What We Talk About When We Talk About “The Uyghurs”

In 1997 I watched a news report about a protest in a place that I’d never heard of. The newsreader probably hadn’t heard of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in western China either; he certainly couldn’t pronounce it, nor the name of the ethnic group—the Uyghurs—that were said to be protesting. But although the report had little to say about them, other than that they were Muslims, its message was clear: here was an ethnic minority that the Chinese government was persecuting.