{"id":1102,"date":"2018-11-05T11:31:00","date_gmt":"2018-11-05T11:31:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/akademiye.org\/en\/?p=1102"},"modified":"2018-11-05T11:31:00","modified_gmt":"2018-11-05T11:31:00","slug":"how-china-is-trying-to-decimate-uighur-minds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/akademiye.org\/en\/?p=1102","title":{"rendered":"How China is trying to decimate Uighur minds"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

HongkongFreePress<\/a><\/p>\n

Academics, journalists and rights groups have recently documented the accelerating repression of the 11-million strong Uighur population living in Xinjiang, a spacious, strategic and resource-rich northwestern borderland of China. The burgeoning\u00a0security apparatus<\/a>, ubiquitous\u00a0surveillance<\/a>, gathering of\u00a0biometrics<\/a>, the use of\u00a0big data<\/a>, and similar technological features of Chinese authoritarianism have invited comparisons of Xinjiang to an open-air prison or to the dystopian visions captured in Orwell\u2019s \u201c1984\u201d or Zamyatin\u2019s \u201cWe.\u201d<\/p>\n

The\u00a0securitisation<\/a>\u00a0of the Xinjiang policy under Xi Jinping reveals several \u201cnew\u00a0<\/a>circumstances<\/a>.\u201d A stable Xinjiang is essential for China\u2019s vital energy security infrastructure and expansive foreign initiatives, such as Xi Jinping\u2019s signature Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). In contrast to previous administrations, the Xi leadership has resolved to treat the \u201cXinjiang problem\u201d as a primarily ethnic issue stemming from the insufficient integration of the Uighur community.<\/p>\n

On the national scale, the Xi leadership\u2019s growing concerns with maintaining the power of the Communist Party of China (CPC) have triggered a massive consolidation of the party-state apparatus and attacks on potentially subversive constituencies such as ethnic minorities, religious groups, lawyers and rights activists, and journalists. The security push is also enabled by adopting new technologies, many of which are being tested in Xinjiang on Uighurs and which\u00a0the CPC expects to turn China into a 21st-century cyber-power.<\/p>\n

Xi Jinping\u2019s \u201cnew era\u201d (xin shidai<\/em>) also brings enhancement to the CPC\u2019s ideational governance. While at his first national propaganda conference in\u00a02013<\/a>, Xi Jinping called in relatively mild terms for strengthening the \u201ccohesiveness\u201d of Chinese society, waging the \u201cpublic opinion struggle,\u201d and boosting the party\u2019s \u201cdiscursive power.\u201d Months into his second term in\u00a0August<\/a>, he spoke in a more dictatorial tone of preserving \u201cauthoritative and centralised leadership,\u201d maintaining \u201cpolitical and cultural security,\u201d and \u201ccultivating a new human capable of undertaking the immensity of national rejuvenation.\u201d Since 2012, the CPC has launched ideological campaigns against constitutional democracy, universal human rights, criticism of China\u2019s past and present, independent media and civil society and other ideas threatening the CPC\u2019s\u00a0ideological grip<\/a>\u00a0on China\u2019s public discourse.<\/p>\n

In Xinjiang, the enhanced ideational governance has been synergised through securitisation, bringing about an alarming reintroduction of seemingly long-outdated techniques of Maoist-style mass indoctrination. Since early March last year, possibly over one million Uighurs and other Turkic Muslims from Xinjiang allegedly prone to \u201creligious extremism\u201d have been imprisoned in political\u00a0re-education camps<\/a>. Ex-detainees have\u00a0testified<\/a>\u00a0about deaths, torture and appalling conditions in the facilities. The authorities have also detained several ethnic Kazakhs of Xinjiang origin who hold\u00a0Kazakhstani citizenship<\/a>. China\u2019s officials repeatedly denied the existence of the camps, only to\u00a0retroactively legalise<\/a>\u00a0them in early October 2018.<\/p>\n

