On November 12, 1944, the Second East Turkestan Republic (ETR) was proclaimed in the “Three Districts” of northern East Turkestan. A brief but powerful assertion of self-determination by the region’s Turkic peoples.
Though its lifespan was short, it symbolized the enduring struggle of Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and Kyrgyz to exist as free nations on their own land.
That hope was extinguished when the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) conquered and annexed East Turkestan in 1949. What followed was not modernization but a colonial occupation, systematically eroding the region’s cultures, ecosystems, and autonomy. The CCP’s so-called “development” has amounted to a slow-motion annihilation of people, environment, and identity hidden behind slogans of prosperity and unity.
Today, East Turkestan stands alongside Tibet as a case study in environmental genocide: regions whose landscapes and peoples have been targeted simultaneously.
In both territories, the CCP has deployed the same triad of domination (forced labor, ecological destruction, and demographic engineering) transforming sacred mountains, fertile basins, and entire river systems into instruments of extraction and control.
From the desertification of the Tarim Basin to the contamination of uranium sites in East Turkestan, and from the damming of the Yarlung Tsangpo in Tibet to the toxic mining of lithium and copper across the Plateau, the pattern is unmistakable: the environment itself is being weaponized to erase indigenous nations.
This article examines the evidence of forced labor in cotton and mining industries, water diversion and pollution, deforestation, and ecological collapse and arguing that these acts form part of a coherent genocidal project.
Under CCP rule, environmental destruction is not collateral damage; it is a deliberate policy of conquest, aimed at breaking the material and spiritual relationship between people and land.
Historical Context: ETR, Conquest, and Colonial Resource Ambitions
The 1944 Second East Turkestan Republic emerged during the chaos of World War II, when collapsing Chinese authority gave local peoples a brief window for independence.
Its flag, language, and governance represented a clear rejection of outside rule.
But five years later, Mao Zedong’s armies marched west, annexing East Turkestan by force. The CCP framed this as “liberation”; in reality, it was occupation and subjugation.
East Turkestan was absorbed into the PRC’s internal empire, renamed “Xinjiang” (literally “New Frontier”) a term that reveals Beijing’s colonial mentality.
Once annexed, the region was restructured to serve the CCP’s extractive ambitions. State and military entities, especially the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps (XPCC/Bingtuan), seized land, diverted water, and established forced-labor farms.
The indigenous peoples’ relationship to land was replaced by a militarized economy built on exploitation.
According to the East Turkistan Government-in-Exile:
“East Turkistan’s resources of natural gas and oil make up an estimated one-third of the total in China. East Turkistan additionally holds large resources of gold, uranium and other metals, while the climate is attractive for cotton cultivation.”
The pattern mirrors Tibet, annexed by the CCP in 1951. There, resource extraction especially of lithium, copper, rare earths, and hydropower has devastated the fragile Himalayan ecosystem.
Entire nomadic communities have been displaced to make way for mines and dams, while rivers like the Yarlung Tsangpo (Brahmaputra) are being redirected or dammed to feed China’s industrial base.
Tibet, like East Turkestan, has become both a sacrifice zone and a surveillance zone. Its people dispossessed, its land poisoned, and its identity systematically erased under the guise of “green development.”
Together, Tibet and East Turkestan illustrate a dual-frontier model of CCP colonialism: seize the land, exploit its resources, suppress its people, and rewrite history to justify the conquest.
Environmental degradation in these regions is therefore not incidental, it is the physical manifestation of the Party’s political intent to destroy indigenous autonomy and transform entire landscapes into engines of control.
