Max Nowalk
April 22, 2019
I wrote this article starting in February of 2019. Since then, the situation in Xinjiang has thankfully gained far greater attention in mainstream media outlets. The international community has also become more vocal in criticizing China. As more news reports came in, however, it seemed clear China’s strategy wasn’t letting up, and had arguably become even harsher towards the Uyghur community. The fact that we could tell from all the way back in 2018 that the crisis was so dire and have accomplished so little to prevent it is a truly sobering thought. I hope to follow more responses available to the international community in another piece.
What is the cost of creating a national identity? Within China’s western province of Xinjiang, the answer might be forced integration. In order to assimilate Uyghur Muslims and other ethnic minority groups, China has pursued severe measures that are steadily diminishing personal liberties and cultural expression in Xinjiang. But the reality of these approaches may constitute gross human rights violations – and even genocide. Such an accusation should never be used lightly, but, thankfully, contemporary literature on human rights has worked to determine clear indicators for whether genocide is in its initial stages or not, as well as guidelines for preventing the crime. Examining the Chinese government’s policies against these standards offers us the opportunity to determine what exactly is going on in Xinjiang with the few reports that are available. The threat of something as heinous as genocide happening in China thus demands close scrutiny and careful attention.
Before diving into the situation in Xinjiang, it is crucial to appreciate what ‘genocide’ entails. Understanding the act as a crime in international law is a recent development from the aftermath of World War II. Raphael Lemkin coined the term in 1944 to delineate ethnically-motivated violence both for historical purposes and for calling attention to Nazi crimes in the Holocaust. Lemkin’s concept was later codified in the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (often abbreviated to the Genocide Convention or Convention on Genocide, as it is here), where the United Nations pledged to hold perpetrators of genocide accountable pursuant to the outlines of the convention. The convention falls short of a legally binding statute of international law but it has set precedent for further measures within the International Criminal Court (ICC) and is commonly invoked in prosecution. The Genocide Convention thus provides a clear framework for determining whether any given organized efforts fit the definition of genocide. It will be used in what follows for the purpose of analyzing China’s treatment of the Uyghur Muslims.
Article 2 of the Genocide Convention labels the crime as follows:
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
- Killing members of the group;
- Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
- Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
- Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
- Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.[1]
Scholarship on the Genocide Convention has also maintained a distinction between “hard” and “soft” genocide that will be relevant here as well. Whereas soft or cultural genocide is the destruction in whole or in part of a people’s art, cultural practices, or way of life, hard genocide is the destruction in whole or in part of the people themselves.[2] These limits help to provide boundaries for examining genocide or genocidal intent for the treatment of the Uyghur Muslims.
The Xinjiang province has been understood by the Chinese government as a ‘frontier’ region since China’s emergence as a modern nation state.[3] State policy had been lenient towards residential minority groups and permitted free movement over borders for Turkic-Muslim travelers. The many Muslim ethnic-groups who crossed the border and founded communities on Chinese soil include Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and Huis. However, since the 1980’s, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has launched aggressive strategies for economic growth and ethnic integration by encouraging Han migration into the region (Han being the dominant ethnic group in eastern, urban China). These movements have dramatically changed Xinjiang’s demographics: while Uyghurs made up 75% and Hans 7% of Xinjiang’s population in 1949, Uyghurs make up 48% and Hans 36% in a population of 23.6 million (11.3 and 8.6 million, respectively) in 2017.[4]
Ethnic tensions became more strained as more Hans settled in the region, spurring intermittent ethnic violence. Beijing began undertaking its most repressive measures against the Uyghur population following terrorist attacks by Muslim extremists. Several violent attacks in 2013 and 2014, including bombings and knifing sprees, were carried out by Uyghur separatists.[5] The CCP has claimed the attacks were orchestrated by terrorist cells based within Xinjiang, and began a new initiative in May 2014 to root them out in its “Strike Hard Campaign against Violent Terrorism”.[6]Similar to other campaigns taken around the country, the Strike Hard initiative imposes strict security measures along with rigorous propaganda. The intended effect is to root out terrorist organizations while simultaneously fostering popular support for the Chinese state. Whether or not the Strike Hard Campaign is a warranted response to terrorism is another question. Worth considering here is that, warranted or not, China’s policies have drastically reduced the freedoms enjoyed by the Uyghur and other minority populations in northwestern China.
