This is a transcript of The Conversation Weekly podcast episde: Chinas plans for Xinjiang, and what it means for the regions persecuted Uyghurs, published on January 27, 2022.
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Dan Merino: Hello, and welcome to The Conversation Weekly.
Gemma Ware: This week, three experts explain Chinas long-term vision for Xinjiang, and what it means for the regions persecuted Uyghurs.
David Tobin: The underlying problem is the notion that Uyghurs were barbarians and became human by becoming Chinese in 1949.
Anna Hayes: Xi Jinpings bigger goal here is the China dream.
Dan: And, what toxic heavy metals are lingering in houses around the world? We talk to a researcher who gets dust from thousands of vacuum cleaners mailed to them and tests that dust for safety.
Cynthia Isley: Theyre present in higher concentrations in homes than we would find outdoors.
Gemma: Im Gemma Ware in London.
Dan: And Im Dan Merino in San Francisco. Youre listening to The Conversation Weekly: the world explained by experts.
Gemma: Whats the latest communication that youve had with somebody inside Xinjiang, and what did they say?
Darren Byler: Well, its difficult to access Uyghur folks directly because of the surveillance system. So much of the information I get comes through Uyghurs who are contacting their family members in the region and them telling them about whats happened to their families, whats happened.
Gemma: This is Darren Byler. Hes an anthropologist who researches northwest China, and hes based at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia in Canada.
Darren: Also conversations that I have with Han people, which are not Uyghurs, but have much more freedom to speak openly with people abroad. And so, you know, Ive talked to people who have been there in the last few months and have talked about how some of the most violent and, sort of, stressful aspects of the system have begun to dissipate or have been pushed to the side in some ways. That theres less people that are being detained at the moment than there were just like a year or two ago. Some of the older folks, you know, people that were in ill health have been returned to their neighbourhoods and are kind of on watch lists and are being monitored. But still theres widespread family separation, hundreds of thousands of people are still missing. And so the situation continues even as it is sort of normalised in some ways.
Gemma: What different methods are the Chinese government using to persecute Uyghurs?
Darren: Well, I think we could probably put them in a few different categories. Theres targeting of people in terms of political framing of Uyghurs as potentially terrorists. Theyre controlling people using biometrics; their faces, their fingerprints. Theres ways that theyre tracking peoples reproduction. Theyre also using technological systems to go through peoples digital history and track them over time. And then of course, theyre using forms of cultural control, stopping people from producing Uyghur knowledge, from using Uyghur language. Theyre criminalising immense aspects of what it means to be Uyghur itself.
Read more: I researched Uighur society in China for 8 years and watched how technology opened new opportunities then became a trap
Newsclip: The Biden administration will not send any diplomatic or official representation to the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics given the PRCs ongoing genocide and crimes against humanity in Xinjiang.
Dan: In December, the United States announced a diplomatic boycott of the Beijing Winter Olympics, due to begin on February 4.
Gemma: The UK, Australia, and Canada soon followed suit.
Dan: The boycotts are limited. Diplomats from those countries will not attend the winter games, but the athletes will still compete.
Gemma: Also in December, the Uyghur Tribunal an independent, unofficial tribunal based in London found China guilty of crimes against humanity and genocide against the Uyghurs.
Newsclip: Hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs have been detained by PRC authorities without any or any remotely sufficient reason.
Dan: All the while, China has continued to deny allegations of genocide and human rights abuses in Xinjiang, rejecting these claims as absurd.
Newsclip: China has slammed a United Nations declaration that accuses Beijing of human rights abuses.
Gemma: Ive been talking to three experts whove carried out research in Xinjiang, to understand whats happening to Uyghurs and the other Muslim minorities who live there.
Its hard to get the full picture of how many people have been taken into camps in Xinjiang. Estimates range from one to two million. I asked Darren Byler what figure he thinks is the most accurate.
Darren: What I see in the internal police documents is that, you know, something between 10% to 20% of the people adult Muslim population have been taken. So, the numbers you just cited are within that range.
Gemma: What is life like in these camps from the information that youve been able to gain from your research?
Darren: What typically happens in the camps is people are put into these cells that are locked. Theyre basically a medium security prison cell, which has bunk beds and have ten to 30 people within them. During the day theyre often asked to sit on plastic stools for many hours at a time and watch TV shows on this flat-screen TV thats up on the wall, which are, you know, Chinese language instruction, and how to sing patriotic songs.
Theyre being watched through a camera system at all times, the lights are not turned off. Theres just so much control, a lot of it automated through the surveillance system. You know, theyll receive a command through a speaker system if they get up from the stools or if they cover their face while theyre sleeping. So its really using this kind of cutting-edge smart technology to control bodily movement throughout every aspect of their day, and I think that more than anything really wears people down.
