Why safeguarding stability matters more than human rights to China in the crackdown on extremism in Xinjiang

By an MSc VCD Student

‘Ground which forms the key to three contiguous states, so that he who occupies it first has most of the Empire at his command, is a ground of intersecting highways.’ Sunzi, The Art of War

Xinjiang on the map, photo: RFA

On 14 October 2020, China was re-elected to the UN Human Rights Council after a year of intense turmoil in Hong Kong and a series of international condemnations for the incarceration (without public trial) of over 1 million Uyghur Muslims in political ‘re-education camps’ in Xinjiang. China has denied allegations of human rights abuses and claimed that these camps are vocational training centres intended to increase Uyghur Muslims’ competitiveness in the job market. In the same month, along with 45 other nation-states, China issued a letter to UN High Commissioner for Refugees in response to the joint statement initiated by the British Permanent Representative to the UN and signed by 23 countries, most of whom are from the Global North. UN Watch (an NGO that discloses UN malpractice and bias) has also revealed that, as long ago as 2013, the UN has been handing over names of Uyghur dissidents to the Chinese Communist Party. More astonishingly, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights has confirmed this information. With China’s growing power in the international community, these actions by UN bodies force us to question the legitimacy of those bodies and their ability to hold China accountable for its human rights violations. In this blog, I’ll address how much safeguarding stability in Xinjiang means for China’s economic development.

Uyghur Muslims in the internment camps, photo: BBC

Xinjiang has been the front line of China’s safeguarding stability plan in the wake of 11 September 2001. China has waged the global ‘war on terror’ against the separatist East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM) for having obtained funds from Al-Qaeda and for sending soldiers to Afghanistan for training. One of the mass crackdowns on ‘Uyghur extremists’ followed a July 2009 incident in which a series of violent riots broke out in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, leaving 197 dead and more than 1721 wounded, most of whom were Han Chinese. A protest demanding that the central government carry out a full investigation of the death of two Uyghurs earlier in southern China had escalated into riots aimed at Hans. Chinese authorities claimed it was an organised and premediated violent crime, orchestrated and incited by ETIM and the World Uyghur Congress. The Chinese government has since come down particularly hard on the Uyghur Muslims through surveillance and security checks. However, many have interpreted China as taking an opportunist stand – as claiming to be the victim of global terrorism in order to justify a crackdown on the Uyghurs that China wanted for economic reasons. These instances have also been chances for China to showcase its military might as a way to deter Tibetan and Hong Kong separatists.

Chinese soldiers marching on patrol as a Uyghur man crosses the street in Urumqi on 15th July 2009. Photo: AFP

China must have Xinjiang under its control in order to maintain economic stability and its status as a superpower. This is because Xinjiang is China’s most strategically important stronghold for accessing the West, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East. The Belt and Road Initiative is a global infrastructure network adopted in 2013 to invest in nearly 70 countries and international organisations, partially aims to alleviate poverty and unrest in the region and is often seen as intended to expand China’s influence across the globe. There are two routes, one of which leaves from Xinjiang and extends all the way to Germany. To keep the disputed regions free of trouble and prove his ability to govern, Xi Jinping (like the previous leaders of China) has used the BRI as a way to accumulate trust and establish authority among Chinese citizens. In addition, China’s enormous investment in the China–Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) makes it difficult for China to overlook any potential violence Xinjiang may bring about. It starts from Kashgar of Xinjiang to Gwadar of Pakistan; the Gwadar Port is the world’s deepest seaport operated by a Chinese state-owned company and the only point connecting the two routes. The Chinese leaders say that CPEC is the flagship project of BRI. Without Xinjiang, it would be extremely difficult for China to stand on its own feet in the Indian subcontinent and using Gwadar as a gateway to the Middle East. Moreover, explorations in the Tarim Basin have revealed the country’s largest oil and gas reserves. And according to China National Nuclear Corporation it has established China’s first kiloton-level uranium mine in Ili prefecture, where a nuclear testing site has also been established for over 2 decades. Alexis-Martin (2019) interprets the colonisation of Uyghur lands and the use of those lands for nuclear-weapons testing represents a mode of nuclear imperialism that treats Uyghur lives as worthless.

The Belt Road Initiative on the map, photo: the one brief

China sees the entire Uyghur group as a biological threat and has stripped them of the rights to practise their religion and speak the Uyghur language as if the group’s distinct culture and ethnic differences were the root causes of terrorism. Stewart (2010) claims Cultural Status Horizontal Inequalities to be the main drivers of this conflict. They include ‘disparities in the recognition and standing of different groups’ languages, customs, norms and practices’. These disparities consequently contribute to the idea of institutional racism and cultural assimilation. Roberts (2018) argues that ‘the use of the terrorist label evokes the presence of a biological threat to society, akin to a virus that must be eradicated, quarantined, or cleansed from those it infects’. This is very close to the idea of biopolitics – a form of politics that ‘takes administration of life and a locality’s populations as its subject’. As such, the Chinese government has been repeatedly criticised for carrying out cultural and physical genocide. In a recent and appalling report, Zenz (2020) revealed that China has forcibly suppressed Uyghur birth rates through mandatory birth control and sterilisations. Zenz compared the published natural population growth rates of Uyghur people between 2015 and 2018 and found a decline of 84%.

It is not difficult to see that China has done grave wrongs in Xinjiang. The Global North should balance the power dynamics of North–South relations. This includes not heavily relying on China for trade. Those violations of human rights are an inevitable consequence of China’s political and economic systems and that the Global North should distance itself from China to avoid being complicit in these violations. In a socialist society, the definition of human rights can be ambiguous. The interest of the state – in this case, ensuring the society is in order and stable – tramples everything.

Bibliography

Alexis-Martin, B. (2019) The nuclear imperialism-necropolitics nexus: contextualizing Chinese-Uyghur oppression in our nuclear age, Eurasian Geography and Economics, 60:2, 152-176, DOI: 10.1080/15387216.2019.1645611

Roberts, S. (2018) The biopolitics of China’s “war on terror” and the exclusion of the Uyghurs, Critical Asian Studies, 50:2, 232- 258, DOI: 10.1080/14672715.2018.1454111

Stewart, F. (2010) Horizontal Inequalities as a cause of conflict, a review of CRISE findings. World Development Report 2011

Zenz, A. (2020) Sterlizations, IUDs, and mandatory birth control: the CCP’s campagn to suppress Uyghur birthrates in Xinjiang, Jamestown Foundation