435 ethnic minority intellectuals in mass detention in Xinjiang

Today the Uyghur Human Rights Project updated its count of confirmed detained & disappeared ethnic-minority intellectuals (artists, authors, academics etc.), a key part of Chinese authorities’ forced-assimilation campaign targeting the ethnic minorities of Xinjiang, western China, including with mass internments in concentration camps, mass surveillance, blanket criminalization of everyday religious practices, forced marriages, and more.

Today’s updated report confirms the detention or disappearance of 435 intellectuals. (This expands the earlier confirmations of 231, in October 2018, 338 in January 2019 and 386 in March 2019). See further:

https://uhrp.org/press-release/update-%E2%80%93-detained-and-disappeared-intellectuals-under-assault-uyghur-homeland.html

The report also underlines: “This group is likely a small fraction of all Uyghur intellectuals suffering serious human rights violations.”

I myself wrote about the implications of this mass “decapitation” of the indigenous peoples’s cultural representatives, here: (then using the previous figure of 386):

https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2019/04/08/universities-should-not-ignore-chinas-persecution-scores-leading-academics-opinion

(“Spoiler alert”: This is now a genocide. )

On this theme, of mass detention of cultural figures, also see Xinjiang experts like Rachel Harris:

https://theglobepost.com/2019/01/17/cultural-genocide-xinjiang/

And others. –Reminder: If you’re an academic, you can circulate and sign on to the global appeal against these mass atrocities, targeting ethnic minorities in Xinjiang:

“Statement by Concerned Scholars on China’s Mass Detention of Turkic Minorities”

https://concernedscholars.home.blog/ (fill out comment field at bottom, to sign up).

–Sincerely, Magnus Fiskesjö, nf42@cornell.edu

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