page_title: History of the Uyghur people
section_title: 1949–present
hierarchical_section_title: History of the Uyghur people / 1949–present
context_page_description: Uyghur nationalist historians in the People's Republic of China and the United States posit that the Uyghur people is millennia-old and can be divided into four distinct phases: Pre-Imperial, Imperial, Idiqut, and Mongol, with perhaps a fifth modern phase running from the death of the Silk Road in AD 1600 until the present. In brief, Uyghur history is the story of a small nomadic tribe from the Altai Mountains competing with rival powers in Central Asia, including other Altaic tribes, Indo-European empires from the south and west and Sino-Tibetan empires to the east. After the collapse of the Uyghur Khaganate in AD 840, ancient Uyghur resettled from Mongolia to the Tarim Basin, assimilating the Indo-European population, which had previously been driven out of the region by the Xiongnu. Ultimately, the Uyghurs became civil servants administering the Mongol Empire.
context_section_description: In 1949, after the Chinese Nationalists (Kuomintang) lost the civil war in China, Second East Turkestan Republic's rulers refused to form a confederate relation within Mao Zedong's People's Republic of China; however, a plane crash killed many of the East Turkestan Republic's delegation. The surviving leader, Saifuddin Azizi, joined the Chinese Communist Party and professed loyalty to the PRC. Soon afterward, General Wang Zhen marched on East Turkestan through the deserts, suppressing anti-invasion uprisings. Mao turned the Second East Turkistan Republic into the Ili Kazakh Autonomous Prefecture, and appointed Azizi as the region's first Communist Party governor. Many Republican loyalists fled into exile in Turkey and Western countries.
  The name Xinjiang was changed to Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, where they are the largest ethnic group. Uyghurs are mostly concentrated in the southwestern Xinjiang.
  A committee of independent experts with ties to The United Nations 
  had one of its US members claim to have credible reports that China holds million Uighurs in secret camps  and many international media reports have said as many as 1 million people are being held in Uyghur re-education camps in Xinjiang.
  On October 24, 2018, BBC released the details of an extensive investigation into China's "hidden camps" and the extent to which the People's Republic goes to maintain so-called "correct thought".
caption: Map of East Turkestan (Xinjiang), the prefectures with Uyghur majority are in blue
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