And then of course, they also see the guards beating people as they escort people throughout the camp.
Gemma: China calls these re-education camps, and thereve been variously termed internment camps, concentration camps. Is there any sense of what do you need to do in order to leave?
Darrem: The state refers to them as closed, concentrated education and training centres. The way you progress out of the camps is you need to pass language exams, you need to pass ideology exams. Theres a point system that they use at times, which has to do with good conduct. But many former detainees told me that it was actually really arbitrary, in terms of how you got out. Mostly it had to do with a factory needing workers that was being built nearby, and so, you know, once the factory was ready, then they would transfer people out. So it really seemed to have more of an economic logic, and the workers being able bodied, as to whether people were transferred.
Gemma: And its mainly men in these camps?
Darren: I would say about two thirds of the people that are detained or are men, and most are between the ages of 15 and 55, but there are women that are held as well. Theres a disproportionate number of people that were transferred from the camps to factories that were women. Many of the people that were sent to prison were men.
Gemma: And what do we know about whether people have died in the camps?
Darren: We dont have systematic data in terms of how many people have died. Many of the people I interviewed who were in the camps as detainees talked about seeing people that appear to be on the brink of death in their cells being taken away, some witnessed suicides. It seems like most of the deaths had to do with neglect, with being in ill health, with lack of hygiene and lack of healthcare in in the camps. And then you know, when COVID hit, we were concerned that that could spread and become systematic throughout the camps as well. It doesnt appear that that happened.
Gemma: You said youve been told by Uyghurs that fewer people are being taken into the camps. So whats happening now?
Darren: Well, what weve seen is that a number of camps have simply been turned into formal detention centres. So kanshousuo in Chinese, which is really the term that in the United States they would use for jails. And so its part of the formal incarceration system and, you know, in the Chinese case, most people that are held there are held as theyre awaiting trial. So a number of camps have just simply become these pre-trial centres. Other camps have been closed, abandoned. But in still other cases, theyve actually been turned into factories themselves. And so it does appear as though the state was maybe acting more reactively to international pressure and wanting to close them more quickly than they were at least intending at the outset. It isnt clear what the future holds, but you know, it seems as though factories and prisons are mostly the direction theyre headed in.
Gemma: And from the conversations youve had with former detainees whove come out, did they absorb what they were being told? Do they feel that they learned anything?
Darren: I asked that question to a whole bunch of them as part of my interview to sort of chart that, and most said that they didnt learn anything when it came to Chinese language or even ideology, really. I mean, they learned enough to pass some exams. They memorised some characters, many of them said that theyd memorised 33 or 40 different songs. But in terms of, like, Chinese language fluency, and even understanding of Chinese law, that wasnt really clear to them.
Really, what they learned was how to be submissive, how to understand their place as sort of really a criminal class. The guards would call them animals, so they understood that they were be being treated as subhuman and that they should sort of recognise themselves as that. So theres, you know, a lot of shame, a lot of trauma that they carry with them.
People would tell me that the worst thing they felt was when they came out of the camp, having to denounce their past behaviour and other people that they knew in front of their community, and then being treated as an outcast. Once youre transferred out, then you have to do the work that youre assigned to do. Youre still being watched really closely. You cant ask about the pay that you are, or arent, given.
Gemma: So weve talked about what lifes been like in the camps. Whats life like outside the camps?
Darren: So for people that werent detained, many of them had family members or people in their community who were detained. And so the status coercion was placed across the entire population of Muslim people, meaning that they could at any time be determined to be untrustworthy and taken to the camp.
The lines in terms of who is trustworthy or not are very porous and arbitrary, really depends on which official youre talking to, which device is scanning your phone, and so that meant that everyone was terrified really by that threat. And the surveillance system really worked to exacerbate and amplify that terror and that part is ongoing. Theres checkpoints at jurisdictional boundaries where people have their face scanned and match the image on their ID. They often have their phone scanned at the same spot. If youre on a watch list because you have a family member in the camp, you have people coming into your home to visit you and inspect your home, looking through your things to make sure you dont have any religious materials. Theyre testing you, you know, making you drink alcohol to prove that youre not a pious Muslim. Theyre asking your children to report things that youre doing as a parent. Its so invasive. Its in all aspects of life. People talked about that system as one that was suffocating. That they felt like even though they werent in the camp, they were still within a sort of open air prison.
Gemma: What do your interviewees tell you about their thoughts about the future and how they see it for themselves in Xinjiang?
