Last year, I shared a select few essays from my time as an MA student at King’s College London in 2023(MA International Political Economy). I have decided to publish the remainder of those essays now on my blog.

This essay was the final piece for Dr Kira Brenner’s ‘Political Economy of Development’ course. Of all my essays, this is the one where I needed to pause before uploading. Xinjiang is an extremely controversial topic, and as important as it is to me I’m aware that writing about the region can have repercussions. I still feel I may regret posting this, but here it is. My thanks goes to Dr Brenner, who stood out as one of the most supportive members of staff I met at KCL.

The original essay question was as follows: To what degree is the uprooting of minority culture and way of life in Xinjiang in the name of development a legitimate means of advancing the nation as a whole?

This essay explores how the repression of minority groups in Xinjiang relates to CCP national development demands. Drawing on Gellner’s (1994) homogenisation theory and Harvey’s (1981) ‘Spatial fix’, Xinjiang development is shown to be organised under a highly colonial mindset, involving a concerted effort to mould minority groups into a standardised image of the rest of China. This has both economic and security intentions, but this essay argues it is an illegitimate approach resulting in severe abuse of human rights.

Xinjiang’s re-education camps

Xinjiang came into the wider public eye through the discovery of so called ‘re-education camps’, which were quickly compared to the concentration camps of WW2 Europe (UK Government, 2022). This has brought to attention the PRC’s treatment of the region’s minority groups who have been at the brunt of dispossession policies and repression at least since the 1990s (Becquelin, 2004).

United Nations Human Rights (UNHR) has received repeated allegations since 2017 from civil rights groups that Uyghurs, one of the minority groups of Xinjiang, were disappearing and that ‘re-education camps’ had been discovered in the region as a means of incarcerating them. Numerous reports alleged huge-scale and arbitrary detention, individual accounts reporting torture, sexual violence and forced labour (UNHR, 2022).

The Xinjiang provincial government argues that the re-education camps are a counter-terrorism measure; vocational training centres for instigators of minor offenses. According to regional government, their counter-terrorism measures ensure human rights in Xinjiang. (People’s government of Xinjiang Autonomous Region, 2022). A 2019 report highlights the extent to which the provincial government has combatted terrorism: “since 2014, Xinjiang has destroyed 1,588 violent and terrorist gangs, arrested 12,995 terrorists, seized 2,052 explosive devices, punished 30,645 people for 4,858 illegal religious activities, and confiscated 345,229 copies of illegal religious materials” (PRC State Council, 2019). The scale of the crackdown means it is highly unlikely that all was genuine terrorism and suggests ulterior motives.

UNHR interviewed 24 former detainees, finding that none of them were given trials and there was no way to challenge their referral to a ‘vocational training facility’. None of them were able to leave the facilities. Detainees stayed in the camps for between 2 and 18 months and were not informed of how long they would be there (UNHR, 2022). Two thirds of interviewees described subjection to torture as well as forced medication and injections. Attempted indoctrination is also evident. (UNHR, 2022). UNHR concludes that severe human rights abuses have been carried out in Xinjiang under the guise of its counter-terrorism policy, directly and indirectly affecting minority communities (UNHR, 2022).

The BBC uncovered what have now been named the ‘Xinjiang Police Files’, containing images of thousands of people incarcerated in Xinjiang’s camps (Sudworth, 2022). Investigation of the documents refutes CCP claims that the camps are mere schools and finds proof that they are an intentional targeting of religious and cultural freedoms. Extrapolating the data suggests that around 1.2 million people could be incarcerated across Xinjiang within the camps. In Shufu county, which the data covers, 12% of the adult population would have been in camps when the data was retrieved (Sudworth, 2022).

As this essay will show, the mass incarceration of minority groups is the most recent stage of longer term control and repression in the name of nation building and an aggressive pursuit of national development.

Homogenisation as a development tool

This essay presents the treatment of Xinjiang minority groups as a homogenisation process, as theorized by Gellner (1994). Acknowledging comparisons of Xinjiang development with colonialism (Grose, 2022; Tynen, 2022; Ye, 2022) this essay complements homogenisation theory with Harvey’s (1981) ‘spatial fix’, which explores the colonial compulsion to expand territory to grow domestic markets. The Chinese sociological theory ‘frontier studies’ is compared to this theoretical base, highlighting how it is actively utilised to inform Xinjiang policy.

Gellner (1994) presents cultural homogenisation as a phenomenon in which culturally diverse people are moulded into a national standard, driven by industrialism. Pre-industrial civilisations have a complex division of labour, often accompanied by cultural diversity. Ethnicity or nationality is a state of shared common ground within a society, delimited by an ethnonym and strong sentiment for the group. Ethnicity becomes politicised when the consciousness of a group becomes a belief that it should also encompass a political boundary. The conditions of industrial society erode the structures sustaining cultural difference.

Conversi (2007) highlights that homogenisation is an active process. This proves essential for the following analysis, which treats the Chinese state as an actively homogenizing agent. Homogenisation should be separated from concepts of unification, but a state may use the two concepts interchangeably for political gain. Nationalism is a meeting of state and culture and homogenisation theory suggests cultural standardisation is necessary for industry to function effectively. (Conversi, 2007).

