Beyond Xinjiang: Xi Jinping’s Ethnic Crackdown

In January, the U.S. State Department declared that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was committing ongoing genocide against the Uyghurs and other ethnic and religious minority groups in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, something later echoed by the new Biden administration. Subsequently, the Canadian, Dutch, and British parliaments passed non-binding resolutions designating China’s actions a genocide, with calls for other governments to follow suit.

In March, the Newlines Institute for Strategic and Policy issued a lengthy report detailing how the Chinese government’s actions in Xinjiang violate all five of the enumerated acts of genocide in the United Nations’ 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, including “mass deaths.”

There’s little doubt China’s pernicious repression of Uyghurs and other Indigenous people is a crime against humanity and human dignity. Yet these charges of genocide misdiagnose the problem and moreover distract us from understanding and ultimately holding the Chinese government accountable for the wider pattern of abuse occurring inside the People’s Republic of China (PRC).

Aspects of China’s new policy direction are certainly destructive, yet their colonial intent ultimately seeks to transform – not exterminate – the physical and social landscape of Xinjiang and other peripheral regions under the government’s control. They work to actively alter the thoughts and behaviors of what Chinese authorities perceive to be a “backward,” “deviant,” and innately “dangerous” sub-section of its population by uplifting their “bio-quality” (suzhi, 素质) and overseeing their rebirth as loyal, patriotic, and civilized Chinese citizens.

Debating the legal semantics of what is happening in Xinjiang is important. But we cannot allow it to distract us from how Xi Jinping and the CCP are turbo-charging the transformative resolve behind significant policy innovations across their colonial possessions – from Kashgar to Hong Kong and Lhasa to Hohhot.

Taming Xinjiang

In the dying days of the Qing dynasty, the Chinese state sought to colonize Xinjiang and other parts of its imperial frontier through Han resettlement. This program of settler colonialism continued following the establishment of the Chinese Republic and intensified as state power grew in the post-Mao era, eventually attracting more than 10 million Han settlers to Xinjiang and sparking cycles of Indigenous resistance.

Settler colonialism adopts what Patrick Wolfe calls the logic of elimination: not only the dissolution of native societies but also their expropriation through regimes of biocultural assimilation. In short, settler colonialism involves both effacement and replacement, and does not necessarily align with commonly accepted definitions of genocide.

As Xi came to power in late 2012, violent resistance escalated once again in Xinjiang, with a spate of deadly attacks across China. In response, he announced a “people’s war on terror” and called on Xinjiang authorities to show “absolutely no mercy.”

Xi’s key lieutenant in Xinjiang, Chen Quanguo, built a vast network of re-education camps – sprawling prison-like facilities with barbed wire and watch towers – and then interned Uyghurs and other Turkic-speaking Muslim minorities in these facilities without legal recourse. Yet these now well-documented camps are only one aspect of the CCP’s multipronged and highly coercive project to remake Xinjiang society.

Other aspects include pervasive and highly intrusive surveillance, in both mass and automated forms, meaning Communist Party officials are now monitoring Uyghurs in their own homes and even beds, while facial recognition cameras, security checkpoints, and AI driven hardware monitor everyone’s actions around the clock.

There is the systematic erasure of Indigenous language, culture, and religious practices. The use of the Uyghur language, which is constitutionally protected in China, is being pushed out of schools, offices, and public squares; Uyghur mosques, shrines, and cemeteries are being desecrated; cultural practices like Islamic greetings, headscarves, and beards are now viewed as signs of religious extremism and grounds for being detained and sent off for re-education.

The CCP is also actively diluting the size and concentration of the Indigenous population through a set of eugenic policies, including mandatory birth control for minorities; incentivizing the migration of Han settlers to Xinjiang; the transfer of Uyghurs and other minorities to other provinces for work and education; and, finally, promoting inter-ethnic marriage.

We have also seen a dramatic increase in the formal incarceration of Uyghurs and other minorities in Xinjiang – presumably those deemed immune to re-education – with the construction of new prisons and a dramatic surge in arrests, trials, and prison sentences.

Finally, there is forced labor. Coercive labor assignments are a key part of the state’s “poverty alleviation” program, and now central to the CCP’s colonial project. Millions of Uyghurs and other Xinjiang minorities have been assigned compulsory work postings both inside Xinjiang and across China since 2014. With the threat of detention or even criminal prosecution hanging over their heads, it is essentially impossible for Uyghurs to refuse a work assignment.

Work on an assembly line is another form of control and disciplining for Uyghurs; in other words, it represents a new phase and deepening of the re-education processes. More importantly, these coerced labor postings make the Chinese government’s colonial project far more economically sustainable, if not downright profitable for the Chinese government and its corporate partners (both domestic and international).

