The Uyghurs: from Mao to Xi Jinping, more than seventy years of repression in Xinjiang

Book. Until recent years, the fate of the Uighurs [orthographi ainsi par Le Monde] didn’t interest many people. Even Bernard Kouchner, then Minister of Foreign Affairs, was caught in the act of ignorance in 2009, citing the Yogurts on national radio. And MEP Raphal Glucksmann bluntly acknowledges that he has only been won over to their cause since September 2019. However, the tragedy of the Uighurs is not new. One of the many merits of Laurence Defranoux’s book is to remind us of this .

Ever since East Turkestan (now Xinjiang Autonomous Region) was ruled by a Chinese emperor in the mid-eighteenth^e century, relations between the Middle Kingdom and this region are marked by ignorance, mistrust and violence. Not only is this region far, very far the city of Kashgar is farther from Beijing than from the Turkish border but it has been mainly populated since the 14th century.^e century of Muslims considered as barbarians by the Chinese despite the refinement of their civilization. Problem: despite its peripheral position in the empire, it has been for two thousand years at the heart of commercial relations the famous silk roads between China and Europe.

The victory of the communists in Peking in 1949 makes matters worse. Of course, Mao Zedong forgot as soon as he came to power the promises of self-determination that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had renewed to the Uighurs, the Mongols and the Tibetans during the previous quarter century. As early as 1949, he sent General Wang Zheng, a relative to Xinjiang, who, it is said, advised him to“definitely eliminate” the Uighurs. At the time, citizens not belonging to the ethnic group of the Hans represented less than 6% of the population, but lived in territories which, together, covered 64% of the surface of the country. The self-determination of the different peoples living on Chinese soil is therefore no longer on the agenda. Apart from during the parenthesis between 1976 (death of Mao) and 1989 (general takeover after the Tiananmen movement), the Chinese settler never ceased to repress the Uighur people, to prevent them from speaking their language and from practicing his religion.

With two other constants: the massive sending of more or less voluntary Hans to Xinjiang so that the Uighurs there become a minority and the development of the region thanks to black gold (oil) and white gold (cotton), two sectors that impoverish the soil more than they enrich the Uighurs, who are systematically excluded from positions of responsibility. Results : Instead of smoothly integrating the Turkic peoples of Xinjiang, the neo-Stalinist policy of minorities, fierce repression and forced colonization have the diametrically opposite effect. Under pressure from outside, the mosaic of small communities scattered over 1.6 million square kilometers of desert and mountains are becoming aware of their ethnicityexplains the journalist of Release.

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