Violent Paternalism: on the Banality of Uyghur Unfreedom

Volume 16 | Issue 24 | Number 4 | Article ID 5228 | Dec 15, 2018 The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus Violent Paternalism: On the Banality of Uyghur Unfreedom Darren Byler child with a book titled Our China during an assessment visit to a Uyghur home in Abstract: Since 2016 over one million Chinese 2017. The image was posted by the civil servants have been ordered to spend a Xinjiang Communist Youth League on series of weeks visiting assigned Turkic Muslim WeChat. “relatives.” These mostly Han urbanites have been tasked with instructing Uyghur and Kazakh farmers in political ideology and Often, the big brothers and sisters arrived subjecting them to tests of Chinese nationalism dressed in hiking gear. They appeared in the and Han cultural assimilation. When they villages in groups, their backpacks bulging, occupy the homes of their Turkic “relatives” their luggage crammed with electric water- they assess whether or not they should be sent kettles, rice-cookers, and other useful gifts for into the mass “reeducation” camp system. their hosts. They were far from home and Drawing on ethnographic field research, plainly a bit uncomfortable, reluctant to “rough interviews and state documents, this essay it” such a long way from the comforts of the argues that the systematic normalization of city. But these “relatives,” as they had been state-directed violent paternalism has produced told to call themselves, were on a mission, so a new kind of banality in Turkic minority they held their heads high when they entered experiences of unfreedom. the Uyghur houses and announced they had come to stay. Keywords: Uyghur, Muslim, Xinjiang, education centers, violent paternalism, The village children spotted the outsiders cultural repression, quickly. They heard their attempted greetings in the local language, saw the gleaming Chinese flags and round face of Xi Jinping pinned to their chests, and knew just how to respond. “I love China,” the children shouted urgently, “I love Father Xi.” Over the past year, reports have found their way out of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in western China of a campaign of religious and cultural repression of the region’s Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslim minorities, and of their detention and confinement in a growing network of razor-wire-ringed camps that China’s government at times has dubbed “transformation through education centers” and at others “counter-extremism A Han “older brother” presents a Uyghur training centers” and, recently, amid 1 16 | 24 | 4 APJ | JF international criticism, “vocational training parts of the country. These incidents, which centers.”1 State media has also recentlyhave been universally blamed on Uyghurs in described the mass occupation of minority state discourse, were generally spontaneous, homes through a “united as one family” small in scale and defensive responses to police program.2 brutality and state violence, rather than anything that resembled an organized The government describes such efforts as a insurgency. response to terrorism. Indeed, these camps can be seen as a logical, if grotesque, extension of The government’s current set of policies the government’s decades-long endeavor to through which it is attempting to transform eradicate the perceived “terrorism, ethnic Turkic Muslim societies in general, however, separatism, and religious extremism” of its rests on the assumption that most Uyghurs and ethnic minority Muslim population in the significant numbers of Kazakhs are terrorists, Uyghur homeland. This region, which the state separatists and extremists-in-waiting. They are refers to as its “new frontier” Xinjiang( ), and presumed to be “unsafe” simply by virtue of the country, have certainly experienced spasms their ethnic affiliation, age, employment and of unplanned violence as well as cases of travel history. Turkic minorities, especially premeditated violence born of UyghurUyghurs, who have practiced embodied forms desperation over decades of dispossession and of Islam through regular mosque attendance, discrimination. studied or taught unauthorized forms of Islam are often automatically detained and sent to When the state began to encourage Han settler the prison camps. migration in the Uyghur and Kazakh homelands through a series of “Open Up the West” and Much reporting has focused on the “New Silk Road” development initiatives, many unprecedented scale and penetration of the people native to the region saw their lands and surveillance technology deployed to carry out societies being partitioned by new zoning this campaign and on the ways China’s mechanisms, new Han settlement and the hard government has pressured other countries to infrastructures of commerce. Much of this assist in the work of forcibly repatriating development centered on state-privateUyghurs living abroad. But less attention has partnerships in natural resource extraction and been paid to the mobilization of more than a industrial farming which permitted andmillion Chinese