May 1, 2026
A UHRP Insights column by Dr. Henryk Szadziewski, Director of Research.
World Press Freedom Day arrives this year against the backdrop of some challenging numbers. Reporters Without Borders ranks China 178th out of 180 countries on its 2025 Press Freedom Index, a lowly position it has occupied with consistency across successive years demonstrating the dire conditions for independent reporting.
East Turkistan (also known as the Uyghur Region) is at the most extreme end of what is already a closed national environment. According to the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China (FCCC), overseas journalists who attempted to report from the region in 2024 faced plainclothes police surveillance and interviewees who were routinely intimidated before they could speak. More than three-quarters of the reporters who travelled to East Turkistan surveyed by the FCCC encountered serious obstacles to their work.
Foreign correspondents are not the only ones affected in a system designed to leave the region in an informational void. In its dataset of reporters currently imprisoned, the Committee to Protect Journalists identifies China as the world’s foremost jailer of journalists, with at least fifty media workers currently behind bars. Among those imprisoned in China, nearly half are Uyghur, a community that comprises less than one percent of the country’s total population.
The dismantling of media in the Uyghur language has been both systematic and long in the planning. Following the 2009 Ürümchi protests, a ten-month internet blackout erased roughly eighty percent of Uyghur-run websites, platforms devoted not only to political and economic commentary, but also to culture, language, and everyday life. The imprisonment of the webmasters who built those spaces completed what can only be described as a “digital book burning.” What remained of the print landscape fared no better. Uyghur-language outlets now function primarily as translation services for Chinese-language content vetted by propaganda committees. In a 2021 UHRP report, Abdullah Qazanchi and Abduweli Ayup documented the persecution of numerous media workers from Xinjiang Television Station, Xinjiang Gazette, Xinjiang Youth magazine, and Kashgar Uyghur Press. The 2026 “ethnic unity law” further diminishes the practical utility of the Uyghur language in public life as the dissemination of information in Chinese becomes a legal norm.
Into this information void steps the state. China’s official outlets, Xinhua, China Daily, CGTN, publish regularly about the Uyghur Region, and they do so on domestic platforms, as well as on social media sites prohibited within China’s own borders, such as Facebook, X, and YouTube. The same government that denies its citizens access to a free internet uses that internet with considerable sophistication to distribute its preferred version of events to the rest of the world. Furthermore, Chinese state narratives are amplified by paid content placements in established news organisations and by a network of influencers willing to provide a veneer of independent endorsement. The authoritarian playbook of suppressing critical journalism while advancing propaganda is nothing new. What is new is the scale and transnational reach.
What is also conspicuous, and it is here that the responsibility shifts, is how little resistance this information strategy encounters in some quarters. In the absence of independent and citizen reporting from the Uyghur Region, incuriosity has taken hold among commercial actors, academic institutions, and governments that might otherwise be expected to ask harder questions. International hotel chains market luxurious new accommodations in the region, university presses conduct “inclusive cross-cultural” visits, and trade delegations proceed. When challenged, the rationalizations are familiar, access is better than isolation, state officials make assurances over conditions in the region, and the picture is far too complex for judgments.
The imprisonment of Uyghur journalists and the harassment of foreign correspondents, not to mention the disruptions enacted on diaspora-led media, boost propaganda, muddy critical narratives, and enable these rationalizations. As such, a space opens for the state’s story to become, by default, the operative reality. That is not a failure of journalists, researchers, and scholars, who have utilized remote methodologies to uncover daily realities in the Uyghur Region. Moreover, it is a failure of curiosity, albeit expedient, that accepts an invented reality because the alternative requires asking questions that complicate transactions with Chinese commercial and state actors. On World Press Freedom Day, it is worth being honest about who benefits from the comfort with the informational void that is the Uyghur Region and who continues to pay the price for it.