Darren: So, you know, I think people now feel as though if they havent been sent to the camp or imprisoned taken yet that theyre probably fine. I think thats becoming something of a widespread feeling. This is based on interviews Ive done with people whove travelled to the region recently.
But at the same time, they know that anyone can still be taken. It just doesnt feel quite as imminent of a threat. So I guess in the short term, theres been a little bit of a relaxation. I think the deeper trauma of family separation, of forced birth control you know, ranging from sterilisation to other forms of long term birth control that continues as well. The surveillance system is still there. You know, theres a lot of anxious people still.
The children, I think, are the ones that we should be most concerned with because theyre being raised in this residential boarding school system, really separated from their parents and from the culture that they came from. Its really producing a lost generation of Uyghurs who will be dealing with the fallout of whats happened to them for the rest of their lives.
So thats the future, its quite bleak I would say. Theyre alive and, you know, it seems like the threat of mass death is now less imminent than it mightve been in the past. That was a lot of concern that we had when the camps were first built is that people could simply be killed. Now, it seems like the state is sort of taking a more middle position, is being a little less aggressive when it comes to crimes against humanity.
Gemma: Why would China want to erase Uyghur culture, language, and future generations? To understand that, we need to understand the history of the region Uyghurs call home, and the way its been viewed by the rest of China.
David Tobin: The underlying problem in how Xinjiang is is governed in China is the notion that Uyghurs were barbarians and became human by becoming Chinese in 1949.
Gemma: This is David Tobin, a lecturer in East Asian studies at the University of Sheffield in the UK.
David: My research focuses on identity and security in global politics, with the focus on Han-Uyghur relations in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.
Gemma: Now, the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region is what this region is called today. But it hasnt always been called that, and its not always even been a part of China. So, give us a brief history of this place.
David: A brief crash course in Xinjiang history would start with the name East Turkestan. This tends to be the name that Uyghurs use. Turkestan just means land of the Turks. Turk includes, Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, so theres a multi-ethnic component to it. So the term today is usually seen as a loose geographical meaning, meaning that its just part of central Asia in the east, that borders China. The region is not seen as culturally Chinese. Uyghurs speak a Turkic language, a different language family from Mandarin, and generally practice Islam.
It was never seen as part of the Chinese nation. It was a colony. It wasnt called Xinjiang until 1884. The region was actually unified by the Manchu. Historically the region wasnt usually ruled by one ruler, there were different kingdoms. So it became to be seen as Xinjiang rather than these different states.
So this gave us a new language to Uyghur nationalists, who then by the 30s and 40s established independent East Turkestan republics based on their identity as Turkic speakers, as practitioners of Islam. The region is really ruled by custom until 1949, so local leaders were largely kept in place. But this obviously changed with China starting to see itself as a nation state, not just a nation or a civilisation, but saying the borders of China should reflect our national identity.
So, in 1949, when the Peoples Liberation Army arrive in Urumchi, this is called a peaceful liberation. Its a bit of a paradox. In the Chinese narrative its always been part of China, yet we have to keep liberating the region because in practice, it wasnt seen as part of the Chinese nation by Chinese people or by Uyghurs.
Gemma: In 1949, when the region became officially part of the Peoples Republic of China, what was its ethnic and religious makeup at that point?
David: In 1949, the population of Xinjiang was approximately 5% Han. And now today the population is around 50% Han, though official statistics do vary. So the transformation since 1949 has been dramatic, particularly when we think about language. In 1949 and in rural Xinjiang, Uyghur language is the lingua franca. Its intelligible with Kazakh and Kyrgyz. And at that stage in 1949, Han Chinese people would have had to learn to speak some Uyghur to be able to communicate with people. This is obviously now not the case.
Gemma: Did anything change in the way Uyghurs were viewed by the Chinese state when The Chinese Communist Party and Mao Zedong came to power in 1949?
David: Uyghurs were traditionally called barbarians by the Chinese state. In imperial history of China, you had the centre of civilisation in Beijing or where the capital was and as you get further from the centre, the peoples become more barbaric, less cooked and more raw as the terminology says.
But when Mao Zedong comes to power, hes saying China shouldnt be chauvinist. China shouldnt be ethno-nationalist. It must be multi-cultural, it must find a new way to include minorities. So he said we shouldnt call them barbarians, we shouldnt use the animal characters that were used in their names when they are given names, they are humans.
When the CCP Chinese communist party came to power, they described almost all social issues in the region in terms of what they call an ethnic problem, the minzu wenti. And they thought the way to solve that ethnic problem, ie, how to fit different ethnic groups into Chinas empire, was to classify the groups. So that was called the Ethnic Classification Project, where groups were identified using things like lineage and language records, people were asked which group do you belong to?. And this was in the framework that economic inequality is the root behind ethnic conflict.
