No mercy, no dissent: China’s building of a modern dystopia in Xinjiang

The vast province of Xinjiang in China’s far west has become the site of a dystopian surveillance state over the past several years. The Chinese government has built mass detention camps, initiated a comprehensive sterilization program, destroyed mosques and effectively banned various Muslim practices. This ruthless and multi-year effort to bring complete control over the politically restless but strategically important mineral-rich region shows the Chinese government’s willingness to go to extreme lengths to achieve its strategic interests, none of which is more important than maintaining single-party rule of the Chinese Communist Party

Scott McKnight – July 8 2020

The vast province of Xinjiang in China’s far west has become the site of a multi-year, systematic comprehensive effort to gain complete control over the politically restless and ethnic minority-populated region. The Chinese government justifies this campaign as part of its relentless effort to defeat what it calls the ‘three evils’ (三股势力)—separatism, terrorism and religious extremism—and to bring economic development to one of China’s poorer regions. The combined result of this multi-pronged effort is a dystopian surveillance state in which the Chinese government has detained some 1 million Muslim men in prison-like conditions, systematically sterilized Muslim women, bulldozed mosques and effectively eliminated the practice of Islam among the region’s inhabitants, while also incentivizing migration from ethnic Han people to the region in what altogether may constitute ‘cultural genocide’.

This piece argues that the motives for this multi-pronged campaign go far beyond securing the region’s plentiful oil and gas assets and protecting vital country-crossing energy infrastructure. Instead, the strategic objectives and stakes are much bigger, centered around nothing short of squashing the secessionist and terrorist challenges to one-party rule under the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

China’s Wild West

Xinjiang is a territorially massive place. At some 1.6 million square kilometres and representing one-sixth of China’s already enormous land mass (China is the world’s fourth largest country by size), Xinjiang is larger than every US state but Alaska or slightly larger than the size of Quebec, though much of the province is uninhabitable. Historically, various imperial governments based in Beijing or other eastern cities have struggled to exert control over the vast territory and the various mostly Muslim-believing minorities that lived there. Mao Zedong, in ‘liberating’ China’s peripheral areas in 1949-50, settled for designating Xinjiang an ‘Uyghur autonomous region’, recognizing the limits of Beijing’s control over the thinly-populated far-off land. (Uighur is the name for the Turkic peoples that has made up the majority of the population in the region for centuries).

Xinjiang is massive in size,

larger than the province of Quebec and every US state but Alaska. Xinjiang

represents one-sixth of China’s already enormous land mass

The starting point of China’s oil industry

Xinjiang was the focus of China’s primitive oil industry in the 1950s. In particular, the Yumen oilfield and several of the province’s basins were believed to be oil-rich by Soviet geologists and engineers who had been sent to China after the People’s Republic was formed in 1949. (These specialists were withdrawn suddenly in 1959, marking the start of what became the Sino-Soviet split). But the discovery of the Daqing ‘elephant’ in 1959-60 shifted attention and resources to China’s northeast, while turning China into an oil powerhouse for many decades thereafter. In the late 1980s and 1990s, with the Chinese government concerned with stagnant oil production, attention again shifted back to Xinjiang. CNPC (中石油), then China’s upstream onshore national oil company (NOC) (a group I’ve written about here) under the leadership of Wang Tao (1988-96), focused on developing these costly and geologically challenging resources so as to fend off China’s growing dependence on foreign oil. The effort was in vain as China became a net oil importer in 1993. The gap between China’s domestic oil production and demand has grown ever since. In spring 2020, China imported over 10m bpd, making it by far the world’s largest oil-importing country and sparking discussions of the country as a whole buying foreign oil.

But Xinjiang consistently disappointed in its levels of oil and gas (O&G) production. In 2008, the province averaged production of 550,000 barrels per day (bpd), or about 15% of China’s overall oil output, with similar output figures for natural gas. Xinjiang is also rich in coal deposits, home to some 40% of China’s total coal reserves. Overall, extractive industries like coal, oil and gas, when coupled with the government’s furious construction of rail and roads across the region, has given a neocolonial flavour and sense of occupation to the Chinese government’s intentions in the province, though it would take many years before that resentment burst to the surface.

