Since mass internment camps in #Xinjiang emerged during 2017, English-language discussion of the region has grown enormously. This new interest in a place so familiar and intimate to many of us was welcomed by scholars and diaspora groups...

...who have attempted to draw attention to routinely ignored state violence in the region since the early 1990s. The downside of the new attention is that Xinjiang is often popularly represented and consumed as ‘a story'.

The significance of the region becomes understood in terms of its position in a geopolitical-ideological clash between two great civilisations or great powers, rather than a place in itself with many peoples and many histories.

The perspectives of people indigenous to the region, most of whom identify with neither China nor the US, are too often silenced and reduced to their position in an imagined ‘new cold war’.

Thinking about Xinjiang solely through a geopolitical or civilisational lens deprives the region of agency but more significantly of its own existence independent of these grand narratives. Many writers with little or no experience in Xinjiang maintain epistemic authority...

...over ‘China’ and ‘the West’ by squeezing the region into pre-existing grand narratives, which fail to explain Xi and Trump’s rise, expansion of mass internment camps, or use of Uyghurs as forced labour for global markets by a self-identified anti-colonial, socialist state.

Turkic and Islamic identities perplex Chinese Studies and IR because they are irreducible to East-West binaries or any “constitutive unit” of an “international system”. Uyghurs are Central Asians in an East Asian state that describes their identities as “colonial manipulations”.

John Bolton’s book has confirmed that Trump thought internment camps were ethically and strategically sound. They do not represent "Chinese values" and provided we offer honest, thoughtful analysis, they are not beyond reproach because we are Western.