Destroying Living Culture, Marketing Its Remains 

*By Ertekin Oghuz

For nearly a decade, the Chinese government’s campaign in East Turkistan (AKA Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region) has not only targeted Uyghur lives, religious identity, and freedom, but also the very foundations of Uyghur culture itself. Since 2016, cultural destruction has become a central pillar of Beijing’s genocidal policies against Uyghur and other Turkic Muslims. Ancient mosques and shrines have been destroyed, and centuries-old neighborhoods erased under the guise of “development” and “modernization.” Through systematic destruction, China has attempted to sever the Uyghurs from their historical memory and remove visible traces of their distinct culture and history from the land they have inhabited for centuries.

Yet today, in a striking display of political hypocrisy, the same Chinese communist authorities that oversaw this cultural devastation are attempting to rebrand itself as a “protector” of Uyghur culture. Chinese state media, archaeologists, and cultural institutions are increasingly promoting exhibitions, restoration projects, and tourism campaigns centered around Uyghur historical sites and artifacts.

This strategy of selectively preserving and promoting fragments of historical heritage has become especially visible in recent campaigns surrounding Turpan and Kucha, two of the most historically significant centers of Uyghur culture and history. Chinese authorities have recently promoted exhibitions of artifacts excavated from ancient cemeteries near Turpan, presenting them in Beijing as evidence of China’s commitment to preserving “shared national heritage.” At the same time, Chinese state media outlets have intensified promotional coverage of the Kizil Thousand Buddha Caves in Kucha¹, emphasizing digital preservation projects, archaeological work, and art exhibitions showcasing ancient murals.

Chinese narratives now celebrate the digitization of cave paintings, the restoration of Buddhist heritage sites, and the commercial promotion of ancient Silk Road culture. Officials and scholars proudly showcase hundreds of preserved murals and cave structures, attempting to demonstrate China’s supposed respect for the region’s cultural diversity. International audiences are invited to admire carefully curated fragments of Uyghur and pre-Islamic heritage, while the living Uyghur culture connected to those sites continues to face unprecedented repression.

What makes this campaign particularly disturbing is the silence surrounding the broader context in which it unfolds. The same authorities now presenting themselves as defenders of culture presided over the destruction of countless mosques, cemeteries, manuscripts, and sacred spaces throughout East Turkistan. Uyghur intellectuals, writers, artists, historians, and academics have been imprisoned, disappeared, or silenced. The state has criminalized ordinary expressions of Uyghur identity, from language and religion to music and traditional customs. In many cases, the people whose ancestors built and protected these cultural sites are no longer free to visit them, speak openly about them, or even remain in their homeland.

China’s so-called “cultural preservation campaign” therefore cannot be understood as genuine protection of heritage. Rather, it represents an attempt to control the narrative of Uyghur history itself. By selectively preserving ancient ruins while dismantling living cultural and religious life, the Chinese authorities seek to transform Uyghur civilization into a depoliticized museum artifact, something that can be displayed, commodified, and marketed to tourists, while disconnected from the people who created it.

This strategy mirrors a broader colonial pattern visible throughout history: destroy the living culture, silence its people, then preserve sanitized remnants as trophies of imperial rule. In this framework, heritage becomes a tool of state propaganda rather than a reflection of genuine respect for cultural diversity. China is not preserving Uyghur culture; it is reconstructing it in a form acceptable to the Chinese Communist Party, stripped of religious meaning, political identity, and independent historical memory.

For Uyghurs, the destruction witnessed since 2016 evokes painful memories of the Cultural Revolution between 1966 and 1976, when mosques, manuscripts, shrines, and cultural treasures across East Turkistan were attacked and destroyed. But the current campaign has surpassed even that era in both scale and sophistication. Today’s repression is carried out not in revolutionary chaos, but through advanced surveillance systems, mass internment camps, forced assimilation policies, and state-managed historical revisionism, all under the watch of the international community.

The tragedy is not simply that cultural heritage is being destroyed. It is that the destruction is now being repackaged as preservation. The world is being asked to applaud carefully restored ruins while remaining silent about the disappearance of the people to whom those ruins belong.

A civilization cannot be preserved while its language is suppressed, its scholars imprisoned, its cemeteries bulldozed, and its people terrorized into silence. Cultural heritage is not merely stones, murals, and tourist attractions. It is the living connection between a people, their memory, their faith, and their homeland. Without that living connection, preservation becomes little more than political theater.

*By Ertekin Oghuz for the Center for Uyghur Studies – Uyghur Research Unit.

Translated from Uyghur into English with slight edits and improvements.

Notes:

1. Kizil Thousand Buddha Caves or Kizil Caves, in Uyghur قىزىل مىڭ ئۆي (Qizil Ming Öy), is one of the most important historical and artistic sites in the Uyghur homeland and across the Silk Road world. Dating from roughly the 3rd to 8th centuries CE, it is known for its historic Buddhist murals and artwork reflecting the diverse civilizations that shaped Central Asia. ↩︎