The cycle of violence in Southern Xinjiang's Bay County built up slowly over the past decade. It started with Islamophobic fears among Han authorities regarding changes in Uyghur piety. For much of its recent history, this small county of around 200,000 mostly Uyghur people located right at the foot of the Tian Shan mountains was known as peaceful farming country. Yet as scholars such as Sean Roberts and Joanne Smith Finley have shown, after the violent street protests in the capital of Ürümchi in 2009, police surveillance and brutality intensified across the region.1 Over the past five years, the cycles of violence confronting Uyghurs culminated in one of the most pressing human rights crises in the contemporary world. As Adrian Zenz has demonstrated, hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims have been detained in new purpose-built “reeducation” camps.2
In 2014, as the state began a religious...
