The Xinjiang Emergency' In conversation with Michael Clarke 2022

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The Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region is the site of the largest mass repression of an ethnic and/or religious minority in the world today with researchers estimating that at least one million people have been detained there at some point without trial since 2016.

Meanwhile, outside of these detention centres more than ten million Turkic Muslim minorities are subjected to a network of high-tech surveillance systems, checkpoints and interpersonal monitoring.

What are the causes of this repressive turn in the Communist Party of China's approach to Xinjiang? What are the short and long-term consequences of state policy for Xinjiang, the Uyghur people, and the People's Republic of China (PRC)? And what does all this mean for Australia - is it, as Beijing insists, 'a matter of China's internal affairs'? Or should Australia take a stronger stand, through, for example, the application of sanctions?

A new book edited by Dr Michael Clarke, UTS:ACRI Adjunct Professor and Senior Fellow at the Centre for Defence Research at the Australian Defence College, The Xinjiang emergency (Manchester University Press, 2022), seeks to address these questions and more. He will be interviewed in an online book launch by Dr David Brophy, senior lecturer on modern Chinese history at the University of Sydney, on the Xinjiang crisis and how Australia should respond. The discussion will be followed by audience Q&A.

The Xinjiang emergency is available for purchase in paperback and e-book versions.

About the speakers

Michael Clarke

Dr Michael Clarke is a UTS:ACRI Adjunct Professor and a Senior Fellow at the Centre for Defence Research at the Australian Defence College. His major areas of research and publication include: the history and politics of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, People's Republic of China (PRC); Chinese foreign and security policy; American grand strategy; and nuclear proliferation and non-proliferation.

He is the author of Xinjiang and China's Rise in Central Asia - A History (Routledge 2011), (with Andrew O'Neil and Stephan Fruhling), Australian Nuclear Policy: Reconciling Strategic, Economic and Normative Interests (Routledge 2015), editor (with Anna Hayes) of Inside Xinjiang: Analysing Space, Place and Power in China's Muslim North-West, (Routledge 2016); editor of Terrorism and Counterterrorism in China: Domestic and Foreign Policy Dimensions, (Oxford University Press 2018); editor (with Matthew Sussex and Nick Bisley) of The Belt and Road Initiative and the Future of Regional Order in the Indo-Pacific, (Lexington Books 2020); and author of US Grand Strategy and National Security: The Dilemmas of Primacy and Decline from the Founders to Trump (Palgrave 2021).

David Brophy

Dr David Brophy is a senior lecturer on modern Chinese history at the University of Sydney. He is the author of Uyghur Nation (2016) and is a frequent commentator on the Xinjiang crisis in outlets including AP News, South China Morning Post and ABC News. Last year Dr Brophy also published a new book on Australia-China relations - China Panic: Australia's Alternative to Paranoia and Pandering.