Xinjiang has become the prime example of a 21st century police state. Police stations are positioned throughout the region’s cities every 300 meters for roughly every few city blocks. Security guards are assigned to every market stall and every street store.[7] Public transportation is constantly stopped for police to check identity cards, fingerprints, eyes (with new iris-recognition technology), and to confiscate smartphones, downloading their users’ activity logs.[8] The immense data on Uyghur citizens’ biometrics is then transferred for security cameras to use facial and eye recognition. In theory, police are supposed to check all citizens in the province to locate terrorist cells, but the checks blatantly discriminate against Uyghur Muslims and other minority groups: officials stop civilians on the basis of appearance and look for ethnicity on identity cards. Muslim women are often told to remove their headscarves and mosques experience the highest level of scrutiny. Uyghurs are stopped several times throughout their day at such security checkpoints while Hans, on the other hand, are waved through.[9] The countryside is no different: new police stations have been erected in most villages with continual checkpoints along the major highways.
Another tactic to assess which civilians are “trustworthy” is sending state agents to be hosted by Uyghur families. A host Uyghur family must “adopt” these spies for extended periods of time while the agent gets to know the host family members through probing conversations. The agent is fed by the host family and sleeps in their home until he or she feels confident in making an assessment on each of the members of the household.[10] Their presence also intimidates the Uyghur host family from celebrating Muslim rituals and holidays. For example, during the month of Ramadan, when Muslims fast for extended periods of time and pray, host families must abstain from such practices lest their adopted agent report them for religious fanaticism.[11] Xinjiang’s mass surveillance is disturbingly comprehensive and has left Uyghurs’ privacy nonexistent. This level of control should be extremely concerning because it targets minority groups like the Uyghurs on the basis of ethnicity and dehumanizes them.
Simultaneously, the Strike Hard Campaign has generated enough “evidence” to detain over 1 million Uyghurs and members of other Muslim minority groups in detention centers, public prisons, and “political education camps”.[12] Possible offenses that Uyghurs are detained for include praying Muslim prayers and having dual citizenship in another country, neither of which are criminal under Chinese law. Many individuals, labelled as “suspicious persons”, are arbitrarily detained without a warrant and then sent to a political education camp for patriotic instruction without ever being convicted. The indoctrination methods in these facilities are meant to instill good citizenship in the detainees. Compulsory education is administered on Chinese and Xinjiang history, Mandarin Chinese, and political ideology through propaganda songs and legal study. The extent of the detainees’ legal studies is to understand the crimes that placed them in the camps, though acts such as praying Muslim prayers are, again, not criminal offenses in China.[13] Local languages and religious practices are banned. Detainees must also swear loyalty to the CCP president, Xi Jinping, and thank him before every meal. Release for the detainees is conditional on passing exams to show they have learned the complex Chinese language and memorized party propaganda songs. The detainees are kept in the camps until they can pass the examinations.
This is not the first time China has deployed such extensive strategies of integration. Following religious and separatist protests in 2008, the CCP’s crackdown on Tibet also used mass indoctrination as a means of assimilating the population by force. While the many monks and Tibetan separatists who were caught were simply sent to detention centers and prison, mechanisms for mass surveillance and political education camps were concurrently used to indoctrinate any potential rebel-rousers.[14] This was labelled the “Patriotic Education Campaign”. Programs similar to the homestays in Xinjiang involved state agents visiting monasteries to assess the loyalty of monks and nuns. Similarly, the political education camps forced detainees to learn Mandarin and the CCP’s version of Tibetan history.[15] In the case of 2008, political indoctrination efforts focused on criticizing the Dalai Lama clique and Tibetan nationalism. The block-by-block surveillance and checkpoints approach was also implemented for city security.
