Is China Easing up on Xinjiang?

In October, Associated Press reporter Dake Kang published a story based on two recent trips to Xinjiang. The piece, titled “Terror & tourism: Xinjiang eases its grip, but fear remains,” outlines China’s softened approach to Xinjiang security.

“Chinese authorities have scaled back many of the most draconian and visible aspects of the region’s high-tech police state,” Kang wrote.

The article was instantly seized upon by China-friendly news outlets to declare victory in the war of narratives. YouTube videos repackaged the piece with headlines like “AP News Confirms NO Uyghur Genocide in Xinjiang China” and “BREAKING: Associated Press Says ‘There’s NO Uyghur Genocide in Xinjiang’!!” CGTN, China’s official English-language overseas broadcaster, used Kang’s article as the focal point for an editorial titled “The genocide that vanished: The U.S. is downplaying Xinjiang for now.”

The “genocide” label has always been controversial, even among those who agree upon the scale and horror of the mass detentions in Xinjiang. Putting aside the question of what to call China’s campaign of oppression, however, Kang’s piece demonstrates a key point that was apparently lost on pro-China outlets: China’s methods of control are shifting, but not vanishing entirely.

While China is relaxing some of the most forceful methods of control, including closing some of its extralegal detention centers, this by no means signals that its repression of Uyghurs and other Turkic ethnic groups is at an end. Rather, we should view the egregious abuses committed over the past four years as an emergency response from Beijing to a perceived crisis in Xinjiang. Now that the crisis is past, Chinese authorities are moving back toward subtler forms of control, which will nonetheless ensure a tight grip over most aspects of everyday life.

For an example of what this “new normal” might look like, consider the situation in Tibet. Tibetan identity, especially religious identity, is still tightly policed by the state, but without resorting to mass detentions on the scale seen in Xinjiang.

The use of softer security methods to ensure compliance features prominently in Xinjiang researcher Darren Byler’s new book, “In the Camps: China’s High-Tech Penal Colony.” Despite the title, Byler outlines not only life in the camps but, importantly, life outside them. Both are part of China’s recipe for control: People comply with Beijing’s diktats for daily life due to the combination of intrusive surveillance and the ever-present threat of detention.

While Byler gives numerous examples of how this combination works, I’ll focus on one: The experience of Vera Zhou, a Hui Muslim from Xinjiang who was detained for months because she used a VPN to access websites banned in China. Vera was eventually released, but her ordeal was far from over upon release. Her life outside the camps was defined by intense fear and tight control.

Vera could not leave her neighborhood without sparking a security alert that had her terrified about being put back in the camps. She was forced to attend weekly flag-raising ceremonies where she loudly proclaimed “her loyalty to the Chinese government.” Even her behavior on social media became performative, as she raced to be the first to like and share any posts from her assigned government minder.

Once she was released from the camps, there were no longer any visible constraints on Vera’s behavior. However, her interviews with Byler make it clear that she sharply restricted her behavior in response to the abuse she had suffered in the camps. Vera’s actions were shaped by one overwhelming imperative: to avoid being sent back.

The invisible nature of this control is best summed up by Vera’s brush with forced labor. When her probation officer asked Vera to teach his children English, there was no overt coercion at play. But Vera didn’t feel she could refuse – or even ask to be paid for her work – without risking a return to the camps. Instead, she worked for free and even brought gifts of food to the officer to cultivate his favor.

Vera’s experience shows that even life outside the camps is undeniably colored by the threat of detention. Rather than a true opening up, then, Kang’s piece suggests that Beijing is ready to move to a new phase of “social stability maintenance” in Xinjiang, one marked by the subtler forms of control Byler described. Sheena Greitens, an expert on China’s internal security strategy, referred to this on Twitter as “the internalization of a repressive environment.”

As Greitens summed it up: “[R]educed *visibility* of repression doesn't necessarily mean a) [a] shift in CCP policy, or b) a less repressive environment for human beings in Xinjiang. It’s important we as readers & observers understand that.”

International outrage – and sanctions from the U.S., EU, and Canada – may have pushed China to recalibrate its approach in Xinjiang. But it’s also possible that Chinese authorities never intended for mass detentions on the scale seen in 2017-2018 to be a permanent feature of Xinjiang security policy. Chinese government figures cited by the BBC suggest that nearly 8 million people have been through the “education and vocational training” program – China’s name for the detention camps – at a rate of 1.3 million people each year for six years. That’s nearly one-third of Xinjiang’s total population of 26 million (although some people may have been undergoing “training” for multiple years, and thus been counted multiple times). Sustaining that level of detention would be immensely difficult.

It would also be expensive. As Byler told The Diplomat in a recent interview, “State documents show that the China has invested as much as $100 billion to build the camps and related material and digital infrastructure… Maintaining a security workforce of 100,000 in addition to the maintenance and updating of software and hardware systems will require significant spending going forward.”

Indeed, as early as 2019 Chinese officials were insisting that the “education and vocational training” facilities had been closed, with the “students” having “graduated.” As Byler noted in his book, many of the detainees were in practice transferred into forced labor – like Vera, given job offers they couldn’t realistically refuse – or formally convicted and put into a more traditional prison.

The mass detentions were always a means to an end: to swiftly – and brutally – “reprogram” thousands of Uyghurs who were viewed as threats to social stability because of their religious practices, overseas contacts, or simply their embrace of Uyghur cultural markers. What we are seeing in Xinjiang now is a signal that Beijing thinks its drastic initial effort has succeeded. Authorities can now progress to a more relaxed form of control involving the pervasive surveillance of people’s activities, both in the real world and digital spaces.

Now that people know Beijing’s red lines – and the horrific consequences of crossing them – fewer people are willing to transgress. That means there is less of a need for actual detention. This idea resonates with the Legalist philosophy of ancient China: “When one eradicates punishments through punishments, the state is ordered.” Or, as Donald Clarke of George Washington University summarized the concept on Twitter: “If punishments are severe, there will be no punishments.”

“The absence of overt physical violence is sometimes due to the *success* of state/regime repression, not its absence,” as Greitens pointed out.

The new approach has the added benefit of allowing Beijing to escape pressure from abroad without abandoning its security goals. The mass detention of millions of ethnic minorities sparks global outrage in a way that pervasive surveillance – from tracking apps on smartphones to ubiquitous facial recognition software – does not. Surveillance is both less visible and more common; as Byler notes in his book, countries around the world use similar technologies to track “suspicious” populations, usually ethnic minorities.

Thus, as reports of China easing control continue to circulate, it’s important to keep in mind what Chinese authorities are not doing. They are not returning passports to Uyghurs or letting them travel freely abroad – or even within China. They are not answering questions from desperate Uyghur, Kazakh, and Uzbek diaspora members about the whereabouts and wellbeing of relatives within China. They are not fully lifting restrictions on religious practices, such as attending religious services, fasting during Ramadan, or keeping a halal diet. Life in Xinjiang remains heavily censored and scripted and those who deviate still face harsh punishment, including time in still-prevalent detention centers.

Kang’s article makes that abundantly clear. In fact, his reporting trip to Xinjiang is itself evidence of China’s new strategy. Kang was allowed to go, something that would not have been possible when the detention campaign was in full swing. But he was not allowed to talk freely to anyone other than the Uyghurs his government minders brought in to perform – both literally and figuratively.