“Our days became dark, and the nights even darker.” — Kazakh lyrical poem condemning state violence in Xinjiang

Written by Yi Xiaocuo This is a Kazakh song by an anonymous singer. It is in a traditional oral art … More

I know that the world will say “never again” when the last Uyghur is killed

The term “genocide” began to be used by more and more scholars and activists to describe the situation in Xinjiang. In her essay, “‘Never again?’ It’s already happening,” Anne Applebaum compared global indifference to the Xinjiang atrocities today to indifference toward the famine in Soviet Ukraine in 1933, which was widely covered in western media at the time like Xinjiang today. Fred Hiatt used “Kristallnacht” (Night of Broken Glass) — the destruction of synagogues, cemeteries, and Jewish businesses — to describe the mass demolition of Mosques and Muslim cemeteries in Xinjiang today.

My heart is like a burning forest inside

Sübhi’s poem depicts a Uyghur woman publicly experiencing cultural aggression from a group of ethnic Han men. At the moment, the state’s purge and cultural genocide of Uyghurs is working in Han men’s favor, allowing them to reach Uyghur women previously unattainable to them, resulting in many involuntary inter-ethnic marriages.

Tomato Shirt

Juxkun, a concerned friend of Xinjiang, also designed this T-shirt to address the issue of China’s resource extraction in Xinjiang. Besides the cotton and oil industries, Xinjiang produces more than 70% of China’s tomatoes and a significant portion of canned and processed tomatoes for export into the global economy, for example Heinz tomato ketchup.

Juxkun’s Honest Labeling of Xinjiang Products

After seeing that Muji not only sources Xinjiang cotton but also brazenly advertises it, Juxkun, a concerned friend of Xinjiang, took to action. He customized a stamp from a local stationery store including a QR code link to a WSJ article about Xinjiang forced labor, then he stamped it onto the Muji shirt tags in hope of educating the consumers about the stories behind the Muji shirt.

A strange planet many, many light years away

A police walks up to an empty mosque
This is an otherworldly image, almost like a storm trooper on patrol on one of the empire’s colonial outposts. Photographer Theo Santana has walked the earth freely but never encountered the level of security checks and surveillance like in China’s Xinjiang. He shared these photos online at the end of 2018.