Gellner’s base understanding that homogenisation is a result of industrialisation somewhat lacks an active developmental paradigm. Homogenisation results from the conditions of industrialisation but is not the engine of it. Harvey’s (1981) ‘spatial fix’ complements this shortfall by providing an explanation for why states expand territory to fuel domestic markets. Harvey explores how internal pressures on production compel states to expand.

Harvey evidently had colonialism and empire in mind when formulating the spatial fix and critics may correctly point out that Xinjiang is within China’s territory. The west of China is however relatively undeveloped and politically is intentionally treated as a hinterland. This differentiation is so pervasive that a field of study called ‘frontier studies’ (Bianjiang xue) has developed in Chinese academia to rationalise the apparent need for a development approach specific to domestic frontier regions (Carlson, 2012). Some scholars of Xinjiang’s development thus argue that development policy has become a form of ‘domestic colonialism’ (Grose, 2022). The spatial fix thus remains useful in establishing the compulsion of the CCP to develop Xinjiang so aggressively.

China’s own policy is however informed by the academics of frontier studies (Ma, 2017; Carlson, 2012). Carlson (2012) tracks the development of this uniquely Chinese field and how it relates to both geopolitics and the treatment of the local populace. Frontier studies intellectual Ma Dezheng was directly charged by Beijing to focus on territorial issues and his stance is in line with nationalist mentality building (Carlson, 2012).

How to manage frontier regions has only come into question since the fall of the Soviet Union and the rapid rise of China to the level of a global power (Carlson, 2012). International confidence has been paired with domestic unrest within periphery regions including protests in Tibet in 2008 and the 2009 unrest in Xinjiang. These bouts of unrest did not seriously challenge state power, but they did accelerate thinking on how to better control the frontiers. Frontier studies looks to historical management of China’s western regions for inspiration, but faces the issue that historically China’s borders were more fluid than they are now (Carlson, 2012), and thus so was Sinicization – China’s particular brand of homogenization.

Carlson’s above view highlights the value of applying Gellner’s theorising to Xinjiang. He recognises that politics creates a space for defining ‘Chinese-ness’, just as Gellner theorises that as an ‘ethnicity’ is compelled to politicise it solidifies nationalist sentiment. China officially designated 56 Chinese ethnic groups in the 1950s within this intellectual environment (Ma, 2017). In defining specific cultural groups, complexity in regional cultural difference was reduced – a step towards homogenisation, whilst appearing to recognise difference.

National and regional development

Since the beginning of China’s reform period in 1978, GDP growth has averaged at 9% annually. It has become an upper-middle income country and 800 million people have been lifted out of poverty (World Bank, 2022). Following four decades of rapid growth, China’s economy is now slowing (World Bank, 2019). The World Bank argues its drivers of growth, investment, low-cost manufacturing and exports, have reached their limit, resulting in economic and social imbalances. The World Bank suggests a shift in economic structure to focus on services, and a change from intensive investment to increased consumption (World Bank, 2022). labour force growth is slowing, as is ROI and productivity growth (World Bank, 2022). China is thus compelled to look for new sources of growth.

In 2000, the CCP central government initiated the Great Western Development (GWD) programme, injecting major investment and offering preferential treatment to China’s western provinces with the intention to accelerate industrialisation (Jia et al, 2020). The study found GDP growth increased by 1.6 points in the target regions, but had not accompanied increased wages and employment. The increase in growth is predominantly registered in infrastructure projects themselves and does not represent an increase in factor productivity.

Regional growth targets in China are a competition. Provincial GDP growth targets at the beginning of 2021 varied from 6% to 10%, each province trying to outdo the others (Xin, 2021). The ‘Open up the North-west’ policy, which started in 1992, was integral to ensuring sustained growth averaging over 10% annually over the 1990s (Becquelin, 2004) but it has since slowed. Xinjiang’s 2022 targets were at the lower end compared to all other provinces, targeting 6% GDP growth and 10% in fixed asset investment (Tian Shan Wang, 2022).

In September 2020, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi claimed that “development is the master key to solving all problems” (Ferchen, 2020). This was in context to China’s flagship international project, the Belt and Road Initiative, but equally applies to domestic policy. There is however awareness that development is no panacea. President Xi Jinping noted in leaked documents regarding the re-education camps: “We say that development is the top priority and the basis for achieving lasting security, and that’s right…But it would be wrong to believe that with development every problem solves itself” (Ferchen, 2020).

Analysis

Development, or colonial expansion of markets?

Considering China’s slowing national growth, expanding growth centres past the east coast is increasingly important. While the highest profile economic development initiative in China is along the south coast concentrated in Guangdong province, development of the West has both potential benefit for international trade with a rising central Asia, and a strengthened consumer base for the domestic market. The issue is how the CCP chooses to pursue development.

