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This transcript was exported on Aug 12, 2020 - view latest version here. Mark Elliott: Well, good afternoon and thank you again for your patience. My name is Mark Elliott. I'm a professor of Chinese and Inner Asian history, here at Harvard. Also Vice Provost of International Affairs and a former Director of the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies. And I've been asked by the Director, Professor Michael Szonyi, to on his behalf extend a warm welcome to all of you here today for our talk; Chinese De-Extremification Campaign in Xinjiang by Adrian Zenz of the European School of Culture and Theology. Mark Elliott: I want to begin by thanking the co-sponsors of today's event, and they include the PhD committee on Inner Asian and Altaic Studies, the East Asian Legal Studies program, represented here by Professor Bill Alford, and the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Islamic Studies Program, represented here by its Executive Director, Harry Bastermajian. Harry, where are you? There you are. Thanks. Mark Elliott: So, just a word to everybody. This event is being audio recorded, but there is no video recording today. And after Dr. Zenz's remarks, which will last approximately 40 minutes or so, we will do the usual Q&A and open the floor up to questions from the audience. Mark Elliott: Everyone here, I presume, is aware to some degree of recent developments in Xinjiang. Well, for nearly 10 years, there has been increased ethnic and political tension in the region. During the past 12 to 18 months, the situation has become considerably more dire, with mounting evidence of restricted religious, academic, and personal freedoms, and of the mass incarceration of hundreds of thousands of Chinese citizens. Nearly all of them Muslims, mostly Uyghurs, but also Kazakhs and Kyrgyzs. On apparent suspicion of supporting Islamic fundamentalism or extremism, of having sympathies for Xinjiang independence, or of being insufficiently loyal to the party, or some combination of one or more of these, or other charges. Mark Elliott: Reports on the establishment of the so-called re-education centers began to appear in the media a little over a year ago, and have now received considerable attention in the world media, and have also come to the attention of various parliamentary bodies around the world, as well as at the UN. These centers go by a variety of names in Chinese, the most official, I think, being jizhong jiaoyu zhuanhua peixun zhongxin, but there are a bunch of other names, very unstandardized if you look around. In English, they're called re-education camps or re-education centers. Some media voices have given them other names such as internment camps or concentration camps, both names going back to the 19th century, in fact. Our speaker, who has recently published the authoritative study on the creation of these centers, based on Chinese documents primarily, sees them as part of a "Large-scale, extrajudicial detention system." And estimates are that somewhere between several hundred thousand, perhaps as many as a million people, are being held in these facilities, which continue to be built today. Mark Elliott: The significant deterioration of the situation in Xinjiang is a cause for great concern among many China scholars. Quite a number of us can remember visiting the region when ethnic tension was not such an issue and when security concerns were nonexistent. My own first visit to Xinjiang came in 1983, a very Recent Developments in Xinjiang, with Adrian Zen... (Completed 07/09/20) Page 1 of 24 Transcript by Rev.com This transcript was exported on Aug 12, 2020 - view latest version here. different place than Xinjiang today, for sure. Today, we see that the region is under strict surveillance and that mobility of certain individuals is greatly limited. Many of our colleagues at universities in Xinjiang, including a number who have provided academic guidance and assistance to Harvard students, have been taken away and held incommunicado. The voices of intellectuals, poets, artists, and writers have been largely silenced. In sum, if reports of the widespread repression that is being visited upon Uyghurs and others in Xinjiang are true, we appear to be witnessing a violation of human rights on a mass scale. Mark Elliott: This situation is made even more distressing and confusing by the absence of much reliable, local information about what is actually happening. To help us understand these developments, we turn today to Dr. Adrian Zenz. He is lecturer in social research methods at the European School of Culture and Thought in Korntal, in Germany, which I believe is not far from Stuttgart, is that right? Dr. Zenz earned his PhD in Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge, that's the real Cambridge, the original Cambridge. Having studied before that at the University of Auckland, in New Zealand. He's an expert on Chinese minority policies with a research focus on ethnic policy and recruitment in Tibetan regions and in Xinjiang. He is engaged in researching minority language requirements and government recruitment in China's Tibetan areas, as well as in Xinjiang, focusing especially on the recruitment of security related personnel and minority teacher recruitment. And as you see, the title of his talk today, China's De- Extremification Campaign in Xinjiang. Please join me in welcoming Dr. Adrian Zenz. Adrian Zenz: Wow. Thank you so much, everyone. Thank you, Mark, for this very helpful introduction. Thank you for the kind invitation to Harvard. It's nice to be back, in a sense. I've not been back in 24 years. I attended Harvard Summer School in 1994, if I remember correctly. I'm getting to that age where you have to start to try to remember what year something was in. So anyways, it's good to be back. Even though the topic of today's talk is rather sobering, Mark already did a very good job at giving us a general introduction of sorts to the region. Not planning to give a detailed ethnographic explanation, as you can see from the map, we are talking today about the so-called Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, which is home to about 11 to 12 million Uyghur's out of a regional population of 24 million. The region has close to 14 million Muslim minorities in total, this also includes Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Tajik, Hui, and a number of other minorities. Adrian Zenz: Now, to jump straight into the analysis, I'm a bit of a data analyst among anthropologists. I think I was one of the very few Cambridge PhDs who had charts in the PhD thesis and voluntarily attended an SPSS data analysis seminar, which my fellow students had to attend because of their research funding, knowing that they would never ever touch it again, after their field work. But here I am. And I have brought a few charts for you today, to give you a wider context. Now, we know there have been ethnic tensions in the regions. Of course, Xinjiang was taken over by Mao Zedong's armies in 1949. The Uyghurs did have a brief period of attempting an independent state. They have been a sort of very loosely governed people for a long part of history with Chinese overlordship, very changeable and fluid arrangements, as is so typical of these Western Chinese and central Asian regions. Adrian Zenz: Recent Developments in Xinjiang, with Adrian Zen... (Completed 07/09/20) Page 2 of 24 Transcript by Rev.com This transcript was exported on Aug 12, 2020 - view latest version here. Now, this chart here shows the red line, a national rural disposable income, as a percent of urban disposable income. What this is supposed to show is the inequality gap between the countryside and the cities, which is one of the major axes of socioeconomic inequality in China. You see under Deng Xiaoping, rural incomes were just over half of urban average disposable incomes. If it was at 100%, then rural and urban incomes were the same. So, the lower the curves go, the higher the inequality, the higher the income gap between urban and rural. You can see with Decollectivization and then Marketization, especially proposed and promoted under Jiang Zemin in the 1990s, the so-called socialist market economy, these discrepancies increased very significantly. Adrian Zenz: The national level is the red line. You see that in both Kashgar, which is a Uyghur majority prefecture in the South, has a Uyghur population of 90%, so it epitomizes a Muslim Uyghur region, and Xinjiang, the drop was much steeper, as shown by the red arrow. The gap between national and Xinjiang and then Kashgar was substantial. Meaning the inequality, the difference between rural and urban incomes, especially in Kashgar, if you follow the green line, which is the lowest and stays lower until very recently, this income inequality was more pronounced. Adrian Zenz: Now, the little fire here is by the year of 2009, which is the year marking the Ürümqi riots, which were widespread riots in Xinjiang between the Uyghur's and the Han Chinese. And this was interesting to look at this from a little socioeconomic perspective, to understand some of the wider context in which all of this is happening. And of course, Xi Jinping has proposed the moderately prosperate society, which originally Hu Jintao talked about in the late 2000s. But he's really working towards reaching this goal. As you can see, progress is being made. But of course, all of this happened after decades of strong inequality, which is the wider context.