Human Camps: Silence and Denial in a New Era

Image from Camp Album Project, depicting "daily reflection of a Xinjiang person" and "perpetual silence, stigma, and representational violence they always have to face alone". The project documents lived experience, trauma, and resistance.

When Eugen Kogon published the English-language version of ‘The Theory and Practice of Hell’, the first book written from inside the German concentration camp system, U.S. publishers cited “apathy on the part of the public” to explain its small print-run. 5 years after the fall of the Third Reich and Holocaust survivors still had to work hard to find intelligent and creative ways to have their stories and the facts heard. If “never again” is to mean genocide should never happen again, it will help to remember that we only remember the Holocaust even happened because its survivors made an unreceptive world listen. Little has changed since 1950. People in Xinjiang have experienced the largest, ethnically targeted internment of minority groups since the second world war. Yet even renowned experts of China struggle to name a real, living person from Xinjiang, despite their growing calls to be heard online and across mainstream media.

The comforting lie that we could never commit such exceptional evil fuses with the shock that such things are still possible in the 21st century, making our era a perplexing one where people say “never again” while watching it happen again. In 1940, Walter Benjamin warned that “the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule”. Silence from the majority who consider themselves unaffected while minority groups are targeted as threats is tragically normal. Naively believing that fascism was an exceptional period aids its return because it prevents us from recognising it until it’s too late. Hannah Arendt famously described the “banality of evil”, that people can choose to retreat from reason and free themselves of responsibility in the refuge of bureaucratic determinism, normalising and routinising violence against groups deemed worthless to their political goals. That people can commit such violence as a routine through a sense of inevitability is more psychologically and philosophically challenging than thinking of fascism as exceptional and dismissing its manifestations. For Benjamin, every document of civilisation is also a document of barbarism.

Why such silence? In a digital age, the evidence from Xinjiang has not only been more compelling and more rapidly available than ever, but also clearer that all global consumers are implicated. While working on the topic, many people who do not tell me why the issue is unworthy of their attention. The reasons I’ve been given, even in 2019, was that “we need more evidence”, at a time when the evidence available included visual satellite images displaying rapid growth of the camp system, official documents outlining funding channels including military equipment, and multiple testimonies of people released describing their experiences. When discussing the consensus among scholars of the subject that the camps and related practices constitute cultural genocide according to the U.N. Convention on Genocide, one friend dismissed the experts, “but there’s no chimneys with fumes of the dead bellowing out”. To focus on the quantity of deaths, in many respects, misses the camp’s purpose and their significance: dehumanisation of peoples towards promotion of the state’s goals. Germany’s “extermination camps” for mass annihilation (Vernichtung) were only one specialised form of concentration camp (Konzentrationslager) and not all concentration camps contained gas chambers or furnaces. Yet all camps were designed to identify, dehumanise, and isolate groups viewed as incompatible with the state’s goals of reviving and producing a romantic vision of an ancient, culturally pure society. The conversation reminded me of an exchange with a Dutch student who proudly told me how Mein Kampf was banned in the Netherlands to ensure fascism could never repeated, before using logics from its pages that his town was being “taken over” and “infected” by immigrants from “outside western civilisation”. Learning about that uncomfortable history would help people recognise its recurrence. This is the engagement Benjamin called for in his Theses on the Philosophy of History; an engagement with history, not a recollection of the past but an attempt to make sense of and respond to the present. Ironically, a talk from a Dutch resistance fighter at primary school, telling the class to “forgive but never forget”, inspired me to read Mein Kampf so that I could just do that.

Since existence of the camps became widespread knowledge, outright denial narratives shifted to downplaying the issue’s significance. Many people say to me, “it comes down to whether it affects us”. Everyone who has lived there or has long-term connections to people who do is affected every day. When they even hear or read the words camp or “training centres”, they are reminded of people they love and people they are disconnected from, not knowing if they are safe, not knowing if they are being tortured, raped, or put to forced labour. That affects us. Widespread existential anxieties about the environment, terrorism, and impending world wars circulate in popular culture. Yet what Benjamin called the “stubborn faith in progress”, blinds us to the uncomfortable reality that we are accepting concentration camps and genocide against stateless groups as banal, inevitably parts of life in the 21st century. Concentration camps not only challenge the belief that the world is progressing but the very idea of progress itself because they are so depressingly familiar. The shock that this could still be happening in the 21st century is useless, unless it shocks us into realising that we see history through the lens of the present and learn that evil can emerge when humans choose to retreat from reason into inevitability.

