As of 2021. Ethnic composition figures come from the 2020-21 Chinese census, whose Xinjiang returns are disputed by some demographers, and the settlement policy is ongoing.
In late 1949, PLA forces entered Xinjiang following the collapse of the short-lived, Soviet-backed Second East Turkestan Republic, and the region was formally incorporated into the newly founded People's Republic of China. Over subsequent decades, Beijing promoted large-scale Han Chinese settlement, notably through the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps (Bingtuan), a paramilitary agricultural and industrial organization that built farms, towns, and later cities across the region. The Han share of Xinjiang's population rose from roughly 6–7% in the early 1950s to around 40% by the 2000s, dramatically altering the demographic balance with the Turkic Muslim Uyghur majority population. This settlement policy, alongside more recent large-scale internment and assimilation campaigns targeting Uyghurs since the late 2010s, remains a source of ongoing international controversy.
The People's Liberation Army took control of Xinjiang in 1949 and the PRC subsequently promoted large-scale Han Chinese migration and settlement, including through the paramilitary Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps (Bingtuan)
The 1953 census counted 5.11 million people in Xinjiang, of whom about 73 per cent were Uyghur and only a small minority Han. By 2000 Uyghurs were about 45 per cent of the population, and the region now holds roughly 26 million people with Han and Uyghur shares close to parity — the product of state-organised settlement through the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps and later migration.
No credible source produces a death toll for the incorporation of Xinjiang and the subsequent settlement policy taken as a single event spanning 1949 to the present. The OHCHR's 2022 assessment did not attempt to quantify deaths, and deaths in detention since 2017 are reported by former detainees and relatives but have never been enumerated. Discrete lethal episodes within the period (the 1962 Ili exodus, the 1990 Baren and 1997 Ghulja incidents, the 2009 Ürümqi riots) have their own contested and much smaller counts. Setting a range here would require inventing one.
Documented by OHCHR's 2022 Xinjiang assessment, which found patterns of arbitrary detention in 'vocational' facilities, torture and ill-treatment including forced medical interventions, sexual and gender-based violence, forced labour, and severe restrictions on religious practice; China disputes each of these findings.
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