So the idea was that developing the region would enable the region to not just economically catch up, but they would become Chinese. So, this shows how their regional policy did have an ethnocentric streak. There was a notion of modernisation thats very similar to colonial motions of modernisation, that essentially cultures develop along a straight line. Deng Xiaoping even said the Han have a special responsibility to modernise Uyghurs.
Gemma: Whats happened between then and now in terms some of the big moments that have defined the way China and the centre have viewed Xinjiang?
David: The big events in sort of the the last 20, 30 years, of course, outbreaks of violence in 2008 before the Beijing Olympics, and the violence in Urumchi in 2009, between Han and Uyghurs.
What was different about them was its people-on-people violence, it wasnt just institutions being attacked. So it was taken as a symbol of deteriorating ethnic relations, and it sparked debates amongst Chinese scholars of how to resolve the ethnic problem in a new era. This was largely a debate between the old school saying focus on economic development, and a new school saying we need rapid assimilation, we need to remove minority languages from education system, and we need to derecognise minorities. Xi Jinpings policy, the language of smelting into rongzhu, that you should have no special rights for minorities, has been celebrated by those scholars as resolving Chinas contradictions. So this is a new direction in policy, but it is based on the underlying idea that Uyghur ethnicity is a security problem that needs to be dealt with.
Gemma: There was violence in 2008 and 2009, and that was followed by more attacks in 2013 and 2014 in Beijing and Kunming which were blamed on Uyghur separatists. How much of what the Chinese state has done in Xinjiang since then is a continuation of that longer history of discrimination and persecution against Uyghurs?
David: This is the real underlying problem, that Uyhgurs are not really seen as human, and then when they start to be seen as human its only because they have to be integrated into China. Its worth noting it didnt have to happen this way. We could have had different turns of events, different leaders with some different ideas.
But when there is a narrative that a people are a security problem, its very difficult to turn that around on the ground when a people know they are targeted as a security problem. And once you have that narrative in official circles, how else can you talk about Uyghurs and Xinjiang without referring to Uyghurs as a security problem?
Gemma: You have spent a lot of time in the region and youve spoken to a lot of Uyghur people as part of your research. When you were there back a decade ago or so, were people using the word genocide at that point or is it only in more recent years that the diaspora that youve talked to have used it? How did they perceive Chinas view of them as, as you say, as barbarians, as terrorist threats and more generally the policies that are happening to wards them in Xinjiang?
David: In Xinjiang, people used assimilation as a norm to explain Chinese policy. It was not necessarily an issue, whether this was genocide, ethnic cleansing, crimes against humanity, its not an international law debate; its just speaking from the heart. So one Uyghur I interviewed in 2011, I asked what he means by assimilation do you mean total assimilation , or do you mean something more subtle? And he says, no, I do mean assimilation. So I ask him would you would tell us what the word is in Chinese tonghua to mean the same. Yep. Hes meaning assimilation. So it is largely a form of genocide in the language being used, and in Uyghur you could even say it as hanzu-leesheesh: to be made Han. So there was no claim that Uyghurs were going to be massacred. But the project of China being in Xinjiang is interpreted as an assimilation project and it is seen as colonialism.
Gemma: Its not just the Uyghurs who see whats going on in Xinjiang as a form of colonialism. In his 2020 book, The War on the Uyghurs, the American anthropologist Sean Roberts argued that the Chinese states actions in the region are a clear example of settler colonialism.
Anna Hayes: Settler colonialism in the form that we saw centuries ago, whereby states would colonise territories and they would overwhelm the indigenous population of that entity so that they could transform that territory into what they wanted it to be.
Gemma: This is Anna Hayes. Shes a senior lecturer at James Cook University in Australia and a fellow of the East Asian Security Centre. I called her up to talk about the economic strategy behind what China is doing in Xinjiang.
Anna: When you think of settler colonialism, you think of places like Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the United States, and the very devastating impact that that had on indigenous populations in those places. And that has an economic driver in it. And thats certainly something that I think were seeing in Xinjiang and when it comes to the economic strategy, how thats playing out is through the belt and road initiative.
Gemma: Broadly, what is Chinas belt and road initiative?
Anna: Its an attempt to connect China to regions and markets far outside of the Chinese mainland, to put in trading routes and economic corridors that will link China through to the Middle East, Central Asia, to Europe. It also has maritime dimensions that sees China hoping to link down into places further field like the South Pacific.