civilians (mostly members of incentivized the exclusion of Uyghurs and other the Han ethnic majority) to aid the military and minorities in favor of Han-dominatedpolice in their campaign by occupying the corporations and settler communities. These homes of the region’s Uyghurs and other changes led to an inflation in the basic costs of Muslim minorities, and undertaking programs living which in turn produced new forms of of indoctrination and surveillance, while poverty and desperation, particularly in Uyghur presenting themselves as older siblings of the society.3 Protests over land seizure, police men and women they might then decide to brutality, and competition for jobs in the region consign to the camps.4 in turn prompted widespread state violence toward minority populations. The resulting In spring 2018, as an anthropologist returning atmosphere of brutal “crack-downs” or “hard- to a province where I had spent two years strike campaigns,” dispossession, and injustice researching Han and Uyghur social life, I met produced a cascading spiral of conflict between and interviewed Han civilian state workers in Uyghur civilians and the police and Han predominantly Uyghur urban districts and civilians, both in the province and in other towns across Southern Xinjiang. Over my time 2 16 | 24 | 4 APJ | JF there and in conversations online, both before Had a Uyghur host just greeted a neighbor in and after my visit, I spoke to around a dozen Arabic with the words “Assalamu Alaykum”? people about the experiences of “big sisters That would need to go in the notebook. Was and brothers” in Uyghur and Kazakh homes. that a copy of the Quran in the home? Was They ranged from civilian surveillance workers anyone praying on Friday or fasting during who performed these visits themselves, to Ramadan? Was a little sister’s dress too long or friends and family members of thesea little brother’s beard irregular? And why was surveillance workers. no one playing cards or watching movies? Some of these people were Han friends that I Of course it was possible they were doing their first built relationships with in 2011 when I home visit in a “healthy” secular family. began my fieldwork in Ürümchi. Others, Perhaps there were posters of Xi Jinping or primarily friends and family members of those Chinese flags on their walls. Maybe the directly involved in the program, werechildren spoke Mandarin even when they acquaintances I made outside of China. Still hadn’t been prompted. others were people I met in Ürümchi and Not all the most important evidence would be Kashgar in 2018.5 immediately visible. So the visitors were instructed to ask questions. Did their hosts I wanted to understand how different groups of have any relatives living in “sensitive regions?” Han civilians viewed their roles in the human Did anyone they knew live abroad? Did they engineering project and why they assented to have any knowledge of Arabic or Turkish? Had take part in it. I asked them to describe how they attended a mosque outside of their they viewed their work and its purpose. I also village? If the adult little brothers and sisters’ observed how they interacted with minorities answers felt incomplete, or if they seemed to be and with one another. I was curious as to hiding anything, the children should be whether they would be able to empathize with questioned next. the Uyghurs and Kazakhs they were involved in “transforming.” At times, the big brothers and sisters suspected the Uyghurs might be slippery, that however * * * cheerfully they might open their houses or declare their loyalty to the Chinese nation, Mapping out a schedule for the little brothers beneath their smiles and gestures of and sisters was the first order of business. In wholesome secularism there might lurk darker the mornings, they would sing together at daily allegiances, uncured attachments to their flag-raising ceremonies outside the village “diseased” religious ways. But there were Party office, at night they would attend classes simple ways to test for this kind of thing. One on Xi Jinping’s vision for a “New China.” The could offer a host a cigarette or a sip of beer; a teaching of “culture” would suffuse all the time hand could be extended in greeting to a little in between. They would converse in Mandarin sibling of the opposite gender, staying alert for and watch approved TV programs, practice signs of flinching. Or one could go out to the Chinese calligraphy, and sing patriotic songs. market for some freshly ground meat and And all the while the “relatives” would be propose that the family make dumplings. And watching the villagers and taking notes, then wait and watch to see if the Uyghurs assessing the Uyghurs’ level of loyalty to their would ask what kind of meat was in the bag. country, noting how well they spoke Chinese, staying alert for signs that their attachment to All of this was valuable evidence. Everything Islam might be “extreme.” that could be detected would be recorded, go 3 16 | 24 | 4 APJ | JF into notebooks and onto the online forms.

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