Uyghur Initiative Papers No. 11, December 2014
By Nabijan Tursun
In the first half of the 20th century, as a result of the Uyghur education movement that spread across Eastern Turkistan, a new understanding and national consciousness started to develop among Uyghurs. Uyghur intellec-tuals trained abroad, along with the intellectuals from different countries, played a prominent role in the development of nationalism in this period. These Uyghur intellectuals included both those in Eastern Turkistan and Uyghur intellectuals in diaspora. The emergence and development of the Uyghur intellectual class in this period took place in accordance with the dispersion of Uyghurs across three different geographical regions: Eastern Turkistan; Central Asia and Russia; and Turkey and the Middle East.