Gemma: Tell us where Xinjiang fits into that plan and why its therefore so important?
Anna: So, for Xinjiang, it sits right in a strategic and pivotal location for the belt and road initiative. It is the gateway to the Middle East, its the gateway to Central Asia, it is also the gateway to Europe.
Gemma: And thats because its literally the most western province, in the top corner of China if youre looking at a map.
Anna: Thats right. And its massive. And it shares a land border with many different states. So it is a massive territory, it takes up almost the entire western part. So within China, theres a real hope that Xinjiang will be massively transformed, itll be a hub of manufacturing, a hub of natural resource extraction I mean, it already is however, that will be expanded.
And cities in Xinjiang, like Kashgar, which is located in southern Xinjiang, and its long been the heart of the Uyghur homeland. Its a beautiful, or was a beautiful, example of traditional Islamic architecture in Central Asia. But since really the late 2000s, the Chinese government in their attempts to develop Kashgar first, and now more radically to completely develop and transform Kashgar into just any other Chinese city. The old city of Kashgar has been smashed down and theres a desire to rapidly increase the population of Kashgar as part of this belt and road push, and to have it as a central gravity of economic focus in the belt and road initiative. And theyve identified nine bases that they want to have Kashgar centred around.
They include textile industry, the large scale metallurgical industrial base, a petrochemical base. They want it as a processing base for agricultural and sideline products, they also want to have export commodity processing and manufacturing base for the neighbouring countries. They also see it as playing a role in Halal food production and supply base for Muslim countries, as well as a buildings materials based for neighbouring countries. A trade logistics base, helping them get that China-Pakistan economic corridor really humming. And they also see it as being an international tourist destination because those little elements of old Kashgar that still remain, theyre wanting to make that a big tourism pull to the region.
Gemma: So all those different elements, is that happening yet or is that still the project in the future?
Anna: Thats still the project in some respects for the future. Other parts of it is already happening. In just the last couple of years, Kashgars population has already grown from 500,000 to 711,000. Theres the plan for it to have a population of over one million.
Gemma: Are these Uyghurs that have been brought from other parts of Xinjiang or are they people from outside the region whove been brought in?
Anna: Theyre a mixture of both. And I think what weve already seen too in Kashgar is that a number of factories that have been identified, they do have dormitories attached to them. Weve seen that with other factories around Xinjiang, that co-location of dormitories to provide the labour to the factories.
Gemma: Where do the Uyghurs fit into this economic strategy for Xinjiang?
Anna: I mean, its difficult to say, because you know, when you think about the connections that the Chinese government is wanting to pursue with economic and business arrangements with the Middle East, the Uyghurs were the ideal trading partners. And for many years prior, they had been. Until Xinjiang was really cut off to other parts of the world by the Chinese government, much of Uyhgur business and trade was with neighbouring states. So, they could have played really quite an instrumental role in connecting China to these other locations. But that is not the way that the government has proceeded.
Instead, I think what they are see is that the Uyghurs will make up the grunt labour force within this economic plan. And this is the other thing with the settler colonial society is that thats typically how indigenous populations are used. Theyre there to do the menial, you know, dirty jobs, alongside increasing numbers of Han Chinese who are migrating to the region because they too are a labour pool that is being used in the belt and road initiative within Xinjiang.
Gemma: Where does this fit into president Xi Jinpings wider project for China, which I know youve written a research paper on recently?
Anna: I guess Xi Jinpings bigger goal here is what he has called the China dream. Its a dream that many leaders have long held, and its really the dream of China returning to a position of great power status, potentially superpower status in the contemporary age. Thats why Xi Jinping talks about it being a great rejuvenation of China and the Chinese nation. And by the Chinese nation, hes meaning the Chinese people and theres racial connotations within there as well.
The belt and road initiative kind of falls underneath that, and Ive called it in my paper interwoven destinies. Its the blueprint for achieving the China dream. So, its the economic strategy that Xi Jinping believes can get China back into that really strong economic position globally.
Gemma: So if you see that the China dream is this bigger top level strategy, the belt and road initiative is a fundamental part of that. And then within the belt and road initiative, whats going on in Xinjiang is a core element. It puts Xinjiang really kind of as a crucial crux point of that China dream.
Anna: Absolutely. And this is one of the critical things about it all; is that for the belt and road initiative to work, Xinjiang has to work. And so thats why weve seen really intensive focus, and repression, and crack down, and the forced labour, the mass detention of one to two million Uyghurs, because Xi Jinping has to make Xinjiang work.
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China's plan for Xinjiang, plus what's lurking in your household dust? The Conversation Weekly podcast transcript - The Conversation UK
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