Paper long abstract:

Concentration camps established in the Uighur region, China, have gained growing attention from international community. There have been mounting testimonies provided by members of Uighur diaspora, former detainees, official reports and international media coverage of the camps as well as other findings. Information delivered through these sources indicates that Uighurs' experiences under the Chinese communist regime mirror what is called genocide defined by Limkin, resemble research findings of previous genocides exercised by colonists (Damien, 2016). Yet, there has been no academic analysis on how definitions and examples of genocidal cases discussed by Damien (2016) could be applied to Uighurs' experiences under the authority of Chinese Communist Party (CCP). This paper aims to fill this gap.

Defining CCP as a settler colonial, this paper examines a connection between CCP's colonialism and its genocide of the Uighurs, and explores the genocide by discussing the most context relevant of Lemkin's two techniques of genocide, physical and cultural. It discusses CCP's genocide of the Uighurs is an on-going process: it started, since the occupation of Xinjiang, (named East Turkistan by Uighurs), with implementations of genocide - tendency policies to assimilate Uighurs into Chinese nationality as well as an oppressive regime, under the name of combating terrorism, separatism and extremism, to quick punish any protests, demonstrations by Uighurs, and recently the establishment of the concentration camps to exercise genocide Uighurs at a large scale. This paper challenges the dominant understanding of genocide as mass killing by discussing that forced disappearance, arbitrary detaining, imprisoning, sentencing to death, and organ harvesting have been the approaches of CCP to exercise physical genocide. It also discusses how the cultural genocide are manifested in various ways including banning Uighur language from education, burning Uighur books and detaining Uighur intellectuals, particularly since 2017, which has put the Uighur culture, language, religion, tradition, and art in danger. Further, this paper discusses characteristics of CCP's genocide from three aspects - surveillance, silencing others and staging (to deceive), which have enabled such genocide to possess Chinese communist characteristics.

This paper is based on published and publicly available materials, mainly testimonies, official reports and international media coverage of the Uighur case, with an aim to contribute to contemporary genocide studies from a sociological science prospective.