet and Erkin Ekrem outline the rise in violence that has corresponded with the rise in Uyghur dispossession. Emet focuses primarily on the events of July 2009, providing a comprehensive timeline of the violent protests in Ürümchi and the responses of differently positioned actors to them. Ekrem focuses on the way succeeding waves of “strike hard” campaigns have brought new waves of Uyghur refugees to Turkey and, in turn, exacerbated the Chinese authorities’ fears of Uyghur radicalization in Turkey and Syria.

The tone of the majority of the volume stands in sharp contrast to a deeply problematic chapter from Colin Mackerras, a retired Australian sinologist who in 2014 received a Chinese Government Friendship Award and a personal expression of gratitude for his service from Xi Jinping.Footnote ¹¹ His positioning is something that the editors address elliptically by noting that scholarship on the Uyghurs is very “sensitive” and as a result they did not attempt to create “unity” in the text (p. vi). Near the beginning of his essay, Mackerras uses coded words such as “dark” and “ominous” to describe the Uyghur turn toward more pious forms of Islamic practice (pp. 61–62). He writes that such forms of Islam are “generally hostile to the Chinese state” and led by “underground clergy” who are “actively hostile” to Chinese rule and “linked to separatism and terrorism” (pp. 63, 65). These are views that are radically contradicted by the findings of more than a dozen ethnographers of contemporary Islamic piety movements in China in a forthcoming volume edited by Rachel Harris, Guangtian Ha, and Maria Jaschok.Footnote ¹²

Mackerras's central thesis is that, beginning with the 1990 Baren Incident,Footnote ¹³ Uyghurs began to build a “holy war” of “violent resistance to China based on Islamic extremism” (pp. 72, 76). This narrative has also been deeply problematized in a recent book chapter by Sean Roberts, an anthropologist of Uyghur Islamic movements.Footnote ¹⁴ Mackerras speculates that the Baren Incident led to the formation of the East Turkistan Islamic Movement and produced a “flow-on” to a “whole series” of incidents, most of which, he suggests, were “separatist in intent” rather than responses to localized grievances, as in the case I recounted at the beginning of this essay (p. 72). Ignoring the institutionalized forms of discrimination that have confronted Uyghurs for decades, as outlined by Gardner Bovingdon, Joanne Smith Finley, and others,Footnote ¹⁵ he presents what might be interpreted as a “reverse-racism” argument that Uyghurs have “equal or more hostile” views of Han than Han do of Uyghurs (p. 70). This view is echoed by Han intellectuals such as Hu Lianhe, Hu Angang, and Ma Rong, whose writings undergird the new policies of coercive ethnic minority “reeducation” in Xinjiang and Tibet.Footnote ¹⁶ In Mackerras's view, it seems, Han settlers and Chinese authorities are the real victims of the Uyghur colonization. Mackerras also implies that Uyghur diaspora communities were part of the “cause” of “ethnic rioting” in Ürümchi in 2009 (p. 74). Lacking any supporting evidence, he suggests that some Uyghurs in diaspora may simply be pretending not to be in favor of “violent religious war” in order to garner international support (p. 77).

If there is something to be gained from a reading of Mackerras's essay, it is in the radical elimination of traces of Uyghur piety that readers can calculate based on the numbers he provides from his tours of the region in the 1990s and 2000s. For instance, he says that during his visit to the Idkah Mosque in Kashgar in 2010 around 45,000 people attended Friday prayers. When I visited the same mosque in 2018, I observed less than thirty elderly men praying during the Friday service. He also writes that as of 2009 there were 24,300 mosques in the region, that “most villages in the south have active mosques” (p. 62) and, echoing the work of Rian Thum, that shrine visitation is an important part of Uyghur native spirituality.Footnote ¹⁷ As I observed during a research trip in 2018, nearly all Uyghur village mosques and shrines have been closed or demolished.Footnote ¹⁸

Mackerras ends his essay by stating that “Islamic extremists account for only a small proportion of Muslims in Xinjiang” and that fear should not allow for a conflation of “extremism” with Islam itself (p. 79). He would do well to heed his own advice and question his own conceptualization of “hostile” forms of pious Islamic practice and the way his own hostility allows for a tacit approval of settler-colonial violence. The failures of his work should remind readers that it is important to consider the specific causes of Uyghur violent actions, as I have tried to demonstrate in the opening paragraphs of this essay. Doing so is not an excuse for abhorrent behavior, but rather a means through which to examine the underlying systemic injustices and resulting hopelessness that make people, such as those in Bay County, strive for spiritual belonging, or, in rare instances, respond violently.

Taken together, the essays in this collection provide a portrait of a people who have been forced to survive in a state of “in-betweenness,” as argued by Chatterjee. They show, as noted by Shichor, that the primary blockage to greater Uyghur self-determination is the unwillingness of the Chinese authorities, and scholars such as Mackerras, to listen to Uyghur voices.