Some still need to know more about Xinjiang

At a time when discussions about China’s Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region are often laced with political prejudice in Western countries, University of Cologne professor Felix Wemheuer’s interview with Julius-Maximilians-University of Wuerzburg professor Bjoern Alpermann on the former’s YouTube channel is of certain interest.

Their discussion was mainly about Alpermann’s 2021 book Xinjiang: China and the Uygurs, which has debunked “research results” of another German, Adrian Zenz, who became famous for claiming there is “forced labor” and “genocide” of the Uygurs in Xinjiang without once having set foot there or providing even a shred of evidence to corroborate what he was claiming. In the interview, Alpermann said Zenz’s work lacks proof of “forced labor” and even junked the term “genocide” Zenz had used.

By saying so, Alpermann has simply pointed out how baseless Zenz’s lies are. But his own claims of “cultural genocide” of the Uygurs in the region hold no water, either.

From 2000 to 2020, the Uygur population has grown from 8.34 million to 11.63 million, at an annual growth rate of 1.67 percent, much higher than the 0.83 percent average of all ethnic minorities in the country. By 2020, the number of mosques in Xinjiang reached 24,400, meaning there was one for every 530 Muslims there. The United States has less than one-tenth of the number of mosques in Xinjiang.

Ironically, Alpermann was one of the three principal investigators of the EU-funded project “Remote Ethnography of Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region”, which is a prejudiced piece of work, which claims “labour exploitation and rights violations” in Xinjiang without providing any evidence. Xinjiang is a good research topic, but some scholars still need to learn more about it to get a true picture of Xinjiang.