Antiterrorist settler colonialism: Michael Clarke, ‘Xinjiang in the 21st century: Surveillance, social reengineering and settler colonialism in Xi Jinping’s “new era”‘, in Czeslaw Tubilewicz (ed.), Critical Issues in Contemporary China, Routledge, 2024 | settler colonial studies blog

Antiterrorist settler colonialism: Michael Clarke, ‘Xinjiang in the 21st century: Surveillance, social reengineering and settler colonialism in Xi Jinping’s “new era”‘, in Czeslaw Tubilewicz (ed.), Critical Issues in Contemporary China, Routledge, 2024

10Aug24

Abstract: This chapter examines the Chinese Communist Party’s policies towards Turkic Muslim minorities in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. It argues that the systematic repression of Xinjiang under Xi Jinping’s leadership demonstrates that the Party-state’s approach is an outgrowth of the convergence of two distinct yet interrelated imperatives – an ideological shift toward assimilation of ethnic minorities and adaptation of global models of ‘counterterrorism’ – that seek to eradicate Turkic Muslim identities and replace them with ‘domesticated’ ethnic identities aligned with Han Chinese political and socio-economic norms. The ideological shift toward outright assimilation of ethnic minorities is informed by a perception that the security threat posed by the ‘extremism’ is generated by the Party’s perception that there is an inherent link between socio-economic ‘under-development’ and Turkic Muslim identity. As such, a core goal of the Party is to break this link through the application of a development strategy that facilitates the economic, social, demographic and physical transformation of Xinjiang into a ‘normal’ Chinese province. The adaptation of global models of ‘counterterrorism’ to Xinjiang, in turn, has yielded a system of surveillance designed to predict and interdict ‘terrorism’ before it occurs based on the collection and assessment of outward ‘signs’ of ‘deviancy’.

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