New Publication: East Turkistan’s Right to Sovereignty: Decolonization and Beyond
by Rukiye Turdush
Rowan and Littlefield / Lexington Books
In this new book, Rukiye Turdush shows how East Turkestan, in Chinese often known as Xinjiang (“New Frontier” of the Chinese empire), was conquered and turned into a settler colony. Post-WWII decolonization, as happened in Africa and elsewhere, never touched it. These are striking arguments given the current vogue of discussions of decolonization in other contexts. This Chinese situation is especially interesting today not least because the Chinese Communist Party, before they took power in China in 1949, solemnly promised that if they came into power, they would grant freedom of secession and independence to all peoples conquered by the previous Chinese Empires. –yrs. Magnus Fiskesjö, nf42@cornell.edu
Abstract:
This study examines the relationship between the People’s Republic of China and the people of East Turkistan; specifically, between China’s settler colonialism and East Turkistan’s independence movement. What distinguishes this study is its dispassionate analysis of the East Turkistan’s national dilemma in terms of international law and legal precedent as well as the prudence with which it distinguishes substantial evidence from claims of China’s crimes against humanity and genocide in East Turkistan that have not been fully verified yet.
The author demonstrates how other states have ignored the nature of that relationship and so avoided asking key questions about East Turkistan that have been asked and answered about other occupied and colonized states. The book analyzes this situation and provides the tools and the argument to understand East Turkistan’s actual status in the international community. Currently, the world has bought into China’s rhetoric about “stability” and “fighting extremism,” and international organizations accept China’s presentation of Uyghurs and other people as “minorities” within a Chinese nation-state. This book instead shows East Turkistan can correctly be understood through history and law as an illegally occupied territory undergoing genocide. It also makes the case that East Turkistani people had basis advancing territorial claim for independence.