An Open Letter to the BBC: What's Islam got to do with it?

Dear BBC,

The Xinjiang research community is delighted that you continue to cover such pressing humanitarian disasters as cultural genocide and internment camps. However, your coverage of the Xinjiang, Karakax papers on the 17th February 2019 fell somewhat short of the rigorous standards associated with your organisation that should continue to be both publicly accountable and funded. I hope these comments are received in the spirit of civic engagement and support to improve your important work with which they are intended.

The key factual problem in the reporting was the representation of the operation of camps and assimilation policies in Xinjiang as focused on targeting religion per se. The expert literature on state and non-state violence in the region by Gardner Bovingdon, James Millward, and Sean Roberts, who have published on the topic for over 20 years, has demonstrated it was only after 9/11 that religion was adopted as an official public-image focus, re-representing what the party-state has always openly termed the “ethnic problem”. Policy documents throughout the 1990s did not even mention religion or extremism yet these events are re-described this way today. BBC journalists do know this, so it was unusual that in your main bulletin, the issue was represented in a manner considerably closer to the perspective of CCTV rather than the BBC or the global research community.

Your own data points to how ethnic targeting does target religion but only as one of multiple indicators of ethnic identity. Some of the key reasons for interning people include plans to travel outside China and the entirely arbitrary “untrustworthy” judgement. Preventing religious observance is one aspect of these policies but they also target language use, travel abroad, friendship with non-Chinese citizens, and general ‘cultural’ demeanour described as “manners education” in the leaked documents. The work of Timothy Grose even shows how narratives of “hygiene”, paralleling more well-known historical instances of ethnic targeting, justify destruction of traditional Uyghur furniture from people’s own homes. Uyghur language has long been removed from the school curriculum and according to the scholars and NGOs you work with, it is constantly monitored in camps as an indicator of extremism and general untrustworthiness. Religion is only one facet of identity and governance in the region, which I hope my work helps show have been described in official documents as a problem of “backwardness” for decades. In 2009, textbooks for middle-school children taught the concept of minzu xiaowang (民族消亡) to celebrate that “backward” minority groups will disappear. Ethnic unity and Patriotic Education textbooks explicitly celebrate the “disappearance” of minority languages as progress. Xinjiang’s Turkic-speaking groups are always represented as behind the advanced “settler culture” (tunken wenhua 屯垦文化) of the majority and in need of their guidance, as illustrated in the images above taken from official exhibitions. This is essential background knowledge to make sense of current policies.

These are not intellectual quibbles over minor details! The framing of these issues has real concrete impact, particularly when presented in mainstream media on an area generally considered specialised. So why does this matter?

Uyghurs and other Turkic-speaking minorities say it matters and ultimately, it’s their identity we are talking about! Uyghur diaspora groups and scholars have been calling for journalists to take heed of the fact that “this is not a war on Islam but a war on Uyghurs”, according to one Uyghur scholar, and “we are not all Muslims” according to another. There is much diversity among Uyghurs and other Turkic-speaking groups in Xinjiang. They feel you are misrepresenting their identity and they are worried about the concrete effects of that misrepresentation.

Audience reception. The reality is that in an age of popular anxieties about terrorism and Islam, your audience is considerably more sympathetic to a “war on Islam” than cultural genocide or camps for people arbitrarily deemed untrustworthy. In my line of work, I encounter British people of left and right-wing persuasions telling me they are not interested in this issue because they “don’t like Muslims” or “don’t like religion”. Your coverage does not cause that intolerance but it cannot reach those people. It may even embolden them with another example of “Muslims behaving badly” and does so by misrepresenting basic facts about people’s identity and governance of the region. Uyghurs in the UK and across Europe are concerned that representation of this issue may encourage discrimination here and give greater global support for the party-state to pursue what they describe as cultural genocide.

I commend that you cover this issue but recommend that you more fully engage with people from the region and consult a broader range of scholars with long-term experience in the region. This will help avoid misrepresenting such an important and complex set of issues.

Yours sincerely,

                                  Dr David Tobin (University of Manchester)

Fuck Scottishness. I'm Voting Yes.