Clearly, the repressive practices in 2008 have inspired China’s strategies of integration for Uyghur Muslims and other minority groups in Xinjiang, this time under the guise of fighting terrorism. The Party Secretary, Chen Quanquo, who oversaw operations in Tibet, transferred to Xinjiang to take command of the Strike Hard Campaign in August 2016.[16] China’s strategies have become more and more repressive in the region as Quanguo implements more of the methods used in Tibet. The result is accelerated cultural destruction. China’s tried-and-true mass surveillance and political indoctrination seek to undermine the targeted groups’ cultural or ethnic identity and replace it with one that is favorably patriotic. This means both gradually eliminating the targeted group’s cultural norms and practices as well as reducing its public presence. The Uyghurs have been subjected to these very practices. In addition to banning the use of Turkic languages in political education camps (and replacing it with Mandarin), religious expression has been severely limited in the public sphere.[17] Mosques have been closed and remaining ones put under heavy surveillance; minarets and Islamic crescents have been torn down; dancing after prayers and ceremonies has been prohibited; and Uyghur-language instruction in schools has started to vanish.[18] Some Islamic names cannot be given to Uyghur newborns.
Most chillingly, evidence has surfaced of Uyghur women being targeted in efforts to curb reproduction in the Uyghur community. The Human Rights Watch 2018 report on Xinjiang references multiple sources who corroborated accounts of Uyghur women being pressured to marry Han men in rural villages.[19] Prima facie, these practices violate the victims’ rights to security, liberty, and self-autonomy – denying anyone the right to choose their spouse qualifies as an intolerable violation of human rights. Furthermore, in widening the scope of the injury to the broader context in Xinjiang, it becomes disturbingly clear this is a calculated assault on the Uyghurs’ group existence. In the long term, it diminishes Uyghur heritage by the decline of inter-communal marriages while simultaneously enlarging Han lineage. In the short term, it undermines Uyghur children’s identity by offending traditional Islamic family law. Muslim men can enter an interfaith marriage with women of other religions while still preserving the family’s Islamic identity since their descendants are meant to follow the father’s religion. Women, however, are required to wed Muslim men to continue their religious heritage. This is why forcing Muslim women to marry non-Muslim men in Xinjiang is thus doubly heinous as it, for one, violates the women’s personal rights, and, secondly, precludes their children from the Islamic identity they would otherwise be entitled to from birth.[20] Detainees within the political education camps have also described the CCP incentivizing Kazakhs and Uyghurs to intermarry with Hans with financial rewards worth US $13,000 and permission to apply for large loans from the state.[21]
Taken with the strictures on Uyghurs’ public and private lives listed above, it is clear China is targeting all facets of religious, ethnic, and cultural expression, thereby supplanting Uyghur traditions and customs with state propaganda. It is no coincidence that by detaining parents and religious leaders, China unravels the basic family units of the Uyghurs. Separating children from families to political education camps and “orphanages” further confirms the Strike Hard Campaign’s final target.[22]
It should be uncontroversial to claim state policy has the effect of soft or cultural genocide. The Uyghurs qualify as an ethnic and religious group since the targeted discrimination against them is manifest. Now recall that genocide need only constitute the destruction in whole or in part of a people’s practices and norms to qualify as cultural genocide – China does not have to eliminate all remnants of Islam within Xinjiang overnight. Given the evidence of forbidding cultural and religious expression, the physical destruction of religious structures and symbols, and the sanctioning (which is to say attempted extinction) of Uyghur language, China is attacking the cultural, ethnic, and religious identity of the Uyghur community.
