Description
Much has been written on the brutality of China’s “vocational re-education plan” implemented in Xinjiang. Beijing’s camps have been first installed in 2014, but their re-education policy conducted on mass scale has been detected by the international community only in 2017. Since then, the brutality and the lawlessness of what China continues to praise as an “anti-terrorist system” has been systematically denounced, aiming at pushing the country to dismantle all camps and guarantee basic freedom and humanitarian rights to Uighur communities residing in Xinjiang.
This paper argues that the current internment policy is framed into a specific “anti-terrorist” legal framework that is broadly accepted overall China, creating a supportive narrative for a further upsurge of “anti-extremist” initiatives in the region. To justify this generalized internal support for Xinjiang vocational camps the paper investigates on the targeted anti-Uighurs policies that have been systematically implemented in the region over the last fifteen years, presenting the upsurge of these anti-Islamic practices as the inevitable consequence of the gradual yet significant shift in authority from the state to the Party that has been characterizing the functioning of institutional structures and ideological praxis of ethnic governance, legitimizing Beijing direct intervention in the implementation of China’s contemporary ethnic policy.
The paper offers an assessment of the escalation of anti-extremist regulations implemented in Xinjiang from 2009 (Urumqi riots – the most recent violent anti-Han protest that erupted following the police intervention to stop a Uighur march calling for a full investigation into the Shaoguan incident, another civil disturbance which took place overnight on 25/26 June in Guangdong, where a Uighur was accused of sexually assaulting a Han Chinese female) to 2019 (Xinjiang Papers – about 400 pages of Chinese internal documents leaked to New York Times and documenting the sharp debate within the Chinese Communist Party concerning the anti-extremists methods to be implemented to “harmonize” the region).
This assessment is crucial to decode both key points and official narratives of China’s internal debate on ethnic policy, and in particular Xinjiang policy. Also, the analysis will be able to explain how China’s flowing legal system is used to justify “anti-terrorist” practices in the region, and to shed light on whether Xinjiang “best practices” could become a reference for promoting authoritarian ethnic policies in other regions in the country, and in particular in Tibet and Inner Mongolia.