The indoctrination methods described by ex-detainees include attending the flag-raising ceremony every morning followed by endless hours of singing red songs, lauding the party and Xi Jinping before their meals, and studying Chinese language, history and laws. The prisoners are allowed to speak only Chinese \u2013 speaking in Uighur is punished \u2013 and they are denied legal and medical assistance. The indoctrination also involves forced self-criticism and acknowledgement of alleged \u201ccrimes\u201d which are, however, not defined as criminal acts under state law.<\/p>\n

Uighurs are being detained for merely displaying their religious and ethnic identity, which is protected by the constitution and other laws. In the camps, they have to reject Islam and promise to consume alcohol and tobacco. The descriptions of physical torture and mental manipulation of Uighurs in today\u2019s Xinjiang prisons read as if quoted from Bao Ruowang\u2019s\u00a0memoir<\/a>\u00a0of incarceration in China from 1957 to 1964, or from the sources for\u00a0Ji Fengyuan<\/a>\u2019s and\u00a0Daniel Leese<\/a>\u2019s seminal studies of totalitarian mind-control during high Maoism. Meanwhile, the detention of massive numbers of Uyghurs is also causing anguish to their\u00a0families,<\/a>\u00a0and Uighur intellectual elites are being decimated by a campaign against so-called\u00a0\u201cTwo-Faced Persons.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

There are substantial differences between China under Xi Jinping and under Mao Zedong. The Cultural Revolution, to which the current re-engineering of Uighur society is often compared, was launched by Mao against perceived competitors for power inside the CPC, while the everyday horrors of the \u201cspiritual holocaust\u201d (as it was termed by the Chinese writer Ba Jin) were unleashed, often chaotically, by actors outside of the party bureaucracy \u2013 mostly radical propagandists, fanatical youth or loyal military units. In contrast, today\u2019s repression is carried out in a highly organised manner by an unprecedentedly effective party-state apparatus, starting at the top with the CPC\u2019s core leader and ending at the bottom with\u00a0grassroots-level cadres posted to Uighur homes<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Mao\u2019s totalitarian excesses also took place in a China which was almost completely isolated from the outside world and was barely surviving economically. The China of today is the second largest economy in the world, where the CPC\u2019s legitimisation through securing the material needs of China\u2019s citizens is preconditioned by economic openness and globalisation. The fact that China is tightly embedded in global trends means that its authorities can justify the anti-religious and anti-ethnic Xinjiang policy by trumped-up claims of Uighur religious extremism. It also means that the global public is relatively more aware of what is happening in Xinjiang.<\/p>\n

But similarly to the Maoist era, Xi Jinping\u2019s China considers Uighur minds as its enemy and has resolved to forcefully indoctrinate them with its official values and beliefs. The state has also resolved to normalise extrajudicial violence and psychological terror, to eliminate multiple Uighur elites, and to take complete control over education, culture, media, public debate and other ideational realms. China watchers have previously assessed the\u00a0Great Leap Backward<\/a>\u00a0which China is taking under Xi by stifling the ideological climate, the revamping of the political system, the rise in militant official nationalism, and the political divergence from the democratic world. Another symptom of the totalitarian regression is the immeasurable mental anguish systematically inflicted on the Uighurs, hardly imaginable in the twenty-first century before the rise of Xi Jinping.<\/p>\n

Source:https:\/\/www.hongkongfp.com\/2018\/11\/05\/china-trying-decimate-uighur-minds\/<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

HongkongFreePress Academics, journalists and rights groups have recently documented the accelerating repression of the 11-million strong Uighur population living in Xinjiang, a spacious, strategic and resource-rich northwestern borderland of China. The burgeoning\u00a0security apparatus, ubiquitous\u00a0surveillance, gathering of\u00a0biometrics, the use of\u00a0big data, and similar technological features of Chinese authoritarianism have invited comparisons of Xinjiang to an open-air […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1102","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uyghur-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/akademiye.org\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1102","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/akademiye.org\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/akademiye.org\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/akademiye.org\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/akademiye.org\/en\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1102"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/akademiye.org\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1102\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1105,"href":"https:\/\/akademiye.org\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1102\/revisions\/1105"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/akademiye.org\/en\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1102"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/akademiye.org\/en\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1102"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/akademiye.org\/en\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1102"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}