For over a decade, mounting evidence has exposed China’s brutal campaign against Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, and other Turkic peoples in East Turkistan—what Beijing calls the “Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.” This campaign includes mass internment camps, forced sterilizations, family separations, religious repression, forced labor, organ harvesting, and pervasive high-tech surveillance. Multiple governments, including the United States, have labeled these atrocities as genocide. The United Nations has identified them as crimes against humanity.
Yet, reducing this crisis to a human rights issue or authoritarian overreach obscures its deeper cause: the ongoing colonization of East Turkistan. This is not merely a question of repression—it is the result of China’s illegal occupation and settler-colonial rule. Like all colonial projects, it cannot be reformed; it must be ended.
East Turkistan has a distinct history, identity, and culture apart from China. Although the Manchu-led Qing Empire first invaded in 1759, control was never uncontested. Between 1759 and 1864, the people of East Turkistan launched 42 uprisings. They regained independence in 1864 as the State of Yette Sheher, only to be re-occupied by the Qing in 1877. In 1884, China renamed the region “Xinjiang”—meaning “New Territory”—a colonial label used to legitimize its conquest and erase indigenous identity.
Despite repression, East Turkistanis have continually resisted colonization. They declared independence twice in the 20th century, establishing the East Turkistan Republic in 1933 and again in 1944. Both were dismantled through foreign interference and Chinese military force. In 1949, after the Communist victory in China, the People’s Liberation Army invaded East Turkistan with Soviet support, ending its short-lived sovereignty under the guise of “peaceful liberation.”
Since then, East Turkistan has remained under Chinese colonial rule. The genocide we witness today is not an isolated policy—it is the culmination of decades of occupation, population transfer, and cultural erasure. Ending the atrocities requires more than humanitarian concern; it demands global recognition of East Turkistan’s right to self-determination and decolonization.
To secure justice and peace, the international community must stop viewing this as a domestic human rights issue and acknowledge it for what it truly is: a colonial crisis. Only by confronting the root cause—China’s occupation—can the genocide end, and a free East Turkistan begin.