The State of Xinjiang

I wrote this paper last April. I was never going to publish it because I was worried about the consequences to it. However, as the summer has moved into the fall and the protests in Hong Kong have not died down and as the PRC escalates the violence and as more civil liberties are taken away, I can no longer be silent. This is not a paper about Hong Kong and it’s history with with colonialism, imperialism, and China. This is a paper about Muslim Uyghurs in Xinjiang province. However, I feel the need to put this paper out not only because the themes of the paper relate to what is happening in Hong Kong: resistance, censorship, and who’s history gets told but it runs through the entirety of China and the nations that resist it’s idea of “One China.” The PRC’s “One China” policy is their revisionist view of their land claims. The truth is that China’s entire history is one of turmoil and civil war across it’s many regions and multitudes of ethnic identities, religions, and communities. No amount of White Papers, Han Chinese propaganda, big business interests and revisionist history will change their great big lie they’ve been selling for the past 70 years.

The first time I had learned about the internment camps in China was late last year and even then, I did not give it that much thought. After all, I am in an entirely different continent, an entire ocean away, what could I do? I am interested in systemic oppression in the place I call home because I live here, it is my lived experience. Except, China is my ancestral home and to be honest I know next to nothing about it. I remember learning about it in Grade Six but even then, it was framed as something mysterious and romanticized, as if it was a land, I would never be able to touch, so it would be best to treat it at a distance. The main reason for me taking this class was to learn about China and do it through the lens of ethnicity. I chose to focus on Muslims in China because I was interested to see how they came to be put into internment camps because this does not happen overnight. Oppression happens because it is reinforced, legislation is passed, and social contracts are pushed and agreed upon by communities and people. These systems, laws, and legislation do not come from some higher power, there is nothing divine nor universal about them and do not live on any moral high ground. I know they are created by people and like with any human made thing, it is as fallible as the people who made the laws as well as the people who reinforce and carry out said law. I am interested about how do people fight this and hold onto a major part of their identity? I do not know what it is like to prosecuted and be thrown into a concentration camp to be brainwashed into thinking my religious beliefs is a mental illness but I do know what it is like to fragment my identity or a part of my being in order to fit in and not draw attention to the parts of myself that are seen as socially undesirable. I am curious in the silence that is born out of this. The silence that comes from the residual of fear. I am interested in the questions that burn after the broken silence is broken: What does resistance look like in the face of censorship? The complicated relationship between oppressor and oppressed and how it is not black and white but levels that make up a tower of grey. What is it like to navigate the difference between identity and ethnicity when laws and legislation make them one in the same? How silence is used as a weapon and who does this silence benefit? How does the oppression of Muslims in China further a nationalistic agenda while also creating a myth of what it means to be truly Chinese to its people and the rest of the world? I believe these questions are important because people are not just one thing, we are not rigid nor linear in our growth or life span, there are consequences to these identifications and definitions of ethnicity. To fragment one’s self to fit in or to be accepted or recognized is an act of violence. To be seen is liberating, to not have to justify your existence is empowering. Definitions, rules, and regulations made surrounding identity are completely arbitrary. There is a reason for it. You do not go from over 2000 recognized ethnicities to 56 overnight nor is it a random act. It is purposeful. The purposefulness is necessary to highlight because there is not a universal or divine definition of what it means to be Chinese, people make that up themselves and reinforce the ideas and images they want.

The overarching theme of this class is that identity is a multitude of narratives. China is currently sifting through its many narratives and choosing the ones which serve its agenda and discarding the ones that do not. Caught in the whirlwind of this are an entire ethnicity of people in Xinjiang, whose own complicated history and relationship with China contradicts the vision the Chinese government wants to advance into the future with. History and the stories that we tell to shape it are not absolute truths but are multitudes of stories existing at the same time. China can believe that a strong nation includes all the previous lands that China used to rule over and at the exact same time those countries can view themselves as separate from China. To tell this history that flies in the face of the history that China is pushing is an act of resistance. It might not be as loud as an all-out holy war and rebellion, but it is resistance all in the same. People fight with what they have, sometimes it’s their voice, other times it is with their fists, and sometimes it’s just surviving and taking up space where someone wants to replace them. I do not know what is going to happen, I do not know if more people will care, or enough people will care that change for the better will come. What I do know is that history, much like identity, is fluid and does not exist in a vacuum, despite those who want to pretend it does, we are not sealed off chapters, we are an accumulation, we do not grow from running away from this truth, we grow by diving into it. To exist in a space that is your home but where you are not welcome and where you could be punished for being and practicing your traditions and displaying your identity is an act of resistance. I do not know when this will change or if it ever will, Xinjiang has been a place of cultural clashing and turmoil for centuries, but change will not happen just because of the passage of time. China vanquished their great enemy in Xinjiang centuries ago, but the fighting continues, and the fighting will only cease when the idea of what it means to be Chinese changes or Xinjiang becomes fully Han. It is a question of relinquishing one’s identity or redefining and evolving the definition of what it means to be Chinese. I know which side I am on; the fight continues.

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