To paraphrase Allen Chun who said the same of China, something called "Scotland" unquestionably exists, but, more importantly there is a multitude of expressions to denote different aspects of Scotland and Scottish-ness. There is no room for these multiple perspectives in our official political debates right now as Scotland continues to be represented through flags, whiskey, and mountains by British and Scottish nationalists. Impartiality is impossible so let me explain how my biases and personal experiences shape my politics and my choice to vote yes to Scottish independence. I was born in Scotland and I have lived for several years in England and in China. My father was born in London but left the UK's supposedly cosmopolitan capital because it was "too parochial" and because north of Watford is not barbarian country. His father was from Waterford in southern Ireland and came to London to escape his own involvement in a civil war which pitted brother against brother in a battle for control of the nation against the British empire. He was then told "no dogs, no Irish" on arrival, so he had to start his own small business. He married a woman from England who I was lucky to grow up with and who I can't recall even mentioning countries.

My mother was born in Clydebank outside Glasgow into a family of migrants from Donegal. They arrived in Scotland with Irish as their first language and we spent every summer in the hills of Donegal. My grandmother was an Irish catholic and she read the Bible. My grandfather was an internationalist socialist and read the communist manifesto. The first time I ever wore a Scottish football top as a 7 year old, I was called a "mongrel" with "no right to wear that" by my protestant neighbour. I attended a "non-denominational" school which sent us to the Church of Scotland for every Christian festival! Almost every day of primary school I was called a "fenian bastard" and almost every day I responded in kind to call them "orange bastards" in return. I grew up being teased by my dad for being a "fenian" for supporting Celtic and had to suffer in silence listening to friend's dads calling people "English bastards". Even as children we discussed our identity at school. It's impossible not to given our history. I was always told I'm British because my passport says so yet this inclusion made me feel more excluded than ever as it offered no concern for how I understood myself, the daily reality of mutual exclusion, or my family history. The idea that my identity or anyone's identity could simplify and gloss over these contestations and simply return to being British or being Scottish feels foreign to me.

Ethnic majorities have a responsibility to understand minority and in-between experiences. They tend to forget they have their own identity attachments because they are surrounded by people with seemingly similar ones. Telling someone to be above nationalism when they have been marked their whole lives as different and foreign is not progressive, it's an unconsciously ethno-centric view of the world which seeks to detach themselves from all responsibility from the complex realities of colonialism, marginalisation, and discrimination. To witness the scandal that is the official debate on the subject which frames Yes voters as nationalists and then fails to deconstruct any of the ideological assumptions of why people vote no or feel British, feels like everything I've just written and the colour and fuzziness of the identity politics I know I have lived through is meaningless. The political debate makes a politics lecturer want to withdraw from politics. To have to justify why I am not a nationalist to people who have thought about these things for a few hours when I have been forced to think about these things every day since I was a boy is tiresome and worrying. You are no or you are yes, you don't like the SNP or you do, you are with us or you are against us. The party political machines have the real victory here not because people want to vote no but because it is impossible to have a debate without relying on these childish binaries, which most children know are imagined. Their victory is society's loss because instead of sharing my hopes and fears with many English friends I'm forced to justify why I'm not anti-English instead of discussing how to make things better. Instead of being excited by politics, I feel like it is nothing to do with me.

The political parties have long converged on a neoliberal consensus: the Conservatives are cowboy capitalists, Labour is whatever the Conservatives say with a smile and a tax rebate for working families, and the Lib Dems are part of an illiberal coalition presiding over declining civil liberties and freedom of speech. There is no debate. They are willing the "end of history" to insist we all agree on values, we just differ on detail. The discourse of "austerity" overshadows every possible political discussion. The rapid growth of food banks since 2008 and the media and politician's unwillingness to fully tackle the issue should be the scandal of our age. The value of humans and their right to be seen as good British citizens is judged solely by their contribution to GDP as the most vulnerable in our society are called scum and gazed upon in human zoos such as Benefits Street. There is no hope of any alternative being offered outside this discourse and it is a guarantee of further economic inequality and political disengagement. I'll be voting yes not because it guarantees social justice but because it is the only offer on the table of doing anything whatsoever about it.

The referendum does not ask us how we identify ourselves or how do we understand our history. It asks "do you think Scotland should be an independent nation?". I wanted to say no so I could reject the need for nations altogether but the best way to do that is to say Yes. A no vote simply confirms we are happy to move to the next general election with excluding everyone who isn't British and or economically viable the dominant motif. Leaving the EU and the "threat" of immigrants are now top of the very unconsciously nationalist political agenda which dominates the UK's political discourse. I'll be voting yes because I have never been British and I would like to have a meaningful debate about how colonialism, including the participation of Scots, shapes how we view ourselves and the outside world. The smaller the state the easier it will be to ask how are people being marginalised and stigmatised in Easterhouse, Calton, and East Kilbride, places I've yet to hear being mentioned by our "leaders" crippling the debate. I want to be able to look beyond Scotland V England and look at how we marginalise people on our own doorstep. I want to say Fuck Scottish-ness  and it mean something. 

