In September 2017 Human Rights Watch (HRW) released a statement calling on the Chinese government to release over a million detainees in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of northwestern China. From around April 2017 onward, China has been engaging in a vast campaign of ‘political re-education’ aimed primarily at the region’s Turkic Muslim populations, mostly Uyghurs and Kazakhs. It is now estimated that up to 1.5 million people have spent some time in these detention facilities. Some have never left.

Although they first denied the existence of the detention centers, the Chinese authorities have since acknowledged a widespread campaign in Xinjiang, apparently to root out what it calls the “Three Evils” of “terrorism, separatism and religious extremism”, and to spur economic growth through what it has dubbed ‘Vocational Education and Training Centers’. According to Chinese authorities, the ‘training centers’ are intended to combat extremist Islamic ideology, which is said by Beijing to have been imported into Xinjiang from the Middle East and conflict zones such as Afghanistan, and has ‘poisoned’ the minds of people.

Global awareness of the situation in Xinjiang has risen significantly in the past two years. But is it enough? I spoke to Rachel Harris, who teaches in the School of Arts at SOAS, and is an expert on the culture, music and history of the Uyghurs, and one the key organizers of the upcoming conference Surveillance and Repression of Muslim Minorities: Xinjiang and Beyond on Saturday 07 March 2020, about the current situation.

(Aki Elborzi): Global media attention to state repression and Beijing’s assimilation policies towards the non-Han ethnic groups in Xinjiang has been increasing since late 2017. Has a campaign of forced assimilation towards the Uyghurs been consistent since the establishment of the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) in 1949 or is this a more recent phenomenon?

(Rachel Harris): This is really a recent phenomenon. China’s treatment of its minority peoples has definitely been uneven, to say the least, over the past seventy years. But up until the past few years, Beijing has at least given lip service to multicultural policies. Alongside the rhetoric of China as a “big, happy family of nationalities” that has meant tangible rights and benefits for the peoples of Xinjiang, including support for mother-tongue education and culture. Now those rights and benefits have been denied to such an extent that we really do seem to be looking at active policies of assimilation. One of the aims of the conference is to discuss whether there is a legal basis for regarding what is going on as cultural genocide.

Chinese officials argue that violence and terrorism committed by a section of the Uyghur population motivated by separatism and a foreign inspired Islamic extremism is ‘poisoning minds’ and is something that the state and civilian population of Xinjiang has grappled with for decades, resulting in hundreds of deaths, especially between 2009 to 2014. You have visited and have been researching Xinjiang and Uyghur society and culture for the past 20 years. Is there any basis to this claim?

Yes, the region saw a large number of violent incidents between 2009 and 2014, which state media labelled as terrorism, but in fact, the majority of these incidents were local flashpoints caused by heavy handed policing, for example where police went into people’s houses forcibly removing veils.

I’ve been researching religious life in this region for over a decade, and what I have observed is a big rise in piety, a return to religious lifestyles: daily prayer, modest dress, fasting, reading the Quran … all of these everyday practices for Muslims around the globe have been labelled as “extremism” by the Xinjiang authorities. Any of these activities, alongside having relatives abroad or even having visited a foreign country, is sufficient reason to send people to the detention camps.

Much of the general media’s focus on the situation in Xinjiang identifies the Uyghurs (mostly) Muslim religious identity and the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) suspicion of Islam (and religion generally) as a factor behind what has motivated Beijing’s current campaign of detention, surveillance and political ‘re-education’ of minorities in the province. Yet there are reports of musicians, artists, poets and teachers of Uyghur language, history and culture that have been taken away by the authorities for ‘re-education’. What do you make of this, given that China officially recognizes 56 ethnic groups that make up the modern Chinese nation?

The detention of such large numbers of moderate, secular intellectuals and cultural leaders gives the lie to Beijing’s narrative of combating extremism. More than anything, these detentions suggest that the policies are aimed at weakening, even erasing cultural identity.