Murat Yılmaz, received a doctorate in political science with two majors, International Relations and Comparative Politics in 2021 from the University of Cincinnati. He is currently an Instructor at Kastamonu University’s Department of International Relations. In his current work, he is interested in transnational authoritarianism, cyber security, immigration and gender, which builds on his dissertation as it focuses on Uyghurs, diaspora and China's oppression of minorities. Recently he was awarded Carrie Chapman Catt Prize with co-author, Crystal Whetstone and published a book chapter in Critical Perspectives on Cybersecurity. For more, please visit www.yilmazmurat.academy.com

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This paper investigates how Uyghur and other Turkic-Muslim women employ new media in cyberspace in their resistance against China’s oppression of Turkic-Muslim groups in China. Uyghurs and similar Turkic populations are arguably undergoing a cultural genocide, if not outright genocide, for being deemed by the state as a threat to Chinese national unity. Since 2016, the Chinese Communist Party has stepped up its colonial aims in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region and deployed a series of tools, including internment camps, forced sterilization, forced labor, and transnational repression campaign within cyberspace to solve the “Uyghur problem.” Since then, Uyghur women have become the primary resisters against China’s colonial policies. Although new media is not Uyghur’s only resistance space, it surely is one of the most important ones, even as the state uses digital tools to surveil and persecute Uyghurs.

In this paper, I analyze Uyghur women’s activities and campaigns in cyberspace through content analysis focusing on posts on Twitter, aka X, and Facebook that bring awareness to the Uyghur community’s situation in China. Activists do so by telling their personal stories and building solidarity with other Uyghurs and non-Uyghurs. While Uyghurs outside of China lobby from democracies such as the US and Germany, which provide them with the opportunity to engage in activism, China works to turn their activism into a case of disinformation, claiming that activists are lying. Even among democracies, finding agreement on cyberspace norms is difficult. However, when major powers such China and Russia reject democratic cyberspace norms, online activists struggle to be heard and taken as legitimate. The Chinese state is adept at influencing perceptions of Uyghurs online. This article reveals the tools and methods that Uyghur women used in their campaign to argue that while cyberspace serves to oppress vulnerable populations such as ethnic minorities and women, it offers one recourse to resist this very oppression.