In Xinjiang, Xi Advances His Campaign for Han Chinese Dominance
SUBSCRIBE NOW
FREE NEWSLETTER
A recent three-day visit to the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region marked Chinese President Xi Jinping’s first notable public appearance since the leader’s trip to Hong Kong in late June. The visit was intended to showcase what Beijing regards as the vibrancy of Xinjiang’s local economy and sought to shore up Xi’s grassroots support.
It struck a similar tone to the leader’s 2013 lunch visit to a pork bun restaurant in Beijing, where he made a show of eating the same products as ordinary Chinese people in a bid for relatability early in his presidency. Though nine years apart and of differing degrees of formality, the two visits share the peculiar optics of Xi’s public relations and give insight into the Chinese public’s consumption and economic habits. Xi, after all, almost never makes public appearances without a larger purpose.
Even in the face of international condemnation for the human rights violations his government has carried out against Xinjiang’s ethnic Uyghurs, Xi aims to retain control of the narrative regarding China’s peripheries. The visit included propaganda that showcased the region as an ideal vacation destination, complete with clapping schoolchildren and welcoming locals dancing happily in photo-appropriate traditional dress. These campaigns come at a time when Chinese families are flocking outdoors after extended coronavirus-induced lockdowns and other restrictions on activities. Trending topics on state media described vacationers as seeking “beautiful scenery and tranquil lives with friendly people.” Tourism, then, is being deployed as a form of political education, particularly in the case of cultural heritage and ethnic minority heritage sites.
The trip also involved inspections of the region’s cotton fields, cultural centers and manufacturing facilities. It aimed to “place Xinjiang governance in an even more prominent position” and to “establish correct identities of nation, ethnicity, and socialism with Chinese characteristics”—a reference to the Chinese Communist Party’s goal of assimilating minority ethnic groups with the standards of the majority Han Chinese culture. In response to Western criticism, investigative reports and inquiries by United Nations human rights chief Michelle Bachelet, who visited the region herself last month, Xi’s tour indicated that he intends to continue his repressive policies undeterred.
Government agencies and state-run news outlets have shared propaganda posts on Western social media platforms also portraying Xi’s trip as a rebuttal to the prevalent forced labor and genocide allegations and the U.S. ban on goods from Xinjiang, including tomatoes, cotton, dates and other products. How could Xinjiang’s people be imprisoned, these posts seem to ask, if the government-provided photo evidence points to so much prosperity? Meanwhile, the Chinese leader’s visits to sites like Urumqi’s museum of history—which reportedly seeks to “tell good stories on Xinjiang” about the “common identity of Chinese heritage and history”— allude to a “correct” interpretation of history and Chinese identity that is safe for citizens to enjoy.
Indeed, the choreography of Xi’s trip—from its emphasis on economic consumption and production to its racialized language on tourism—itself points to unsavory historical truths. Vincent Wong, a legal scholar at the University of Windsor, argues that the Chinese government uses inequality to justify its economic models. By identifying the cultures of minority ethnic groups as “backwards,” the Chinese government gives itself an excuse to “correct” them, so as to “transform these populations in the mold of (Han) Chinese developmental modernity.” In fact, according to the researcher Yajun Bao, the founding tenet of the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps—or XPCC, the state-owned paramilitary organization at the center of the region’s economic productivity—was “to ensure that sufficient Han Chinese settled and remained in Xinjiang, thus demonstrating the sovereignty of the center and maintaining the security of Xinjiang.”
Under the XPCC’s planning and guidance, the Chinese government built up Xinjiang’s processing of cotton, tomatoes and dates beginning in the 1990s, creating a system that benefited Han entrepreneurs at the cost of labor and supply-side Uyghur exploitation. Farmers were forced to sell goods at legally mandated fixed prices, while real estate developers continued to benefit from reform-era policies that had allowed them to buy rural land usage rights.