Xinjiang Dreams: Worrying About Ethnicity

The ethnically targeted violence of July 2009 in Ürümchi overshadowed the lead-up to the 60^th anniversary of the founding of the PRC. Uyghurs and Han were both victims and perpetrators and official figures claimed 197 people were killed (See here, here, and here). The violence suggested that ethnic relations remain an important issue in people’s daily lives in Xinjiang and for the capacity of the party-state to provide “stability”. July 2009 brought to the fore concerns that China’s ethnic minority polices need rethinking in part because they are constructed without significant input from ethnic minorities themselves. The events of July 2009 lead the then Guangdong Party Committee Secretary and now 3^rd ranked Vice Premier, Wang Yang, to suggest that China needs to re-adjust its ethnic minority policies or there will be further “difficulties”. These comments sparked a debate in Beijing’s elite universities such as Peking University, Tsinghua, and the Chinese Academy of Social sciences (for instance, here and here). Chinese scholars of ethnicity put forward their competing perspectives on the future of ethnic minority policies and the relationship between ethnicity and nation in China. James Leibold has shown that radical policy change in the short-term is highly unlikely but calls for reform have now become the mainstream among officials and public intellectuals.

The events at Tiananmen on October 28^th 2013 will again stimulate discussion of China’s ethnic minority policies in the lead up to the 3rd Plenum of the 18th CPC Central Committee. In many senses the 2012 debate centered on whether to emphasise the plurality or the unity in Fei Xiaotong’s famous conceptualisation of the “plurality and unity” of the Chinese nation. The debate was ostensibly between proponents of the “first generation” of ethnic minority policies who wish to maintain China as a multi-ethnic state of 56 different minzu groups and the “second generation” who seek to transform China into a mono-ethnic race-state (guozu). We simply do not know what happened on October 28^th at Tiananmen, but these events have been officially explained in the same way as July 2009. With no verifiable evidence provided, Chinese media outlets are instructed to frame the issue through “the Three Evils” of “separatism, terrorism, and religious extremism”. Dong Manyuan of the China Institute of International Studies is one of the few Chinese scholars to have spoken out thus far and he immediately blamed “the Three Evils”. His comment that policy is “correct” suggests that more introspection and open debate are necessary if we are seriously attempting to understand the future of ethnicity in contemporary China.

The “first generation” of the inter-generational debate have argued that a shared national identity will naturally emerge with economic development. Scholars such as Wang Xi’en and Hao Shiyuan of the “first generation” explicitly rely on the scientific inevitability of Marxist dialectics to chart the future of ethnicity in China. Wang (2012) and Hao (2012) both argue that Chinese Marxism and economic development will naturally produce a unified nation over time. For these thinkers, ethnic (meaning Minzu) differentiation and the regional autonomy system for ethnic minorities are central to China’s tradition as a socialist nation. However, these policies are framed as temporary measures to deal with remaining historical leftovers of discrimination from feudalism. These thinkers argue that development will naturally resolve the “ethnic question” (minzu wenti). According to their reading of Marxist dialectics, ethnicity will wither away so that all ethnic cultures will naturally evolve into national Chinese culture before merging into a global class consciousness. This stream of thought resolves the tension between ethnicity and nationhood through the Party-state’s Leninist discourse on cultural evolution: culture can be normatively measured because stages of cultural development are superstructural to economic development.

Political economist Hu Angang and social anthropologist Ma Rong of the “second generation” suggest that a shared national identity can be produced through conscious human design. This self-dubbed “second generation” argue that the party-state must actively promote “fusion” (jiaorong). The “second generation” support “fusion” into a mono-cultural race-state (guozu) through monolingual education policies and the abandonment of formal minzu differentiation, including the regional autonomy system. Ma Rong (here and here) argues that it is culture and not ethnicity which define social distinction in China. Ma claims that the distinction between “civilisation” and “barbarians” in ancient China is the basis on which the nation ought to be ordered and that the “ethnic” category (minzu) was merely a temporary policy measure copied from the Soviet Union. For Ma Rong, the barbarian/civilisation distinction is not between different civilisations but between “highly developed and less developed ‘civilizations’ with similar roots but at different stages of advancement”.  This draws from theories of cultural evolution like the “1^st generation” but it normatively frames Han Chinese culture as the apex of civilisation. Modernisation and Han culture are thought of as the same thing, thus, “barbarians” can become developed by learning Chinese culture (jiaohua).

