See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil: Middle Eastern Reactions to Rising China's Uyghur Crackdown

Abstract

This paper addresses the issue of China's rise in the Middle East through the prism of the Uyghur and Xinjiang issues. Given the Middle East's contemporary and vociferous denunciations of the perceived 'persecution' of Muslims throughout the globe, we would expect a harsh reaction to China's ongoing maltreatment of its Muslims in general, and the Uyghur, in particular, primarily from the centre of global Islam. This paper argues however that this has not been the case, particularly at the official level, where Middle Eastern government's have been constrained in their response to China's repression of the Uyghur by a number of factors, including China's growing strategic and economic weight in the region and their own authoritarian political practices