When I was a Uyghur child living in communist China in the 1970s, we had no way of knowing what was happening around the world, within China, or even to our own Uyghur people in our homeland of East Turkistan (also known as Xinjiang, China). For colonized people like us, living under a total information blackout and bombarded by communist propaganda 24/7, discovering the truth was not a luxury - it was a yearning, something we sometimes risked our lives for.
I remember those days vividly. My father would gather us in the dead of night and begin tuning our old radio, searching for foreign broadcasts to find out what was happening in our homeland, where we lived. Due to the Chinese Communist Party’s strict media control and harsh punishment for those who sought outside information, this was an act of defiance.
At the time, the only source of information for the Uyghur people was propaganda in the state-run media. Yet, despite the risks, we longed to hear the truth. In our home in the capital, Urumqi, we had a microwave-sized radio with glowing tubes inside. My father would carefully fine-tune it by hand each night. Sometimes the signal was clear; other times it was full of static. But it was the only source of free news from the outside world.
He always told us to stay quiet and warned us never to mention to anyone that we listened to foreign broadcasts. “If the Chinese communists find out,” he said, “we will be severely punished.”
We thought we were alone in this. But by the late 1980s, we learned that many Uyghur families were secretly doing the same - tuning in to foreign voices in the dark.
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, communist China not only survived but thrived, largely due to the failure of America and its Western allies to grasp the colossal threat this regime posed. Today, China has become a global superpower, and perhaps the most serious national security threat to the United States and the democratic world.