Political economist Hu Angang, argues that since the 2010 Xinjiang Work Forum, ethnic minority policies have moved from managing a multi-ethnic society and the use of minzu categories to one of fusion (jiaorong) and actively producing a race-state (guozu). Hu Angang tells us that to bring the “dream” of building a rich and strong China (fumin qiangguo) to fruition requires the development of “ethnic regions”. Hu’s central concern is how to make China strong at the international level. He suggests that all “great powers” (da guo), namely the USA, have used a “melting pot” model and all collapsed empires (Soviet Union and Yugoslavia) used a “salad bowl” model. Hence, China must now focus ethnic minority policies, education, and language policies on producing shared identification into a race-state to achieve the China dream. Hu follows the party’s announcements from the 2010 Xinjiang work forum to propose “great leap development” (kuayueshi fazhan). “Great leap development” will supposedly enable Xinjiang to leapfrog over the stages of development set out in Marxist theory. Human agency will allow Xinjiang to leap across stages of development in the way proposed by Mao Zedong during the great leap forward period. The official slogan “contact, communication, fusion” (jiaowang, jiaoliu, jiaorong) tends to suggest this will be a long-term historical process along the lines of the arguments of “1^st generation”. However, Hu Angang uses this to suggest that this is not only part of the “direction of history” progressing towards the “great renewal” of the Chinese nation but that the direction of history towards guozu can be accelerated by state policy. Hu Angang’s dream is for China to surpass the US to become a “new type of superpower” but his dream first requires minorities to abandon self-identification through ethnicity.

Xinjiang’s position in China is articulated through internal boundaries which mark the region as economically and culturally inferior to the East of China. Both generations agree that ‘fusion’ is needed to make China wealthier and more powerful. The “first generation” thinks this should left to the anonymous inevitability of Marxist dialectics where the “second generation” believe they can socially engineer a shared Chinese identity. The difference between the two approaches is a difference not over whether materialist accounts explain identity or if fusion is a desired end state. The debate is over how to achieve that end state, either through the ‘natural’ means of socialist development (‘cultural evolution’) or through human design and planned state policy. The two “generations” do offer different policy recommendations (eg bilingual vs monolingual education). Yet, the reason the debate stimulates so much commentary is that they offer different visions of the Chinese nation: multi-ethnic VS mono-ethnic. Hao Shiyuan of the “1^st generation” has even gone so far as to challenge Hu Angang by suggesting that it was not ethnic minority identities that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union but the nationalist chauvinism of the majority (da minzu zhuyi). This amounts to accusing Hu Angang of being a Han chauvinist and indicates a real schism amongst Chinese scholars over the present and future of China. The debate reveals tensions in contemporary China between competing ideas of nationhood: China as an inclusive multi-ethnic state where different ethnic groups live in harmony and China as a Han nation with a singular model of national belonging.

The day after the Tiananmen incident, one Uyghur student on twitter asked “why is everything we do terrorism?”. He reminded his Han nationalist debating partners that a Han Chinese man set off a bomb in Beijing Capital International Airport with no calls of “terrorism”. Discontent among Han is framed as a less severe threat and is rightly seen within its social and individual context. However, Uyghur discontent can be de-legitimised and presented as a national security threat by activating the discourse of “the Three Evils”. The authors of China’s ethnic minority policies in the inter-generational debate frame a common Chinese national identity as a prerequisite to China’s international strength. Ethnic minority identities are frequently framed by the CCP and Chinese intellectuals as a source of backwardness and insecurity for the Chinese nation. This is the “patriotic worrying” Gloria Davies referred to in Worrying About China: the critical reflexivity of intellectuals is constrained by the need to contextualise academic discussion of the subject not in terms of how to deconstruct and understand a problem but how authors can help to construct China as a perfect civilisation. This sets enormous limitations on how to discuss practical problems and solutions when they have to be framed in terms that are unreflexive and focus on perfecting something which may need rethinking. One obvious way to broaden the debate on ethnic minority policies in Xinjiang and to enable it to respond more effectively to the implications of policy on the ground would be to include hitherto unheard Uyghur perspectives on the subject. However, there is so much worrying about ethnicity in China that Uyghur scholars who attempt to contribute to these debates can be be treated as a national security threat.


This article was originally published for the China Policy Institute at the University of Nottingham.

China's Insecurity Problem: What's Islam Got to Do With It?

