The East Turkistan Government in Exile (ETGE) condemns the Chinese government’s ongoing genocide and colonial occupation of East Turkistan, which Beijing calls “Xinjiang,” meaning “New Territory,” and its coordinated effort to launder these crimes through staged trade forums and complicit international media. Now in its thirteenth year, this genocide is not receding; the Party’s own leadership has just declared its permanence.
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This week’s International Conference for Trans-Altai Subregional Cooperation, held in occupied East Turkistan, does not stand alone. Days earlier, Wang Huning, the Chinese Communist Party’s chief ideologue and fourth-ranking official, toured East Turkistan and ordered “regular counterterrorist efforts,” forced assimilation as the “central task,” and intensified industrial exploitation, with particular emphasis on southern East Turkistan. The forum is the marketing arm of the doctrine the CCP set: the same colonial extraction, now sold to foreign delegations as “development.”
That doctrine is not new. In top-secret CCP Central Committee Document No. 7 of 1996, the Politburo Standing Committee designated the Uyghur and other Turkic peoples’ faith and identity as the principal threat to be eliminated. The same document ordered the state to develop southern East Turkistan, expand the paramilitary Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, and push cotton and petroleum production, the very industries on display at this forum. In the Party’s own classified words, development and repression are one and the same.
The ETGE rejects the claim, now circulating in international coverage, that mass detention was a “response to attacks.” Satellite analysis documents that construction of hundreds of detention facilities began as early as 2009, with the majority built between 2010 and early 2014, before China launched its “Strike Hard Against Violent Terrorism” campaign in May 2014. The apparatus of mass detention was built before the events invoked to justify it. The pretext was manufactured to fit a genocidal policy already in motion.
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