Barbed wire fences snake across barren deserts, enclosing rows of concrete compounds that stretch for miles, under surveillance from above. Outside, the world wonders what transpires within; inside, time dissolves into silence, and the weight of unspoken fear settles like dust on every surface.

In recent years, chilling satellite images have revealed sprawling internment camps in Xinjiang (East Turkistan – ed.), China. Survivors have recounted forced sterilizations, mass surveillance, and indoctrination. This situation forms part of a broader, systematic effort of the government of China to repress Uyghur identity that spanned even before the 21st century. 

And yet, across borders and in exile, the Uyghur diaspora refuses erasure—emerging as a dispersed yet defiant collective, transforming fear into resistance, memory into testimony, and distance into a thread that binds a global tapestry of resistance.

Countering co-optation

Long before the modern Chinese state cemented its grip on Xinjiang, the Uyghurs lived in the region historically known as East Turkestan. A Turkic-speaking Muslim population, Uyghurs have maintained a distinct ethno-religious identity rooted in Islam, traditional Sufi practices, oral literature, and family-centered customs. China officially recognizes the Uyghurs as one of 56 ethnic minorities, yet this recognition has been coupled with policies of securitization and the co-optation of the Uyghur narrative. 

From the purges during the Maoist Cultural Revolution to today’s mass internment, the Chinese state has perceived Uyghurs’ distinctiveness as a threat to China’s stability. The brief religious revival that followed Mao's death was crushed by renewed repression in the 1990s, driven by state paranoia over pan-Turkic solidarities and regional instability after the fall of the Soviet Union. Repressive state policies have also extended to other Turkic and Muslim minorities in the region, including Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Uzbeks, and Tatars.

Since 2016, estimates of the number of Uyghurs detained have ranged from hundreds of thousands to over a million, but tight state control and surveillance made it difficult to verify the extent and scale of the crackdown. This enables Chinese authorities to obscure the scale of repression, while the ambiguity becomes an entry point for attacks by China’s geopolitical opponents. 

Testimonies have nonetheless revealed some of what is happening in the region. According to the Uyghur Human Rights Project, at least 1,046 Turkic imams and other religious figures from East Turkestan have been detained or imprisoned for their roles in religious instruction and community leadership. Sayragul Sautbay, a medical doctor and educator who has now been granted asylum in Sweden, recounted forced feeding of pork for Muslims, witnessing beatings, and forced sterilization. 

But China’s state-sponsored narratives portray these camps as sites for vocational and legal education, according to a 2020 paper by Ali Çaksu of Yıldız Technical University in Istanbul. He contends that the supposed "legal education" function of these camps, espoused by China, constitutes the core of ideological indoctrination and psychological conditioning. Çaksu notes that inmates are not only stripped of their religious and cultural rights but are force-fed a political ideology intended to dilute their identity and assimilate them into Han Chinese nationalism. 

The US has also co-opted the Uyghur struggle to strategically serve its own interests. While positioning itself as a defender of Uyghur rights, most recently through the filing of the Uyghur Policy Act in April 2025, much of its narrative rests on data amplified by far-right-wing think tanks and figures to fuel Sinophobia and reinforce the entrenchment of the US world order, according to Simon Gilbert in an article in the journal International Socialism.

The contradiction becomes more glaring as the US actively enables the ongoing genocide of Palestinians through billions in military aid to Israel, diplomatic shielding at the United Nations, and the export of surveillance and warfare technologies. As it condemns China’s repression of Uyghurs, its funding and legitimization of Israel’s genocide in Gaza exposes a deeply politicized double standard stemming from the same architecture of impunity and state power.

Defiant diaspora

Amidst clashing imperial interests in the Uyghur narrative, it is the diaspora that reclaims its voice. Refusing to be instrumentalized by either authoritarian repression or opportunistic Western motives, the Uyghur diaspora asserts its identity, history, and resistance through literature, arts, and truth-telling. 

A prime example of this is the forthcoming book project “Uyghur Resistance,” a powerful anthology initiated by human rights advocate and lead editor Nuria Khasim. The anthology confronts the detriments of censorship, exposes realities from an authentic vantage point, and transforms the diaspora into a living archive of truth and resistance. 

“There are people who have told us that they are forced to denounce their religion, they live in unsanitary conditions, that there’s torture, rape, forced sterilization,” Khasim told the Collegian. By amplifying Uyghur voices on their own terms, it becomes a form of counter-hegemonic knowledge production that challenges dominant narratives imposed by states and foreign policy agendas alike.

This self-published collection compiles essays, narratives of survivors, poems, and critical reflections that center Uyghur agency in celebration of their continuity, resistance, and unwavering persistence. “A lot of factors pushed us to realize that self-publishing would be the way to have creative control over the book, and give the people the freedom to say what they want,” Khasim added. “We didn’t want the book to be about China. We wanted it to be about us.”

In this context, the process of self-publication is a deliberate step toward self-determination. It foregrounds the multiplicity of Uyghur identity expressed through the convergence and creative assertion of survivors, artists, activists, and the diaspora from all walks of life. 

Strengthening solidarity

In asserting autonomy, the Uyghur struggle does not unfold in isolation, nor can it be fully understood without mapping the global contours of repression. Palestinians, too, endure the weaponization of welfare, mass killings, systemic human rights violations, and the brutal realities of illegal occupation. The alarming rise of Islamophobia in Europe, the marginalization of Muslims in India, and the oppression faced by the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar demonstrate how Muslim communities across the globe are systematically targeted through exclusion and enforced conformity. 

From Gaza to Xinjiang, the persecution of faith, ethnicity, ancestral land, and identity is rooted in shared systems of domination. States and corporations profiting from the occupation of Palestine are equally complicit in the persecution of Muslims, enabled through surveillance contracts, military aid, and the normalization of settler colonial ideologies. These entanglements reveal that liberation struggles are interconnected resistances pushing back against authoritarianism, settler colonialism, and imperial violence. 

The Uyghur resistance, therefore, must be understood not only as a fight for survival but as part of a broader, transnational movement for justice. In every poem written, every photograph taken, and every narrative woven, the Uyghur diaspora reminds us that solidarity, collective resistance, and liberation transcend any borders. 

Maya Padilla is a second-year BS Social Work student. She joined the Collegian's Kultura section in 2025.