Following the 1995 Oklahoma bombing Edward Said was invited for interview by the US media. As an expert on the Middle East, the media assumed he would have insight into how this “terrorist” incident bore the hallmark of “Muslim extremists”. The perpetrator later turned out to be Timothy McVeigh, a former Gulf War veteran who sought to avenge the actions of the US federal government at Waco and Ruby Ridge. The assumption was this was an attack so barbarous it could only be attributed to “Muslims” and not to the complex range of social and individual factors which lead people to kill themselves to draw attention to their unheard or less heard political claims.

The incident at Tiananmen Square on the 28th October 2013 saw a Jeep driven into a pedestrian area before 3 passengers set the car alight killing themselves and 2 innocent tourists as well as injuring 38 pedestrians. The incident appears to be a relatively crude attack with no complex co-ordination or sophisticated weaponry (they carried knives, machetes, and petrol). The World Uyghur Congress and Uyghur scholar under house arrest Ilham Tohti have called for calm until we have real information to work with and so that this incident is not used to increase repression in Xinjiang. The central government has thus far released very little information except to say this was a “carefully planned, organised, and premeditated attack” which included carrying flags with “extreme religious content”.  What this actually means is unclear at best. The fact that the passengers were a man, his wife, and mother suggests there is a lot more to this story and international terrorism does not appear to fit the facts. International media has a remarkably hard job on its hands making sense of it all because the security apparatus was so quick to conceal the entire incident with large police screens. This means it may be impossible to verify any narrative the party-state decides to tell. Experts on Xinjiang have long considered these official accounts to be problematic at best and deliberately misleading at worst. International journalists, such as AFP, have had their photographs seized, domestic media have been given instructions to follow the official line in framing the issue as “terrorism”,  and posts on the subject have disappearing from Weibo, China’s largest social media network, as quickly as they are posted.

A police notice issued to hotels instructed them to watch out for "suspicious people" and Xinjiang registration plates. It named two suspects with Uyghur names from the Piqan (shanshan) and Guma (pishan) counties. The statement was printed online with some media outlets simply adding in the presumption that they are Muslims. Zachary Keck of the Diplomat went further with the irresponsible article ‘Al-Qaeda in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region?’ which offered no consideration of perspectives from Xinjiang. The USA Daily ran with the headline “Muslim family led Tiananmen suicide attack”. No one knows the religion of the perpetrators or if it bears any relevance to their actions. Nevertheless, it appears racial profiling has already begun in Xinjiang with warnings to residents of Shanshan county to be on guard for anyone “suspicious with a big beard or burka”. Identifying the men simply as Muslims obscures a huge ream of complex social factors and controversial policies in Xinjiang which have ethnicised social tensions and sparked small-scale incidents of violence in the region. In recent years, such policies have included discrimination in employment, the eradication of Uyghur language as a medium of instruction, the persecution of writers as“separatists”, the confiscation of Uyghurs’ passports, the demolition of old Kashgar, as well as growing restrictions on fasting for Ramadan and wearing Islamic clothing.

If it is true that a group of Uyghurs were responsible for the car attack then we will need to consider how the party-state’s approach to security works in the region. The LA Times suggests this attack at the heart of Chinese power “has raised doubts about the effectiveness of its security apparatus”. Experts on Xinjiang have raised doubts about this for a long time. However, the weakness lies not with the number of troops posted in Xinjiang or Tiananmen or with the number of armoured vehicles patrolling Uyghur neighbourhoods. The weakness lies with thinking that long-term security comes down the barrel of a gun. The party chief for Xinjiang, Zhang Chunxian, unveiled a plan last year to have armed police every 100 metres in urban Xinjiang. This does not suggest that the party-state is in control but that it is very insecure and has to use violence to maintain the position of Uyghurs as an ethnic minority in China. These methods which are supposed to improve security (ie restrictions on religion, monolingual language policies, and arresting authors of fiction) make Uyghurs feel their identities and their individual well-being are threatened. If we want to take security seriously, then a more pertinent question is how to make Uyghurs feel more secure and to give them channels to express their insecurity so that they do not feel the need to turn to violence. The policies above and the incidents they sparked suggest that the more the Chinese government focuses on “security”, meaning surveillance of Uyghurs, the more insecure Uyghurs feel, and the higher likelihood of further violence. The best way to address this security issue would be to listen to those who feel most insecure in Xinjiang and deal with their concerns. These voices can offer perspectives on the issue beyond relying on lazy essentialisations of Islam to frame an as yet entirely unexplained act of violence. 

