Renmin I: Xinjiang.
Essays | Frank Yang | September 12th, 2022.
I have two names: Yang Jin-xuan and Frank Yang. But I don’t live two lives. My parents both grew up in a heart of mainland China, and I have been taught Chinese customs and languages since I was born. I’ve spent months living in mainland China, and I appreciate my parents, what they have taught me, and some of the traditions that I still partake in. I live one life, definitively Chinese, even though I live in America.
It is because of this love for my origin and ethnicity that I’m starting this series. Renmin, the romanization of the Chinese word for people: 人民. Through this series, I want to highlight the problems of what I’m forced to represent with my naturally straight hair, my thin eyes. I want to represent the good things of my heritage. In order to do so, it’s imperative that I also look at the bad.
Welcome to the first article of Renmin, a series that will shine a light on the people that are mistreated, under-represented, and harmed by the hands of China.
The autonomous region of Xinjiang. Residential to 26 million people, split between 45% Uyghurs and 42% Han. One of the 5 “autonomous regions” of China, who have the ability to make their own legislation (besides secession, of course), and all have greater minority ethnic groups than the Han Chinese.
By comparison, mainland China as a whole has a 1.4 billion person population consisting of 91% Han Chinese and 9% minority ethnicities. Compared to the rest of the country, Xinjiang has a very peculiar identity, holding a normal population for a region in China, but a very, very abnormal ethnic breakdown.
The Uygher people have a relatively debated past, but have proven history as far back as the 8th century. They’re a group of Turkic peoples, and speak from the Turkic language family, and have settled in the same region since their first recorded history. They have their own culture and history that is notably distinct from the Han Chinese, and didn’t even start speaking Mandarin Chinese until as late as the 1990s.
Understandably, starting from 1912 through to the present, there have been repeated attempts at separation of the Uygher people from China. Every attempt at separation and independence was quickly shut down by Chinese forces sent by the government.
This comes as no surprise since the region of Xinjiang, located at the west-most edge of China, contains an abundant amount of minerals and oil for the country’s energy necessities.
This tension between Uyghurs and the Han Chinese erupted once again in 2009, leading to mass riots through Xinjiang for discrimination and mistreatment of Uyghurs. Since then, crackdown against Uyghurs for the “illegal separatist movements” have risen dramatically. This shift in extreme crackdowns have been found to violate human rights, including “the denial of due legal process and failure for a fair trial as mandated by law.”
In 2018, the BBC released an exposé to the public, showing to the rest of the world what China had been doing to Uyghurs since then, but kept hidden: internment camps.
Stories of torture. Stories of abuse. Stories of forced-self hatred for their beliefs as Uyghur Muslims. Stories of murder: physical, mental, and identity-based murder.
They have been confirmed to exist by satellite imagery and first-person accounts by both Han Chinese witnesses and released internment camp prisoners. This forced China to shift the narrative from the camps not existing at all, to them being a “re-education centers” for so-called “extremists and terrorists.”
Forced castration, abortions, and sterilizations are all methods utilized by the government against the minority population in an attempt to control their birth rates. In simple terms: a genocide.
China wants control over Xinjiang. They’re encouraging more Han Chinese to move to Xinjiang while simultaneously cutting down the population of the Uyghurs. All for control over the region’s resources and accessibility for trade. And we’re choosing to remain actionless.
Nations around the world have done little to nothing about precisely the same issues that we fought against Germany for 80 years ago. Some countries are even defending what’s being shown under their own noses. Others have done nothing but condemn China.
At what point will we consider humanity as our own? At what point do we consider money less valuable than human lives? There must be more action against China when the mass incarceration and genocide of an entire ethnicity of people is being presented to us with hard evidence. It’s embarrassing for everyone involved to think that a strongly worded letter by some UN nations is enough. It’s embarrassing for a country to think that murdering 12 million people is worth the increased monetary gain.
It’s time for resounding action: simply, speaking out and spreading awareness about the crisis. The more people that know about the mass murder that’s happening, the more pressure that’s put on China. But standing still while an entire group of people are being slaughtered and erased from the history of humanity for the sole reason that their ancestors chose to live on top of some oil is not something we should be proud of. It’s time to do something.