Internal Colonialism and China's Uyghur Muslim Minority

Abstract

The Turkic people known as Uyghur will most likely be in the same situation at the beginning of the next millenium as they have been for most of this one: an internally colonized people, subject to the Chinese nation-state. How this came to be and how it might cease to be so is the subject of this article. I argue that it is through the model of internal colonialism that we might begin to understand how it is the Uyghur, and other indigenous peoples such as Tibetans, now labelled as 'minority nationalities,' have been turned into 'internal colonial subjects' despite being indigenous peoples in lands they once called their own. Through initial occupation, gradual integration through immigration, and finally 'minoritization' as a result of nationality policy, the Uyghur (and perhaps many others like them) have been internally colonized by the Chinese state