Identity and Empathy in the Logics of "Terror"

When Islamophobia explodes across England because an individual who happens to be a Muslim commits an act of violence, it suggests our Kingdom is not as United as our politicians like to think. In the wake of the murder of a British soldier in Woolwich, we would do well to take a step back and turn a critical lens on our media before we feel the need to lock ourselves in our homes for fear of the terrorists in our midst.

“In the life of a nation, we’re called up to define who we are and what we believe”1.

George Bush uttered these famous words in defence of the US decision to send military forces to Saudi Arabia during the Persian Gulf crisis. Bush, like most politicians, was linking identity to national security by saying identity is something we must define, enclose within national boundaries, and send troops abroad to kill and die in the name of its assumed unity. In these types of state-centric narratives of identity, we do not and must not identify with the suffering of those outside our national borders. There is the nation and there is outside the nation. “The boundaries of a state’s identity are secured by the representation of danger”2.  It is through danger which we define who we are because danger is intrinsically Other and outside ourselves. It is a representation of what we do not want to be and what we do not want to happen to us.

“Danger is not an objective condition. It is not a thing which exists independently of those to whom it may become a threat”3. Acts of violence are represented in different ways which tell us a lot about how we define ourselves. When the English Defence League assaulted police in Woolwich last night, this was represented by the mainstream media as a “protest” and the damaging of mosques were “attacks”. These are dangers but of a lesser and local order. There is no link to national security in the way the incidents are reported and discussed. On the other hand, a British soldier being murdered by a Muslim has been immediately labelled “terrorism”, a supposed threat to the very existence of our nation.

So who is under threat? For David Cameron, this was “an attack on Britain – and on the British way of life” and that “people in every community will utterly condemn this attack”. Why is this incident an attack on the “British” way of life? Why are racially motivated murders not elevated to this level of threat? Why are the lives lost to violence in working class council estates all across the UK not seen as a “threat” to our nation? These are stories of threats to people’s lives which occasionally make the news but are never seen as matters of national security. These lives are not deemed as valuable as those of British soldiers because they are not seen to embody the nation and so they are represented as local problems of an altogether less threatening nature. This is simply not the type of nation many British people want to live in and it only reinforces existing divisions over class and race to simply pretend they do not exist.

The way the Woolwich violence is represented frames our identity in a way which obscures competing perspectives on the violence and on who we are. It demands we see this attack as a threat to ourselves in a way which racial assaults and violence against young working class men are not. It demands we empathise with the victim and that we must not empathise in any way with the perpetrator. Otherwise, we are excluded from this conceptualisation of “community” which is “sickened” and intellectually paralysed with feelings of condemnation. So we are told we must feel a certain way about this because we are British. When David Cameron says “this attack sickened us all” he may be right but it sickens people in very different ways and for very different reasons. Can we not be sickened by the attack, the nationalist response, and the militaristic UK foreign policy all at the same time? Yesterday, one BBC interviewer even asked “what is that is so annoying about having British troops on their soil?”. To frame British troops invading other countries as an annoyance yet one murder in Britain as a threat to our nation exemplifies an utter dearth of empathy in Britain’s historical and current role in initiating and fomenting violent conflict, simply because it has hurt one of our own.

Condemning comes very easily but trying to understand why this happens takes effort, even empathising with people who you may find disagreeable. Some media coverage has worked to deny British people the right to make up their own minds. The video of one of the attacker’s speech was edited to deny our right to empathise by cutting out the parts where he attempts to empathise. Here is a slightly extended version where he says:

“Remove your governments, they don’t care about you. Do you think David Cameron is going to get caught in the street when we start bussing our guns? Are your politicians going to die? No, it’s going to be the average guy like you”.

You may hate the messenger but it is working class persons who are sent to wage the wars which this man himself highlighted as his reasoning behind the attack. Perhaps not going to wars in the name of national identity might make the people we choose to kill in its name feel more secure. If they felt more secure, they may be less likely to want to wage what they see as very similar wars to what happens when British troops leave our shores in the name of “freedom”.

1. Bush, George (1990) “In Defense of Saudi Arabia” in Sifry, M and Cerf, C (eds) The Gulf War Reader: History, Documents, Opinions.