“Xinjiang was the focus of China’s primitive oil industry in the 1950s. A steady and reliable energy producer, the province consistently accounts for about 15% of China’s overall oil and gas production.”

A strategic corridor

As much as Xinjiang was important to supply energy to China’s mega-cities and factories several thousands of kilometres away on the coast, the province also became a vital energy transit route. No project has been more important in this regard than the 4,000-km-long ‘West-East Gas Pipeline’ (西气东输). The project was promoted in the 1990s by CNPC, the massive oil company that also monopolized onshore pipeline infrastructure. The company entered a particularly furious expansionist phase under its empire-building but now disgraced leader Zhou Yongkang (1996-98). The pipeline idea found sympathetic ears in a development-minded State Council and Politburo Standing Committee (PSC), China’s highest echelon of power, especially with then Premier Zhu Rongji. The project was attractive as a means of ensuring a reliable and more environmentally friendly source of energy (natural gas as opposed to coal) for factories and apartments in eastern China. The project also fit within then president Jiang Zemin’s ‘Develop the West’ vision, which featured heavy infrastructure spending on these far western peripheral regions. (The pipeline, as Zhou Yongkang predicted, helped make CNPC fabulously wealthy as both exclusive producer and transporter of oil and gas onshore). On the ground, the pipeline, which opened in 2004, also brought waves of ethnic Han Chinese workers to the sparsely populated province.

Xinjiang is not only an important energy supplier for China’s energy-hungry coastal cities, but has also emerged as a key transit route

The province gained even greater strategic importance as a transit route when a cross-border pipeline linking oil and gas from central Asian republics like Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan was constructed. Since 2005, oil from Kazakhstan started flowing across Xinjiang through the 1,000-km pipeline. These overland pipelines serve as an increasingly appealing option for Chinese strategists, who see some relief from not only diversifying the source-country of China’s oil imports, but oil-import routes as well. Nevertheless, the vast majority of China’s imported oil still passes through the Strait of Hormuz or Strait of Malacca.

International terrorists or fighters for independence?

Fast forward to the early 2000s, when a dormant independence movement took form in the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM). The US Treasury designated ETIM a terrorist organization in 2002 during a warming of US-China relations in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. Ties between ETIM and transnational jihadi groups like al-Qaeda have always been specious, but for the Chinese government, the official labelling by the US government of ETIM as a ‘terrorist’ group was a major coup, as now China had successfully lumped its separatist and domestic terrorist problem with America’s broader ‘Global War on Terror’.

Hundreds of protesters carrying the blue-and-white ‘East Turkestan’ flag rally for Uighurs to raise awareness about the conditions in Xinjiang. November 2018. Source: http://www.anews.com.tr/world/2018/11/14/hundreds-march-in-washington-in-solidarity-for-uyghurs

The Chinese government has also actively made common cause with various authoritarian governments in central Asia, Muslim-majority countries in which ETIM has also made connections and whose governments confront problems of domestic ‘terrorism’ of their own. The Chinese government has repatriated an untold number of Uighurs who had fled China to these neighbouring countries (this was made possible under extradition agreements of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization of which China is de facto leader and these central Asian republics are members). More recently, the Chinese government has claimed that thousands of Uighurs have gone to fight in Syria’s civil war, joining various militant groups, including the Islamic State, and feared they’d return to China to lead their own uprising against the Chinese government.

Tensions boil over: The 2009 Urumqi riots and the wave of terror attacks

The concerted efforts of several Chinese administrations to invest in Xinjiang have sharply increased the province’s overall economic output and standards of living. But the economic benefits of resource extraction and development have been unevenly shared, with Han Chinese benefiting the most while Xinjiang’s many other ethnic groups, most notably the Uighurs, continue to be marginalized. Tensions over programs like ‘Develop the West’ and the Uighurs’ general exclusion from the male Han-dominated political system continued to breed resentment.

