(1)

There are some pretty bad takes here and I think once the empirical reality of what has happened to the Uyghurs becomes even more substantiated, there will be a lot of shame to go around. Some of the sources used to rebut forced internment or that what is happening to the Uyghurs is actually not that bad are, frankly, embarrassing (Carl Zha, really?). Understanding China is extremely difficult and one would be surprised how ill-informed one can end up being by doing what would for other subjects be considered sufficient. Because most people are not experts on China or the CCP or Xinjiang or the Uyghurs and because it is in fact a specialist subject, people are easily swayed by reading lists or articles covered with a thin veneer of expertise. Even the most politically sympathetic China scholar wouldn't even wipe their ass with this stuff.

One of the biggest problems for wading through the morass that is "wtf is going in Xinjiang" is that many in the West and in Uyghur expatriate communities do make sensational points that are easily called into question (e.g. mass organ theft, that there are no radical Islamist Uyghurs, that there are 2 million in internment camps being tortured 24/7, that there is a mass genocide similar to the holocaust, etc). These kinds of outrageous and conspiratorial claims are typical of expatriate communities that seek regime change in their homelands (occupied or not) or were otherwise persecuted (e.g. Falun Gong). They should be read as such, but you simply have to dig deeper than that. To compound the problem, there is an all-out information war between China and the West and politically cretinous people in the West use Xinjiang and the Uyghurs as propaganda tools for their own ends.

These more outlandish claims are unfortunate because they are easy to refute and make it easier to sow doubt about the more realistic and well-evidenced claims, such as: that there are hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs in re-education camps at least; that these camps are forced; that vocational training is the least of what goes on there; that the relationship between Xinjiang (the Dzungharian basin primarily, but the Uyghur region increasingly since the 1980s [read Judd Kinzley]) and eastern China is fundamentally based on material extraction that should be characterized as colonial and exploitative (the reason for Xinjiang's incorporation into China is of course related to the more distant Qing conquests, but also to the discovery of massive resource wealth conducted by Soviet survey teams in the early 20th century); that Uyghurs have been predominantly left out of Xinjiang's economic gains; that many Han people are extremely racist toward Uyghurs inside and outside of Xinjiang; that Uyghurs have a point in resisting Han migration and settler colonialism to Xinjiang; that Uyghur cultural identity and language have been under assault for a long time; that there was a broader sense of collective identity in southern Xinjiang before 1921 based around the tazkirah tradition [read Rian Thum]; that some Uyghurs are, in fact, Islamic militants and have joined ISIS; that Uyghur expatriate groups are authentically Uyghur but also express the desires of Western political actors. That these claims are not considered common knowledge is unfortunate as they are very well-evidenced and supported by research done almost entirely by left wing scholars.

If you are genuinely interested in understanding this subject and also in having strong opinions about it, you have to do the bare minimum. You have to read at least a plurality of the work of James Millward, Mark Elliott, Dru Gladney, Pamela Kyle Crossley, Rian Thum, Gardner Bovingdon, Judd Kinzley, Darren Byler, Sean Roberts, Ildikó Bellér-Hann, David Brophy, Justin Jacobs, and Elise Anderson. I can give others.

If you want to read from someone who is basically a Maoist and also an eminent China historian, you can read Rebecca Karl here. I think you should also make a genuine effort to read what Uyghurs themselves have to say, while keeping in mind the desire of 99% of expatriates is to create an independent East Turkestan and that this narrative fits US global imperial ambitions and desire to constrain China. Read Uyghur poetry (see Joshua Freeman), past and present.

Zenz is a problematic researcher for reasons already said here, but you simply can't stop your research into this topic at his background (or assume that because the numbers he estimates are likely way too high, there's nothing going on at all).

Linking a list of articles and reddit posts from someone on r /Sino on this topic is just not enough. Likewise, and I'm sorry for saying this so crassly, but saying that most sources about Uyghur genocide are from Radio Free Asia basically shows you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about and are nothing more than a cheap propagandist and don't really care to put in the work to understand complex issues. Yes, RFA is propaganda and can pretty much be ignored, but actual scholars doing actual research do not take RFA seriously and resist using the term "genocide" and they've still come to similarly disturbing conclusions as to what has happened and is happening.

Tldr: you need to actually read if you want to be taken seriously on this topic.

(2)

Someone PMed me asking for more details on what to read and about scholars who are not white men. I've included my response for others to reference:

I'm assuming you are limited to Anglophone literature. There's some great stuff in Uyghur and Chinese obviously, and I know there's a lot in Japanese and Russian but I can't read those languages--people like David Brophy and James Millward draw on that literature though. There's Turkish literature as well, but I can't attest to any of it. I'm assuming it's mostly pan-Turkic nationalist in nature. I would suggest:

James Millward: *Eurasian Crossroads* for a good general overview (unfortunately it was published before the camp system, but there is a new edition coming out sometime soon). His article on the 2009 riots here: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02634930903577128

Darren Byler: he just finished his dissertation and has not written a book yet, but read his articles on SupChina. He has lived in Xinjiang for years, speaks Uyghur, and is solidly left wing and anti-imperialist. His articles on surveillance capitalism are useful for understanding what's going on there. His website: https://livingotherwise.com/

Dru Gladney has a lot, but you have to read this: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2059528?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents This article basically spawned an entire field studying how the Han majority internally orientalizes China's ethnic minorities.

