What's going on in Xinjiang isn't a genocide in that, the internment camps aren't death camps and there isn't any evidence for mass sterilisation, but there is institutionalised discrimination and mass internment based on racial and ethnic profiling.

The Chinese goverment line, and what people in this thread will tell you, is that this is necessary to combat "islamist extremism" and terrorism, but that's reactionary garbage. There's nothing inherently terroristic about expressing Uyghur cultural identity or practicing the Islamic faith, and both of those things have been criminalised in the Xinjiang Autonomous Region. There are laws against wearing veils or "unusual" beards.

And again, criminalising expressing Uyghur cultural identity and the practice of the Islamic faith was in no way warranted. As opposed to what some people in this thread are telling you, the whole region is not and never has been on the verge of erupting into an Islamic State stronghold. The number of people carrying out terror attacks and, and the casualties of those terror attacks, are measured in the tens and hundreds, while the number of people imprisoned and whose faith and cultural identity has been criminalised by the "anti-terror" laws is in the tens and hundreds of thousands.

It's true that the Uyghur seperatist movement has gained momentum over the past few decades. If instead of looking for reactionary (it's because of their religion! or their race!) or conspiratorial (It's entirely the CIA's fault!) reasons, we look for a materialist reason we'll find that the Uyghur natives of Xinjiang have some pretty legitimate complaints about institutional discrimination worsening their material conditions that their government has repeatedly failed to address. The following is from a 2002 paper by Chien-peng Chung, a political science professor at Lingnan University whose main research interest at the time was the Xinjiang situation.

The government's call to develop the west has accelerated migration by Han Chinese into Xinjiang, thereby exacerbating tensions. In 1949, the region was almost 80 percent Uighur; today, that figure has dropped to 45-50 percent. Many Uighurs do not speak Mandarin Chinese, which is usually the prerequisite for any good-paying job or government position, and few are as well educated as the immi grants. As a result, the Han dominate commerce in Xinjiang's urban areas and are frequently seen by the locals as having the region's best jobs in the government, the Communist Party, and the military. The Han also usually live in newer neighborhoods and go to informally segregated schools.

Rather than allowing the flow of immigration into Xinjiang to remain unchecked, the Chinese regime should regulate it so that immigrants do not compete unnecessarily with the locals for jobs, schools, or state services. Beijing should encourage public-sector corporations, oil companies, and government agencies to increase their hiring of ethnic minorities. Quotas for Uighur admission into colleges and government positions should also be expanded and enforced. The government must also allocate funds fairly among Han and Uighur neighborhoods. Cleaning up the area around China's nuclear test site at Lop Nor in the Taklimakan Desert, where soil and groundwater pollution are causing birth defects and health problems among the local inhabitants, would be another important step.

Furthermore, as guaranteed in the Chinese constitution, the government must uphold religious freedom. Muslim Uighurs who openly practice their faith complain of harassment by the authori ties. The government must respect Muslim customs and allow the free functioning of mosques and religious schools, interfering only if they are found to be educating or harboring militants. Political changes are required as well: less gerrymandering in favor of Han Chinese among Xinjiang's administrative units, more proportionate ethnic representation in party and government structures, and more devolution of power from Beijing to the region. Hunting down terrorists is only a partial solution to the violence in Xinjiang. Unless China listens to the Uighurs and treats them better, its troubled western region is unlikely to be calmed any time soon.

Basically, he's saying that the reason the seperatist movement is turning violent again is that Uighur people's material conditions were getting worse, and if those material conditions improved the seperatist movement would both lose supporters and get less violent.

What the CPC ended up doing instead of confronting the material needs was level increasingly severe punishments against increasingly more avenues of religious and ethno-cultural expression and using the :shocked-pikachu: increasingly escalating terrorist violence resulting from this radicalising people to justify increasingly harsher measures.

Like, duh the C.I.A. supports the Uighur seperatist movement, they’re a largely reactionary separatist movement on the Chinese side of a China/NATO-puppet-state border, what’s not to love, but the movement would have almost certainly existed whether or not the CIA was involved. And yeah the NYT and it's ilk are lying scum and NATO "intervening" is about the worst thing that can happen to any situation ever. This is a forum for revolutionary communists, noone's going to disagree with you on those points.

But there has been a Uighur seperatist movement in Xinjiang longer that there has been a CIA, for most of its history its been a lot less violent than it was in the last two decades and the violence in the last two decades is at least as much a result of the CPC’s atrocious mishandling as it was of any CIA meddling, and the CPC's response to the growing dissatisfaction of the Uighur population in Xinjiang has been reminiscent in its its racism, escalation, and brutality of Bush’s inestimably worse war on terror that the CPC repeatedly tried to equate it with.