How many uyghur

From the images, rough estimates on how many are held in the facilities are made with measuring square footage. Scholar Zenz recently updated his estimate to 1. Updated satellite images show the camps expanding in size, alongside rising regional security finances and higher arrest numbers.

Meanwhile, a Wall Street Journal report found that that numbers of registered Uyghur Muslims paywall living in Xinjiang have decreased for the first time in decades.

The new number by the US is one of the higher numbers used by a government or international organization thus far. Lumping them together with full internment is even more problematic. Academics, journalists, and human rights organizations have worked with the limited but specific evidence—amid clear perils and pitfalls on their validity—to bring forward strong estimates. By providing your email, you agree to the Quartz Privacy Policy.

Skip to navigation Skip to content. Discover Membership. Editions Quartz. More from Quartz About Quartz. And it's very unfortunate some people, including some journalists, they start with very strong bias and prejudice," China's ambassador to the U.

Cui said China's campaign was spurred by a "mounting terrorist, extremist and violent ideology among the local population. Media outlets and researchers have used satellite images to map the Chinese government's network of camps and prisons. Experts with the Australian Strategic Policy Institute have identified at least detention facilities in Xinjiang that have been newly built or expanded since Some estimates put the number of detention facilities as high as 1, Human rights: Blinken blasts the Trump administration's 'unbalanced' emphasis on religious liberty over other human rights.

Human rights groups say the Uyghurs have been put in the camps for a variety of reasons, from attending religious ceremonies, wearing a veil or having a beard, or refusing to marry a non-Uyghur.

Starting in , the local government in Xinjiang began criminalizing "virtually all Islamic matters," according to an extensive report by a Washington-based think tank called the Newlines Institute for Strategy and Policy and the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights, a consortium based in Canada. The report, based on interviews with former detainees and other evidence, concluded China bears responsibility "for an ongoing genocide against the Uyghurs" and has breached key elements of the Genocide Convention with its "intent to destroy" an entire ethnic group.

Chinese officials have singled out one researcher in particularly harsh terms: Adrian Zenz, a German scholar who now lives in the U. During a March 20 press conference, Chinese Communist Party officials said his reports were "full of lies and fake information ," among other attacks. He is "a goon fed by anti-China forces," said Sun, the foreign ministry official.

Zenz said the Chinese government has resorted to personal attacks on him because they cannot attack his research. That presents a very particular challenge to the Chinese government. They also say the Uyghurs are allowed to "return home regularly.

They are forced to recite Chinese Communist Party propaganda and renounce Muslim religious practices. The researchers also cite Chinese government documents which list prison supplies used to control the detainees. Airbnb: Airbnb asked to drop Olympic ties over China rights issues. According to official Chinese records, there are 12 million Uighurs, representing almost half the population in Xinjiang. The Chinese census data from Xinjiang was incomplete, but it showed that 97 percent of the 1.

The World Uyghur Congress, a group of Uighur exiles advocating for human rights in their homeland, puts their number at about 20 million living inside and outside of China. Because of its location along the ancient Silk Road , Xinjiang has a long history of cross-migration by different minority groups.

It is rich in oil and natural gas and boasts a natural beauty that has attracted international filmmakers. In , an independent East Turkestan was briefly declared by the then-majority Uighurs, but its borders were unsettled and its army was soon defeated by nationalist Chinese led by Chiang Kai-shek.

A second East Turkestan republic was declared in with Soviet backing. Uighurs disagree, saying that borders in the region have been drawn and redrawn for centuries, depending on the dominant power, including the Mongols and the Turkic Karakhanid. Overseas Uighurs also say that their religion, language and cultural practices clearly distinguish Xinjiang from the rest of China.

China has allegedly forced abortions and sterilization on women. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Uighurs and other Muslim minority groups eventually escaped to neighbouring Central Asian countries, including Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.

Others fled to Afghanistan and Turkey. Following renewed political tensions in recent years, thousands of refugees escaped to Europe, while more than 1, eventually made it across the Atlantic to the United States.

The Uighur population in the US have since increased to at least 9, in At the same time, human rights observers have also accused Beijing of rolling out birth-control policies targeting Uighurs and other minority groups, aiming to cut 2.