Judd Kinzley, read *Natural Resources and the New Frontier* to understand how material extraction is fundamental to Xinjiang's relationship to regional states in the 20th century.

Sean Roberts has a book coming out soon, but his article using biopolitics here you might find useful: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14672715.2018.1454111

Rian Thum's work is phenomenal and won one of the most prestigious academic book prizes for East Asian history, *The Sacred Routes of Uyghur History*. Basically shows that there was a broader Uyghur identity based around the tazkirah Sufi mystic historical tradition before Uyghur nationalism developed. You will see that Chinese nationalists will try to downplay or just outright lie about the development of any sense of coherent Uyghur identity. Much of the Uyghur history field has thus been centered around questions of identity development.

David Brophy and Justin Jacobs can be read together: *Xinjiang and the Modern Chinese State* and *Uyghur Nation* (the latter draws on Russian sources in an innovative way).

I agree it's a problem in the field that it's so dominated by white men. This is partly because Uyghur academics are so politically constrained and those who had the most intellectual intercourse with the West have since disappeared, like Rahile Dawut. I can give you a list of some of the foremost borderland scholars in China who publish in Chinese, if you want. I always found it odd that so few graduate students from China who come to the US to study Chinese history end up studying Xinjiang. There was a step toward rectifying this a few years ago when a young woman who had studied with Rahile Dawut was admitted to Harvard's PhD program, however she was arrested and imprisoned for 5 years before she could leave.

You could go to JSTOR, type in "Uyghur" or "Xinjiang" and click on articles written by people with non-Western names.

Xiaowei Zang is a name that comes up. Zang studies employment and economic disparity among Uyghurs and Han. https://www.jstor.org/stable/43590609

Zhe Wu, a scholar from China living in Taiwan (and who I think actually came out in support of the camps or policies in Xinjiang) has a chapter in *Maoism at the Grassroots* about the first decade of PRC rule in Xinjiang and how Han chauvinism and local nationalism were both harshly critiqued by the Party during that time. Today Han chauvinism is rampant and dominant--this jives with Uyghurs who look comparatively fondly on the 1950s and 1980s and the greater degree of autonomy afforded during those decades.

For Anglophone historical literature written by non-whites, you can read Kim Ho Dong's *Holy War in China: The Muslim Rebellion and State in Chinese Central Asia, 1864-1877* for a deeper historical context of unrest in Xinjiang related to control of the region from a state in China. You can read Kwangmin Kim's *Borderland Capitalism: Turkestan Produce, Qing Silver, and the Birth of an Eastern Market* for more on Qing colonial expansion into Xinjiang and the Qing state's relationship to local economic leaders and the integration of Xinjiang to global markets. The question of whether the Qing was acting "imperially" toward Xinjiang is a strong overtone in the field, and politically fraught because the Qing was clearly acted imperially upon by Western powers and Japan. The consensus of those who study Qing expansion in Central Asia is that Qing's imperial victimization was simultaneous to its own imperial expansion in Central Asia (you can guess which relation to imperialism the CCP and Chinese nationalists prefer to underline).

There's this newer article "Colonization with Chinese characteristics: politics of (in)security in Xinjiang and Tibet" by Dibyesh Anand, which had slipped past my radar: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/02634937.2018.1534801?casa_token=8NNdlSLTID8AAAAA:2wabSjkhPnML4afnrHt-8NIB2jFqDE-Wod2urOGvuuhl3VJZfwv--g_jAb26QYfuUnwOiZotJfoLplA

You can also read Nabijan Tursun, who is affiliated with RFA and supports the creation of an independent Uyghur state. He was educated in the Soviet Union, taught at Xinjiang University, and left in I think the early 1990s. He is clearly the premier Uyghur historian of 20th century Xinjiang/Uyghurs writing in English (and Russian) today. Whether his affiliation with RFA disqualifies him or not, I'll leave up to you. He has a chapter with James Millward in *Xinjiang: China's Muslim Borderland*, in which I see Millward moderating Tursun's Uyghur nationalism while still drawing on his unparalleled knowledge of the literature.

You can also read Uyghur personal testimony from recent years. These are often embedded in the work of Western, Central Asian, and global human rights organizations which are problematic, but you should read it and get a better idea of the full volume and scope of testimony and see what your response to the evidence presented is. https://www.shahit.biz/

I recommend reading Uyghur poems and translated literature as well. There's a short fiction from Perhat Tursun (who has since disappeared into the camps) that will be translated and published next year. Some other names to google would be Abdurehim Ötkür, Turghun Almas, or Memtimin Hoshur. Almas's Uyghurlar is a famous book among Uyghurs. It makes a lot of specious and false historical claims in service of building a Uyghur national pride. Regardless, it's important for the nationalism it expresses and the state's terrified response to it, and not for the historical research behind it. A lot of Uyghur historical literature is less interested in doing history to the standards of the Western academy, and more interested in building a Uyghur national consciousness and pride. A more cynical view is that Uyghur scholars aren't allowed to do their own history anyway and are afforded no access to sources that would allow them to do it, nor the freedom to publish anything that resulted from that kind of research.

As you could expect, few Uyghurs speak English and few native English-speakers speak Uyghur--there's a lot of work to be done in translating Uyghur literature and probably not even a dozen people in the world capable of doing so. Poetry is easier to translate than a full novel so you see more of it, but also poetry is an influential category in Uyghur literary culture.

https://supchina.com/2020/02/05/disappearance-of-perhat-tursun-uyghur-worlds-greatest-author/