But what of hard genocide? Uyghur leaders have requested assistance from the international community, claiming China’s policies are “precursors to genocide”.[23] The sweeping erasure of Uyghur rights and high detention rates, they say, are likely to lead to even more violent measures, including mass murder. But genocide, even in its hard form involving the physical destruction of a group in whole or in part, has already begun. Article 2 from the Genocide Convention, as quoted above, holds the prevention of births within a group to constitute genocide. We have seen that China’s policies of family and child separation have already had the effect of destabilizing Uyghur family units, and the reports of forced marriages with financial rewards indicate deliberate coordination to prevent Uyghurs from reproducing. Thomas Cliff, a research fellow at the ANU college of Asia and the Pacific, has argued that the practices in Xinjiang are indeed “a form of genocide, although it’s not killing anybody.”[24] The restrictions on cultural education of Uyghur children further suggest this as China’s intention.
It may be argued that using the Genocide Convention is not specific enough on what counts as prevention of births, and there are many scholars who would look for more definitive evidence that genocide is imminent so as not to declare it exists preemptively. Even if this more cautious approach is taken, there are still alarming signs that suggest genocide is already in its incipient stages for the Uyghurs. Kurt Jonassohn and Karen Solveig’s work on categorizing genocide and its phases of development gives clear criteria for recognizing genocide in its early stages. The important precursors, argue Jonassohn and Solveig, are official statements from potential perpetrators of lethal principles and plans; refugees fleeing the area of conflict; amended government regulations and laws; and the appearance of misinformation or denial from the potential perpetrators.[25] These signs all provide more decisive evidence that genocide is occurring or about to start.
Some of these criteria are obviously met: mass surveillance has landed hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs in detention centers and political education camps, many on extra-judicial charges. China has also had to downplay the nature and scale of its Strike Hard Campaign as more reports surface.[26] However, Jonassohn and Solveig’s other conditions like mass refugee migration do not seem to be met at the moment. Many might point out that the situation in Xinjiang cannot be quite so dire without these crucial indicators.
The mass detention and policing of the Uyghur community should still give us pause about what happens next. Even the information we are aware of might be the metaphorical tip of the iceberg for the real severity of repression in Xinjiang. China has been known to promulgate misinformation in attempts to alter public and internal perception of its affairs: during the Patriotic Education Campaign in Tibet, the CCP released manufactured images of Tibetans attacking Han Chinese to Western media outlets, as well as detained Tibetans. Foreign journalists were also escorted through Potemkin-village-like city streets with Chinese actors posing as peaceful Tibetans.[27] China was then able to heavily distort the true events in Tibet with fabricated evidence. Similar attempts to paint a rosy picture of the Strike Hard Campaign should arouse suspicion towards Beijing.
Even if one disagrees with the conclusion that China is committing hard genocide against the Uyghurs, it is undeniable that Beijing’s policies qualify as gross human rights violations and demand a response from the international community. What can be done to help the Uyghurs? Many ambassadors have already called on China to disclose the reality of the state’s policies in Xinjiang.[28] Western nations like Canada, Australia, Germany, France, and the U.S. have taken up the concern with Chinese diplomats without waiting for more public support in their own nations. They have specifically asked to meet Party Secretary Chen Quanguo to confront him over his harsh tactics. Similar pressure from the international community has worked before. In Tibet, for example, the international community coordinated on boycotting the 2008 Olympics in Beijing to get China to hold talks with the Dalai Lama and other Tibetan separatists.[29] Facing humiliation, China yielded and opened a dialogue with the exiled Tibetan government over the riots and suppression in the region (though the talks never produced substantive results). This seems a viable approach to dissuading China against its harsh measures in Xinjiang.
Stronger measures include economic sanctions and military action. Neither of these strategies would be appropriate unless genocide or plans for genocide were undeniable, and their efficacy is not readily apparent. Economic sanctions, for instance, do not always produce desired results; Stephanie Chan has argued that sanctions designed to pressure states specifically to improve their record of human rights often do not change the targeted nation’s practices but merely affirm the sanctioning country’s morality in contrast to the targeted one.[30] China has also shown how far it will tolerate economic strategies in its tariff dispute with the Trump administration. This option seems unfeasible. Likewise, military action is unlikely to come with the approval of the UN since China has a permanent seat with veto power on the security council. Only something truly drastic could prompt a response independent of the Security Council. Moreover, as long as China controls the details of its Strike Hard Campaign, it is unlikely the international community will ever realize the full scale of the Uyghurs’ repression.
