Islam With Chinese Characteristics: China’s Ethno-Religious Challenge In Xinjiang – Analysis

Abstract

Xi Jinping’s recent national unity tour to Xinjiang has reminisced about China’s clandestine and blatant Sinicization of Islam campaign. More significantly, this is his first visit since the evidence of mass detention internment camps began to emerge in 2018. These internment camps were just a fragment of China’s long campaign of forceful assimilation and overwhelming surveillance of Uyghurs, the indigenous Turkic-speaking Muslim ethnicity. The Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) in China is home to 12 million Muslims, primarily Uyghurs but also smaller numbers of Kazakhs and other minority ethnicities.