Simply put, Uyghur labor was devalued even prior to the development of the mass surveillance and incarceration regimes Uyghurs experience today. And as Xi suggested during his trip, their culture is still regarded by the state as deficient and in need of guidance by the Han Chinese to be brought in line with national standards.
Uyghurs and Turkic minorities within the region have lived for more than five years with their everyday products embedded with tracking devices, their homes occupied by Han-Chinese minders, their power usage monitored and their religious service attendance tracked. Over the course of time, “security” in China has come to mean ensuring the political and cultural security of Han leaders over the preferences of locals.
Xi’s 2022 visit to Xinjiang constitutes a victory lap and an affirmation of his security plans for the region. His inspection and sampling of its local cultures greenlights the exploitation of Xinjiang as a site for economic production and consumption. Its model appearance as a haven for Han tourists, constructed according to their whims, is the standard to which local governments across China will be held. However, at the core of the Xinjiang economic model that Xi prides himself on is the silencing of those who do not fit within Beijing’s vision. For each image of family-friendly tranquility aimed at Han vacationers, there are testimonies from exiled Uyghurs and minorities who have spoken out on policing and surveillance, and who remain cut off from family, perhaps for good.
Worth a Read
The comprehensive scale of monitoring, policing and control that Han Chinese officials exert over Uyghurs and Turkic minorities cannot be overstated. But many surveillance mechanisms and the rationale behind them had been decades in the making, despite the relatively recent nature of the media’s attention to face recognition, predictive policing and other big-data solutions China has pursued as a means to thwart perceived extremism.
Researchers at Sheffield Hallam University have released a new report, “Until Nothing is Left,” that details the development of some of these policies by the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps. The report discusses the history of the XPCC’s growth as a corporation, paramilitary and policing entity within Xinjiang, and how the company came to find itself on U.S. sanctions lists. Racialized policing represents a significant portion of how the XPCC operates, categorizing anything outside the Han-approved mainstreams of culture as a security threat.
In 2014, China’s State Council published the following on the XPCC’s mission:
Since the 1980s the threat of the “three evils”—separatists, religious extremists, and terrorists—to Xinjiang’s social stability has grown. To confront this threat, divisions, regiments, companies, enterprises, and public institutions under the XPCC have established emergency militia battalions, companies, and platoons that enable it to respond rapidly to outbursts of violent terrorist activities.
Shaped significantly by a cocktail of Soviet-era ethnographic biases and post-9/11 Islamophobia, the use of extremism as a pretext to enact cultural restrictions continues apace, allowing the XPCC both to strengthen its authority and to make a tidy profit in the meantime
******
The star power of high-profile scholars within China can rise and fall rapidly. Professor Xu Zhangrun, a scholar at Beijing’s Tsinghua University known for his long essays on political theory, learned this the hard way in 2020, when he was arrested and detained for soliciting prostitutes. His arrest was seemingly a consequence for publishing critical pieces on Xi Jinping’s political agenda two years earlier, along with subsequent commentaries. ChinaFile recently published one such essay from a collection titled “Ten Letters from a Plague Year.”
In the letter, “From my Anguished Heart,” Xu writes to his daughter right before her return to China. Xu is not a writer of the quick, soundbite-laden takes that are popular within Chinese- and English-speaking political discourse. However, his unsparing critiques offer a view into the wave of crackdowns that has fallen upon just about any intellectual who runs afoul of Xi.
Xu warns his daughter:
Though lengthy and dense, Xu’s personal writings tend not to exaggerate on the scale of law enforcement actions that the Chinese Communist Party is capable of. His open letters serve as both an informative record and a warning to those who might sympathize with his views.
Rui Zhong is the writer of World Politics Review’s China Note. She works as a program associate at the Wilson Center in Washington, D.C., where she conducts programming and research on U.S.-China diplomatic and cultural relations. Her writing has appeared in Foreign Policy, WIRED magazine, the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage and the MIT Technology Review. She can be found on Twitter at @rzhongnotes.
No comments:
Post a Comment