Tynen (2022) argues that Uyghurs have experienced ‘colonialism through development’. As the CCP promotes economic assistance, private industry growth has appropriated Uyghur land ownership and capital. The west of China is relatively undeveloped and politically is intentionally treated as a hinterland. Policy to ‘open up Xinjiang to the world’ was introduced in the 1990s, an economic development plan set to create economic zones, develop border trade and bring major investment to the region. Xinjiang would become a regional economic hub and China’s main cotton growing region, and raise living standards (Becquelin, 2020). Becquelin argues that throughout this process, the main government goal has been to rein in Xinjiang more closely to China, utilising Han migration, developing communications and growing military presence.

Alongside the establishment of economic zones, the fiscal relationship with Beijing was overhauled. Xinjiang retains 80% of local tax revenue, compared to the usual 50%. In addition to this, fiscal transfers from central government and a much higher remainder of SOEs in Xinjiang has ensured significant state control within the Xinjiang economy (Becquelin, 2020).

The core natural resources of Xinjiang are oil and cotton. A policy named ‘one black, one white’ promoted oil extraction and cultivation of cotton. Cotton in particular has driven further migration to Xinjiang, while ensuring large-scale land reclamation (Becquelin, 2020). The cost of imported cotton is however cheaper than locally grown cotton. Cotton in practice is hard to draw profit from, even at a large scale and the continued production is sustained by high subsidies. Cotton is sold at a fixed price to state-owned cooperatives, but is then resold by the authorities at market price for a profit. The state promotion of the cotton industry is thus, argues Becquelin (2020), a land reclamation policy.

The colonial structures extend past the state. The internment camps funnel inmates into factories, funded by private sector actors from outside of Xinjiang. Byler (2022) accounts the case of a glove factory owner announcing on television the ‘recruiting’ of 600 people for the factory, but these workers were sourced from internment camps. “We have generated more than US$ 6 million in sales. We plan to reach 1,000 workers by the end of the year”, the owner stated (Byler, 2022, pp.165).

Incarcerated minority citizens are hence being used as practically free labour to turn an easy profit for companies based elsewhere in China. As rising labour costs nationally eat into national manufacturing productivity, slave labour in Xinjiang keeps costs down. Since 2018, the government provides subsidies to build factories and ship from Xinjiang, exacerbating and seemingly supporting the problem. Promise of low cost labour has increasingly attracted factories to set up there since the camps opened (Byler, 2022).

homogenisation – development as cultural control

A state report in 2013 stated that Xinjiang authorities believed ethnic minorities must be ‘transformed’ through education and training measures. Counties were made responsible for realising this target and this target appears to have culminated in the internment camps (Tynen, 2022). The CCP’s development policies go further than economic goals. Hallmarks of minority culture are also gradually disappearing. This is, argues Grose (2022), a core action in colonial projects.

Traditional living and housing arrangements have been declared unhygienic and uncivilised. A ‘poverty alleviation’ policy has forced minority families to move into Han style housing, to ‘improve’ the quality of their lives. As the use of re-education centres grew in 2017, President Xi announced the ‘Beautiful China’ initiative, aimed at improving sanitation and environmental awareness nationwide. Xinjiang officials used the initiative to promote ‘beautification’ of traditional rural communities. This in practice involved dismantling traditional elements of houses, including some resembling traditional fixtures elsewhere in China. The latter remain untouched. (Grose, 2022).

Tynen (2022) argues that violence towards Muslim minorities extends past the camps and manifests in invisible forms of state violence. Visible forms include housing demolition and detainment, but everyday violence pervades Xinjiang society. These are everyday normalised activities: ethnic identity on ID cards; police-controlled movements and bureaucracy, passports for mobility – conditions that remove agency from citizens. The monitoring of ID cards has also been used to locate and channel citizens into internment camps (Tynen, 2022).

State promoted Han migration to Xinjiang feeds the cultural homogenisation process by replacing the dominant regional culture with the nationally promoted culture. In 1953, 75% of Xinjiang’s population were Uyghurs. In 2022, due to sustained policies promoting Han migration to the region, the Uyghur population had dropped to 45% and the Han population had risen to 42% (UNHR, 2022). Between 1990 and 1997, the urban population of Xinjiang jumped from 3.6 million to 5.1 million, as migrant workers flocked there. In 2020, this reached 14.5 million, 56% of the total Xinjiang population (National Bureau of Statistics of China, 2021).

Conclusion

Xinjiang’s re-education camps should serve as a warning to the limits of capitalist development. The predominant logic assumes that countries move through industrial stages. The high-income countries, in pushing agriculture and manufacturing onto developing nations, have the incentive to source their manufacturing and commodity needs from low labour cost nations. Yet at a certain point, as seen in China, those ‘world factories’ shift away from earlier industrial stages to secure their own growth and low-wage labour must come from a new source. The ‘domestic colonialism’ visible in Xinjiang has resulted from the desire to maintain growth through opening ‘new’ markets and keep the Chinese world factory ticking. Through a process of cultural homogenization, the Chinese state has attempted to ‘standardise’ Xinjiang’s population to make it more conducive to its national economic and security targets. In doing so it has abused human rights in a highly illegitimate approach to national development.

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