What is clear is that China will take any reprieve the international community gives it in human rights. After considering holding China’s access to American markets conditional on improving its human rights record in 1994, President Bill Clinton abandoned this approach. He, along with the other developed nations of the world, hoped China would converge with international standards on its own.[31] China has repeatedly shown that it will not coalesce to such strategies unless there is real pressure behind them, such as the threats of boycott at the 2008 Olympics. It is imperative, therefore, that the international community muster a unified response to China if it wants the treatment of the Uyghur Muslims to improve. The situation in Xinjiang has arguably already met the definition of genocide and China shows no intention of slowing down its campaign. History’s greatest tragedies have occurred not just alongside but because of the complacency of others who were not paying attention and could have taken action. Hence, the prospect of mass murder against the Uyghurs cannot be ignored.
[1] Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, 1.
[2] Stone, Dan. The Historiography of Genocide. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, 13-14, 22.
[3] “‘Eradicating Ideological Viruses’: China’s Campaign of Repression Against Xinjiang’s Muslims.” 2019. Human Rights Watch. September 9, 2018. https://www.hrw.org/report/2018/09/09/eradicating-ideological-viruses/chinas-campaign-repression-against-xinjiangs#, 10.
[4] HRW, 21.
[5] “China Has Turned Xinjiang into a Police State like No Other.” 2019. The Economist. May 31, 2018. https://www.economist.com/briefing/2018/05/31/china-has-turned-xinjiang-into-a-police-state-like-no-other.
[6] HRW, 20-23.
[7] Economist Police State.
[8] Economist Police State.
[9] Economist Police State.
[10] Economist Police State.
[11] Seytoff, Alim. 2019. “Xinjiang Authorities Regularly Impose ‘Home Stays’ on Muslim Uyghur Families: Rights Group.” Radio Free Asia. May 14, 2018. https://www.rfa.org/english/news/uyghur/homestays-05142018153305.html.
[12] Lyons, Kate. 2018. “Uighur Leaders Warn China’s Actions Could Be ‘Precursors to Genocide’.” The Guardian. December 6, 2018. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/dec/07/uighur-leaders-warn-chinas-actions-could-be-precursors-to-genocide.
[13] HRW, 36.
[14] Smith, Warren W. 2010; 2009;. Tibet’s Last Stand?: The Tibetan Uprising of 2008 and China’s Response. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 61-67.
[15] Smith, 63-64.
[16] HRW, 12.
[17] HRW, 38.
[18] Economist Police State.
[19] HRW, 110.
[20] Marie Buisson, Johanna. “Interfaith Marriage for Muslim Women.” Crosscurrents 66, no. 4 (2016): 430-449, 443.
[21] HRW, 40.
[22] HRW, 5, 82.
[23] The Guardian.
[24] The Guardian.
[25] Jonassohn, Kurt, and Karin Solveig. Björnson. 1999. Genocide and Gross Human Rights Violations: in Comparative Perspective. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 95.
[26] Birtles, Bill. 2018. “Inside China’s ‘Vocational Training Centres’.” ABC News. October 16, 2018. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-10-16/china-defends-vocational-training-centres/10384096.
[27] Smith, 7, 47.
[28] “The West Begins to Stir over China’s Massive Abuse of Muslims.” 2019. The Economist. November 22, 2018. https://www.economist.com/china/2018/11/24/the-west-begins-to-stir-over-chinas-massive-abuse-of-muslims.
[29] Smith, 160-172.
[30] Chan, Stephanie. 2018. “Principle versus profit: Debating human rights sanctions.” Human Rights Review 19 (1): 45-71, 45-71.
[31] Economist West Response to China.
Policy & Political Review 