Sinister Sinicization: The Chinese Crackdown on Uyghur Muslims

By- Ayush Upadhyay

In 2014 the Chinese government started the “People’s War on Terror”. This was a major assault on the freedom, identity, and lives of the Uyghur people. With time this crackdown evolved from the creation of a police state to a massive "human re-engineering" project (Çaksu 2020, 177) The Uyghurs are Muslims and for their faith and culture, they have faced a lot of discrimination from the Chinese state. China's government has faced resistance to its homogenizing in these regions, like in Xiangjiang. Initially, the government tried to market the camps as vocational training centres. Ultimately, when the extent of atrocities became tough to conceal, the Government linked this project to combatting extremism, separatism, and terrorism. In this manner, the state would go on to securitize the issue by making it about state sovereignty and safety. In this case, the state intends to Sinicize these Uyghur Muslims. The Chinese government is mostly Han Chinese and intends to promote Han culture. Ole Weaver's idea that something becomes a security problem when the elites in a society decide to call it that way, is validated here (Weaver 1995, 6) The idea in traditional security studies that security comes before language, does not hold. The government’s speech act, the securitization, is not in proportion to the threat that was present.

Women have faced some of the worst things because of this crackdown. As the government attempts to alter the demographic in the Uyghur regions, the politics on the bodies of women becomes more blatant and daunting. One way the state has tried to increase the Han presence is by promotion of interethnic marriages. This takes an extreme form as officials forcefully live with women (Nazeer 2022) This is an instance where the women are subjected to immense fear and stress. Gulruy Asqar is a Uyghur woman whose nephew and brother were taken away by the state. Her mother asked her to keep quiet to prevent things from getting worse. She calls this the ‘mentality of learnt helplessness’ which is taught to Ughur children by their parents (Mistreanu 2021) This silence is reminiscent of the silence talked by Lene Hansen in her critique of the Copenhagen school. In Foucauldian terms, this is the ‘conduct of conduct’ that makes people adhere to certain ideas and limitations and work within the framework of the dominating power, without realizing it.  Uyghur men are often taken away and their abductions by the state are used by the state to threaten the women into submission. This could mean being forced into marriage with a Han man. In the case of Uyghur women, the biopolitics revolves around controlling fertility Women have been subjected to forced sterilizations, IUD implantations, and abortions (Mistreanu 2021) Uyghur women have intersectional identities being both a woman and Muslim. It is the failure of the securitization theory that while women’s reproductivity is instrumentalized by the state, gender is subsumed in the securitization discourse.  

Sophia’s Drawings

  The Copenhagen school finds gender-based insecurity to be of less utility when put together with other referent objects that are national, religious, or racial (Hansen 2000) However, Judith Butler’s body performance understanding is important in analyzing the insecurity of the Uyghurs. It is not just the voice of the Uyghurs that the state has tried to regulate, it is the entirety of their being. Uyghur women are told to not wear veils, wear long dresses, or even braid their hair (Mistreanu 2021) Similarly for men long beards are prohibited. Offences that can invite punishment include arbitrary things like owning extra food, fasting, or owning a tent (Çaksu 2020, 182) One of the women, Sophia, who survived the camp tells how she used to draw the various things she saw in the camp (Refer image) (Mistreanu 2021) This is one way to step outside of the silence that marks the life of the Uyghur people. When the identity and culture of the people have been made a threat object by the state, then sustaining these is resistance. The Uyghur women play a very important role in this. Mothers pass this culture to the younger generation. At times this is necessitated as the men of the family are taken to the camps leaving the mothers to be alone, caregiving and homemaking.

The PARIS School emphasizes ‘praxis’ and does not limit itself to just analyzing the discourse (Mustafa 2019, 94) Necro politics allows us to understand the functioning of the camps. Here the exercise of both disciplinary power and governmentality can be observed. When Zumret Dawut was in the camp she was beaten up for giving a piece of bread to older diabetic women who needed it (Mistreanu 2021) This is an example of the exercise of disciplinary power. Later Dawut was given medicine and told that she had a “religious virus” because she exclaimed “Allah!” when being beaten (Mistreanu 2021) This brutality is made possible by the securitization of the region and even more so by the institution of the camp. Mbembe says that in a camp a slave is kept alive in a ‘state of injury’ ( Mbembe 2008, 21) This is in line with the Foucauldian idea that modernity has led to an emphasis on the ‘right to live’ One survivor of the camp, says –“It does not kill, it makes us worse than killed” (Çaksu 2020, 193) It is to accommodate this kind of brutality that Mbembe finds necro politics better suited than biopolitics. The critiques of the Copenhagen School argue that security should be more than the language. In this case, we see how transcending language is possible with art and bodily performativity. Nevertheless, de-securitization is the way forward. The Chinese Government's Islamophobia led it to this brutal and inhumane assimilation campaign. An explanation based on the idea of competing security can be given. This might imply that the Chinese state attempts to be areligious and therefore its sense of security is in contestation with the security of a group with piety. However, the Mobius strip conceptualization of security shows how the pursuit of security may invite insecurity as well. In this case, could the subjugation of the Uyghurs lead to their radicalization? Could this crackdown lead to increased insecurity in the Hui Muslim community? All these questions are worth pondering for the Chinese government.

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REFERENCES

·       Hansen, Lene. "The Little Mermaid's silent security dilemma and the absence of gender in the Copenhagen School." Millennium 29, no. 2 (2000): 285-306.

·       Wæver, Ole. Securitization and desecuritization. Vol. 5. Copenhagen: Centre for Peace and Conflict Research, 1993.

·       Mbembe, Achille. "Necropolitics." In Foucault in an Age of Terror: Essays on Biopolitics and the Defence of Society, pp. 152-182. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2008.

·       Foucault, Michel. "The history of sexuality: An introduction, volume I." Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage 95 (1990): 1-160.

·       NDTV.com. “China Imposing Forced Inter-Ethnic Marriages on Uyghur Women: Report,” n.d. https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/china-imposing-forced-inter-ethnic-marriages-on-uyghur-women-report-3531250.

·       Nazeer, Tasnim. “Uyghur Women and Forced Marriages in China.” The Diplomat, December 10, 2022. https://thediplomat.com/2022/12/uyghur-women-and-forced-marriages-in-china/.

·       Mistreanu, Simina. “Uyghur Women Are China’s Biggest Victims—and Its Strongest Resistance.” Foreign Policy, March 14, 2021. https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/03/12/uyghur-women-are-chinas-victims-and-resistance/

·       Sezal, Mustafa. "Origins of Differentiation in Critical Security Schools." PhD diss., PhD thesis, (unpublished), University of Groningen, Netherland, 2019.

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