2. Campbell, David (1998) Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity.

3. Campbell, David (1998).

China's Divided Leadership, China's Divided Society

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) under Hu Jintao has emphasised building a “harmonious society” at home and a “harmonious world” at the international level. Given that official figures tell us that China experiences approximately 500 protests per day, it is safe to conclude that the party’s emphasis on harmony represents the awareness that contemporary China is anything but harmonious. Today’s China may enjoy double-digit growth figures on paper but it is also rampant with corruption, struggling to address a growing wealth gap, and has a state-media increasingly viewed as a form of “brainwashing”. One of the party-state’s greatest concerns following the end of the Soviet Union was an “ideological vacuum”. However, its greatest challenge is not a vacuum but its own irrelevance in the face of competing alternatives in an increasingly diverse China. The party’s inability to offer a genuine economic model to meet people’s needs is placing strains on its legitimacy. Furthermore, its inability to speak to ordinary Chinese people and share in the meanings they give to daily life is driving its own demise.

The present leadership handover has been less than harmonious as we have seen with the arrest and expulsion from the party of one of China’s potential future leaders, Bo Xilai. Bo Xilai is seen as a representative of China’s “new left” and one of the architects of the “Chongqing model”. Bo’s “cake theory” of economics was now that China has a big enough cake, the pressing concern is how to divide the cake. Bo Xilai’s concern for inequality ought to be easily incorporated into the discourse of a nominally Communist party. However, factionalism within the party is so rife that discussion of inequality has become a political sensitive issue. The website of the Utopia bookshop was shut down this year because it supported Bo and his redistributive policies. As one media executive put it, “we don’t mention Chongqing. I don’t eat Chongqing hotpot. I won’t even date Chongqing girls”. When Mao Zedong said that “the Chinese people have stood up”, it was not his intention that protesters who respectfully knelt down in front of his portrait should be arrested as happened earlier this year!

The politics of contemporary China appears all the more bewildering when we see the opening of the Party Congress with a very orthodox celebration of the party’s communist heritage and use of communist symbols. The party has long wished to present itself as the only Chinese voice the world should listen to and this performance was no different. However, thanks to a global telecommunications revolution we know Chinese people are already posting sarcastic and dismissive remarks online where “harmony” is talked about as something that is done to the people and not by them. The ban on knife sales in Beijing lest the proletariat turn on the dictatorship reflects the party’s awareness that public performances of harmony have yet to produce harmony.

The expulsion of Bo Xilai led many to speculate that Wang Yang’s “Guangdong model” of “free-markets” would be the new path for China. Wang Yang’s response to “cake theory” was that China “must bake a bigger cake before dividing it”. His claim that small and medium size enterprises are inefficient and should be allowed to be eliminated by the market is closer to what one would expect from Mitt Romney than a Communist Party leader. This debate on the future of China is not simply about party factionalism but the very heart of daily life in today’s China where the divide between the 128 million people who live on roughly a dollar a day and the number of dollar billionaires is growing. Most of the 500 protests a day in China are focused on economic issues such as evictions, property redevelopment, and labour rights. Educated people in China have always corrected my Chinese to tell me that “class” (jieji; 阶级) does not exist in today’s China, only “status” (jieceng; 阶层). However, those on the bottom rung don’t blink when I mention China is a classist and unfair society. In the words of one taxi driver “China is a capitalist communist country. We don’t even know who rules us anymore because they are hidden away in luxury apartments and plazas buying diamonds and playing on computers. We are slaves.”

Wang Yang’s alleged removal from the Politburo Standing Committee has raised questions regarding the influence of Jiang Zemin and Conservative elders. What appears to be happening is that factional politics inside the party meant that ousting some of the leading proponents of the left and the right was necessary for a workable political compromise for the leadership selection. How long can this uneasy compromise last? Xi Jinping, who will take over from Hu Jintao as the party General Secretary, is a careerist who is happy to jump from left to right to gain power, so this choice may work for now. However, the ongoing pretence of “building socialism” coupled with no transparent debate amongst officials, the party-state appears to be atrophying into its own ideological vacuum while the rest of China diversifies and conducts heated political debates outside official channels.

Hu Jintao’s statement that “we will never copy a Western political system” will speak to nationalists but it continues to define China in terms of what it is not and uses a mythical, homogenised Western Other to do so. Factionalism and multiple ideologies are good things for China but unless the party can find a way to make itself relevant to the daily lives of citizens, these ideologies will blossom and be turned against them. The party is increasingly backing itself into irrelevance by performing Communism yet pursuing a state-led capitalist model of development. Chen Bilan had to live in exile from 1945 after warning the party that if they did not democratise rapidly the dictatorship of the proletariat would degenerate into a self-interested, bourgeois bureaucracy. It turns out that she was right as today’s China has in the words of Yang Jisheng become a “power-market economy” where rent-seeking and corruption are not threats to the system as such because they are the system itself.