ISBN: 978-1-68589-179-4

Magnus Fiskesjö

Cornell University

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China's genocide against the Uyghurs and Kazakhs is ongoing since 2017, yet the world is mostly silent. East Turkestan (Chinese Xinjiang, the ‘New Territory’) seems remote, and it is not Biblical land. China has formidable resources to influence those who should be influenced (world opinion); and to intimidate and silence those who should be silenced (witnesses and refugees). This book is a riveting, stark, and beautiful writeup of the testimonies of four key native witnesses. The reader is invited into their real-life experiences over the last several years. There are no scholarly footnotes, bibliography or index. Instead, readers enter the gripping stories, which start well before the genocide launch, describing the previous fraught and unequal coexistence of Muslim natives and Chinese settlers. The deadly 2009 clashes in the regional capital Urumchi form a key watershed. Chinese officials  borrowed the rhetoric of terrorism and enabled settler violence against the remaining native people. (The Palestinian West Bank parallels are obvious.) The pace accelerates as the Chinese state launches the genocide, with massive sweeps of people for the concentration camps. The cruelty, the mass humiliation, the coercion, the drugging, the sterilizations, all emerge, as well as the struggle to escape. The book, a masterful and moving reportage, ends with the few narrators now in exile, struggling to tell us their story. The author could have added a chapter on how China is now completing the genocide, by seizing the future: mass separating all children, erasing their identities, culture, and language, force-replaced with Chinese: ‘Kill the native, save the man’, just like in North America in the last century (compare the UN Genocide Convention, §2E). I warmly recommend this book.