micro blog: Why Uyghur, Why Now

In America, censorship is unthinkable. Facebook's recent decision to extend the amount of time former-president Donald Trump must wait before a potential return to the social network has elicited an outcry, mostly from Trump's supporters, who argue that any erasure of Trump and his musings from Facebook is a threat to the First Amendment, that which grants American citizens freedom of speech, so long as the speech does not promote harm. But censorship is integral to America's preservation of its core, Christian values: books are banned if their subject matter is deemed too risky; the FCC regulates what can and cannot appear on television and radio, issuing heavy fines to networks that transgress its rulings. We are taught that Americans are entitled to free speech, and that it is the left who seek to stunt our ability to exercise that right, through such phenomena as 'cancel culture' and social media bans of conservative politicians. But the same people who worry that free speech is at stake, also seek control over who gets to say, think, and write what in this country.

But this battle of censorship versus free expression in America is not as full-fledged as the one in Xinjiang, the western Chinese province populated by over 10 million Uyghurs, a largely-Muslim ethnic group of Chinese people whose own culture closely resembles that of its neighbors – like Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan – more than it does the rest of China. Since the 1990s, Xinjiang has seen a great influx of Han Chinese, people from the east who, by migrating into Xinjiang, disrupt its Uyghur makeup. This has caused protests and demonstrations from Uyghur people, who notice their own culture fading into the background, or otherwise being asked to assimilate into Han.

The Chinese government tries to deter any movements of unrest which might promote "splitism," or separatism. Sun Linping, a Chinese sociologist, tells Raffi Khatchadourian in a long-form essay for The New Yorker that the Chinese government strives to eliminate any "phantom of instability" through its use of weiwen, a government sanctioned use of policing the Chinese populace with the intent of stopping the promotion of ideals which are anti-government. Growing police force in Xinjiang to eliminate "instability" has been abused, and now "reeducation camps" appear in the province, where millions of Uyghurs are detained, stripped of access to Uyghur language and taught Mandarin instead, separated from their loved ones and from a decent quality of life, and forced into professing allegiance to the Chinese government. 

Many languages which are considered endangered are ones with dwindling numbers of speakers, but there are millions who speak Uyghur. The immediate threat to Uyghur, however, is that it is "lesser known." A "lesser known" language that is being condemned in the very place where it is taught and spoken most is at risk of disappearance, especially when there are concentrated efforts by the government to replace that language with another (Mandarin). The censorship that we fear in America is nowhere near as disorienting as that which is being lived out right now in Xinjiang: a removal from one's identity by force, a coerced appropriation of a new language, a different way of thinking, a different way of seeing the world. A lot is at stake if we lose Uyghur. It's a language that grants speakers and students access to the Turkic language family, catalogues of poetry and music, and an understanding of recorded accounts of what's going on in Xinjiang. I think it is important to recognize the language – its typology, its condition, the way it's used – as people who are steadfast in their use of, and protective of, free speech. We can welcome its diaspora and create a home outside of China for Uyghur speakers.

Khatchadourian, Raffi. "Surviving the Crackdown in Xinjiang," The New Yorker, April 5 2021. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/04/12/surviving-the-crackdown-in-xinjiang.