The party’s ultimate goal is the reformatting of Indigenous souls in order to render their labor both docile and useful in the pursuit of the Han man’s dream of wealth and power. There is no evidence of human annihilation. Deaths have most certainly occurred inside what some call China’s “concentration camps,” but nothing like the mass murder of Jews during the Holocaust nor the slaughter of ethnic Tutsis or Bosnians during previous genocides.

Rather the CCP’s policies in Xinjiang are driven by a desire for transformation: a more energetic and interventionist role for the party in, quite literally, forging the ideological, cultural, and spiritual fabric of what Xi calls the “collective consciousness” of the “Chinese (Zhonghua 中华) nation.” As a result, these shifts in policy go well beyond Xinjiang and are part of a fundamental rethink of how the CCP manages ethnocultural diversity and its colonial possessions.

Rethinking Minzu Policy

Following the dramatic collapse of the USSR in 1991, a group of intellectuals and policymakers warned China could follow in the footsteps of the Soviet Union and collapse along its ethnic seams if it didn’t adopt a radically different approach to nation-building. The violence associated with the Lhasa (2008) and Urumqi (2009) riots unnerved the policy establishment and convinced many that China had a serious problem on its hands.

Ma Rong, a highly influential professor at Beijing university, joined other scholar-officials in calling for a dramatic U-turn in the the Chinese government’s governance of diversity. The CCP unwittingly created a “dual structure” in Ma’s opinion: the China of the Han ethnic majority and the China of its 55 minority nationalities (minzu, 民族), with separate homelands, schools, languages, legal identities, and even political representation.

According to Ma, this dual structure amplifies ethnocultural differences and spurs social conflict and a lack of mutual interactions and understanding. This lack of national cohesion is propelling China toward collapse and requires the urgent diminution of ethnic differences, new policies to facilitate inter-ethnic fusion, and the active construction of a shared national consciousness.

At the time, these proposals were highly contentious, but with the emergence of Xi Jinping they found a sympathetic ear. Under Xi, China has changed fundamentally – becoming more assertive and autocratic – and so has its ethnic policies. These changes are perhaps most evident in Xinjiang, but as discussed below, are far wider and deeper than previously acknowledged.

Xi is now following in the footsteps of Sun Yat-sen, the so-called “father of the nation,” who called on the Tibetans, Mongols, and other frontier peoples to “smelt together in a single furnace” with the Han majority in casting a strong and singular “state-race.” This is what Xi calls “grand minzu fusion” or “the coalescing of blood and mind” in forging the collective consciousness of the Chinese nation.

Merit Over Minzu

Institutionally, the government organs responsible for upholding the protections of minority identities, languages, and cultures in Article 4 of the Chinese Constitution and the 1982 Law on Regional Ethnic Autonomy (LREA) have been sidelined and muzzled. In Xi’s self-declared “new era,” the “party must lead all,” with power, authority, and ideology concentrated in the party center with Xi at its core.

In 2018, the State Ethnic Affairs Commission (SEAC) and the State Administration for Religious Affairs (SARA) were placed under the direct supervision of the party’s increasingly powerful United Front Work Department (UFWD). At all levels of the administrative hierarchy, the UFWD has been strengthened at the expanse of state organs like the SEAC and SARA.

In 2020, the CCP appointed the first Han director of the SEAC since 1954 when Chen Xiaojiang replaced Bagatur, a Mongol. You Quan, the current party secretary of the UFWD, is a member of the 19th Central Committee and the CCP Secretariat while neither Chen nor Wang Zuo’an, the Han director of SARA, is a Central Committee member.

These new appointments signal a significant weakening of the PRC’s long-running system of ethnic-based political and employment quotas, as explicitly required in the LREA. The training and promotion of ethnic cadres is arguably one of the CCP’s longest running and most important policies, ensuring the non-Han minorities had a stake in the system even if these positions are often symbolic.

Across China, Han men dominate the powerful party secretary roles. Of the 33 provincial-level party secretaries in China today, 32 of them are Han men, with the party secretary of Guizhou province, Shen Yiqin, serving as the token female and minority. Similarly, the entire 25 member Politburo is Han, and there is just one woman in its ranks.

In the past, an informal quota system ensured minority representation in public service institutions but these have been gradually scaled back, and in some cases largely abandoned. Take for example, Minzu University in Beijing, which was established in 1950 with a mandate to not only train ethnic cadres but also to study and preserve minority cultures and identities. Today, the Han majority comprise 52 percent of its student body (compared to less than 10 percent during the 1980s) and its faculty and senior party leadership are now dominated by Han academics.

There are now a range of voices in China arguing ethnic-based quotas violate the provision for equality in the Chinese Constitution, not all that different from conservative voices in the United States and elsewhere, arguing preferential policies breed dependency and block merit.

Xi has highlighted the quality, integrity, and ideological character of CCP cadres and suggested they should not be selected purely on the basis of ethnic identity. Ma Rong has gone even further in calling for outright reform of the cadre system with “merit and pure ability” replacing minzu status in determining appointments.

Questioning Minzu Autonomy

The system of regional ethnic autonomy has long been a key plank of the party’s approach to managing and co-opting its Indignous populations since it created the Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region in 1947. As of 2005, more than 71 percent of China’s minority population lived within one of the over 1,300 autonomous units that covered 64 percent of Chinese territory.

Under Xi Jinping, the system has become a vacuous facade, with China’s top ethnic official Wang Yang reminding officials during a recent visit to Inner Mongolia that “all ethnic autonomous regions are under the party’s leadership and belong to all ethnic groups.” Yet this de jure right to self-govern remains part of the Chinese Constitution.

Following the collapse of the USSR and the outbreak of ethnic violence in Tibet and Xinjiang, the system was criticized as a major point of weakness and source of vulnerability. There were open calls for its scrapping on the eve of Xi’s ascension.

Yet Xi ultimately declared regional ethnic autonomy one of three “fundamental political systems” in the PRC and boldly called for an end to talk about overturning the policy. He stated at the Central Ethnic Work Conference in 2014:

“There are some people who say we shouldn’t have a system of regional ethnic autonomous and autonomous regions should be administered no different from provinces. This view is wrong and political pernicious. Let me say clearly once again, we must stop talking about abolishing the system of regional ethnic autonomy. The system of regional ethnic autonomy is the fountainhead of our ethnic policies.”

This hasn’t stopped Ma Rong and others from speaking out. In a bombshell March 2019 article, Ma claimed the system is not only obsolete but also out of step with the spirit and the letter of the constitution.

In an obliquely worded reference to Xi, Ma warned against a “single voice” and blindly following the “two whatevers” – whatever Mao decided and instructed – before concluding: “The wheels of history are always moving forward, and the country’s laws and regulations also need to change in accord with basic social progress and contradictory situations, carrying out necessary revisions and adjustments in the spirit of seeking truth from facts and keeping abreast of the times.”

Winding Back Minzu Privilege

The 1984 Law on Regional Ethnic Autonomy institutionalized a range of “preferential policies” aimed at “looking after,” “supporting,” and “encouraging” the full participation of non-Han minorities in socialist modernization. In addition to employment quotas, two of the most important yet controversial policies are preferential school admission and exemptions from family planning regulations.

The law requires “lower standards and requirements for the admission of students from minority nationalities.” In practice, the marks of minority students on the gaokao, the nation-wide university entrance exam, as well as other school exams, are artificially adjusted by adding bonus points. Unsurprisingly, these benefits breed resentment among Han students and their parents.

The arrangements are complex and vary across space and time; in the past, minority students from rural parts of Tibet and Xinjiang received 200 or more bonus points. In 2015, Xinjiang authorities provided all minority students with an extra 50 points on the exam, and a further 20 points for students with at least one minority parent in the four prefectures of southern Xinjiang. By 2020, these bonus points were wound back further to a max of 20 points in Xinjiang, 10 extra points in Inner Mongolia, and a mere five points in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture.

Extra points offered to minority students elsewhere in China are now being completely phased out in the name of “educational equality and national unity,” and will disappear completely in Anhui in 2022 and 2023 in Jiangsu, with other provinces and autonomous regions following suit.

The same is happening with family planning exemptions. In the past, urban-based minorities were allowed to have two children and rural women three, if not more under some circumstances. With the move toward a national two-child policy in 2016, Chinese authorities effectively eliminated previous exceptions for ethnic minorities.

Xi has repeatedly stressed the “equality of everyone before the law” rather than the group-differentiated rights enshrined in the LREA. Where preferential policies remain, they are chiefly based on regional or economic differences rather than minzu status.

Weeding out the “Minzu Chaff”

Over the last decade the Chinese government has aggressively promoted the universalization of Mandarin-medium education. In autonomous regions like Tibet, Xinjiang, and Inner Mongolia, this policy is disguised as “bilingual education,” which purports to leave some room for study in Indigenous languages, which are protected in Article 4 of the Chinese Constitution and the LREA.

Beginning in 2010, party authorities in Qinghai province proposed the phasing out of Tibetan-medium instruction in Tibetan areas of Qinghai, setting off a wave of protest. A few years later, authorities in the Tibetan Autonomous Region adopted a range of measures to incentivize and pressure local schools to switch to Mandarin-medium education.

Similar coercion exists in Xinjiang. In late 2016, cadres were dispatched to southern Xinjiang to set up thousands of new bilingual preschools in rural areas, which would be free of charge for toddlers between the ages of four and six, and then announced the following year that all primary schools were required to adopt Mandarin-medium education. Soon Uyghur officials asserted it was no longer patriotic to speak the Uyghur language in public, and Uyghur language books disappeared from schools, bookstores, and libraries.

Party officials in Inner Mongolia announced a similar shift in June 2020 with all schools in the autonomous region required to replace Mongolian with Mandarin as the medium of instruction in key courses, sparking heated street demonstrations, school boycotts, and a subsequent security crackdown.

In January 2021, the Legislative Affairs Commission of the National People’s Congress ruled that local regulations in Inner Mongolia and the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture permitting the use of ethnic languages in schools violated Article 19 of the Chinese Constitution and its provision that “the state promotes the nationwide use of Putonghua [Mandarin].” How long before Cantonese disappears from schools in Hong Kong?

Indigenous cultures are also under attack, especially those with a foreign or religious component. This has resulted in the demolition or “rectification” of mosques and shrines not only in Xinjiang, but also in Yunnan, Henan, Beijing, and the Hui areas of the northwest as the party now insists on the “sinicization” of religion in China. Xi, who argues culture is the “blood vessels of the nation,” has previously called on CCP officials to “discard the dross and select the essence; weed out the chaff and bring forth new roots” when it comes to ethnic minority cultures in order to bring about “creative transformation.”

Planting the Seed of Patriotism

The Chinese government is quietly abandoning what it used to call “ethnic unity education,” which critics argue places too much emphasis on “ethnic peculiarities” instead of a shared national identity. In its place, the party is spoon-feeding its youth a heavy dose of “patriotic education” aimed at forging group-thought and unquestioning devotion to the nation and the CCP.

Xi is leading the charge, stating in 2014: “We must grasp the lesson of patriotic education and plant the seeds of love for China deep in the soul of every child… All ethnic groups must cultivate awareness of being part of the Chinese nation among their children. Don’t let them think they only belong to this or that minzu group, but rather they must know – first and foremost – they are part of the Chinese nation.”

In order to eliminate unorthodox ideas, the Ministry of Education ordered schools to “firmly cleanse” their libraries of any illegal, outdated, or improper reading material in October 2019, including books published overseas. The ministry is also rolling out a revised and uniform set of textbooks for the three compulsory subjects of Chinese language, history, and law and ethics. These new textbooks are meant to “strengthen the importance of upholding national sovereignty, unity, and territorial integrity” among students by stressing how Tibet, Xinjiang, Taiwan, and the South China Sea islands are inseparable parts of China since ancient times.

The party’s 2019 directive on patriotic education insists educators actively “guide the people in establishing and persisting with the correct view of the motherland, nation, culture, and history, and constantly enhance the sense of belonging, identity, dignity, and honor of the Chinese nation.” Declaring patriotism the “heart and soul” of the Chinese nation, the document calls on CCP officials to “start with the babies” and develop a holistic approach to patriotic education.

Children as young as three are now subjected to activities aimed at teaching them “love for the motherland and to be proud of being Chinese.” In a 2020 statement, the Ministry of Education called for “the infiltration of patriotic education into children’s games and daily activities in preschools.”

This brainwashing is most intense in sites of resistance. Weekly flag-raising ceremonies are still the norm in Xinjiang. In the Ulanhu Kindergarten in Hohhot, named for the Mongolian revolutionary hero and founding chairman of the Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region, children were subjected to a barrage of patriotic activities following recent unrest over language policy, including singing the national anthem and drawing the Chinese flag. Early this year, the Hong Kong government announced mandatory “national security education” in all schools and universities in order to develop in students “a sense of belonging to the country,” “an affection for the Chinese people,” and “a sense of national identity.”

In conclusion, China is forcefully rewriting its national story and rewiring its body politic under Xi Jinping’s rule. This involves not only acts of colonial effacement in places like Xinjiang and Hong Kong but also systematic efforts to replace Indigenous life with Han and Communist Party-centric norms.

These policies seek to supplant any authentic and autonomous Tibetan or Mongolian identity with a single, homogenous, and party-defined Chinese identity. Indigenous motifs might remain – the singing and dancing actor in bright regalia – but their souls and minds are being remolded in the image of their Han colonial masters.

Settler colonialism in China may not be genocidal in either the narrow popular or legal sense of the word. But it could prove far more insidious in Xi’s China, as a new Han empire emerges well beyond Xinjiang with the potential to touch us all.