The Chinese government’s pervasive fear of a violent Muslim-led insurgency (there are some 60-80 million Muslims living in China) seemed to be confirmed when rioting broke out in 2009 in Urumqi, Xinjiang’s capital city. However, unlike the government’s straightforward understanding of the conflict being caused by separatist forces and transnational terrorism, the causes of the riots and the grievances that spurred them seemed to be local in nature and widely held among Uighurs. Scholars of the region see the murder of two Uighur migrant workers in a Guangdong toy factory as the triggering event. This led mostly Uighurs in Xinjiang to take to the streets in protest, especially against what they saw as widespread discrimination and government-incentivized Han Chinese migration into the region, though the grievances were many and seemed to be widely shared.

The riots left nearly two hundred people dead, a trauma that seems to have deeply changed the way the Chinese government viewed the Uighurs and set off a revision of Xinjiang policy. With the following crackdown came a wave of terrorist attacks, which became particularly frequent and bold through the year 2014, including one during Xi Jinping’s visit to Urumqi that year.

Showing ‘absolutely no mercy’

From this point on, the Chinese government adopted the series of wide-ranging measures that constitute what has come to be known as the ‘absolutely no mercy’ campaign for which the government’s long-term goal is to gain complete control over the vast and restless province. Official CCP documents leaked in summer 2019 indicate a comprehensive campaign, which includes dozens of concentration camps that have detained over 1 million Muslim men. The men often have no charges laid against them and have no legal recourse to challenge their detentions, something permissible under Chinese law.

We still know very little of what goes on inside the camps, though first-hand accounts from those who have since fled China describe a depressing mix of constant monitoring, sleep deprivation and torture during interrogations. Among other things, detainees are ordered to denounce Islam and pledge loyalty to the CCP.

“Xinjiang now features hundreds of camps, with satellite imagery indicating that 39 camps almost tripled in size between April 2017 (one month after the passing of the law) and April 2018”

The legislative centerpiece of this campaign came in March 2017, when the Xinjiang government passed an anti-extremism law, which has provided the legal veneer for a massive and indiscriminate crackdown. Included in the law were provisions like banning the wearing veils in public and the growing of long beards, indicating that the oppressive cultural and religious components were very much part of the campaign from the beginning. More importantly, the law legalized the use of detention (described as ‘vocation centres’) as places created to eliminate extremism, reflecting the government’s ingrained fear that religious practices could spur any of the ‘three evils’ of separatism, terrorism and radicalism.

With this passing of this law, detention has become the hallmark policy of the party-state’s harsher and more comprehensive approach to the region. Xinjiang now features literally hundreds of camps, with satellite imagery indicating that 39 camps almost tripled in size between April 2017 (one month after the passing of the law) and April 2018.

The man with the iron fist

The post of party secretary of Xinjiang, the Chinese party-state’s most important position in the province, is among the most challenging but appreciated by the Politburo Standing Committee. The ‘absolutely no mercy’ campaign has required—and found—a ruthless figure in Chen Quanguo. He took over Xinjiang’s top post over in 2016. Chen had previously held top position in Tibet where he’d overseen a tightening of state control over Buddhist monasteries in Tibet as well as ramping up the number of police and security checkpoints. Similarly, security measures in Xinjiang have intensified dramatically under Chen, most notably the widespread use of arbitrary and long-term detention of Muslim men.

Under Xinjiang party-secretary Chen Quanguo, security has greatly increased, including detaining some 1 million Muslim men

Dictatorship requires control. The Chinese single party-state has shown both its willingness and ability to harness cutting-edge technology to construct this surveillance state. Urban centres, towns and villages have effectively been reorganized under a grid system with a police station being set up among blocks of some five hundred people. These police posts then closely monitor the activities of inhabitants, regularly scanning ID cards, taking pictures and fingerprints, and searching cell phones, all permissible under the new Xinjiang security law.

The government also has a vast and growing databank of DNA of Xinjiang residents (this was required under the program ‘Physicals for All’). Facial-recognition technology, of which China is now considered a world-leader, is widely used through cameras which are now ubiquitous throughout the province. Another particularly Huxleyian element of this surveillance state is the homestay program, in which Chinese Communist Party members live with Uighur families and report back on any perceived ‘extremist’ behaviours.

Demographic genocide

The Chinese government’s ruthless and multifaceted Xinjiang policy has reappeared in Western media following several reports, one by the Associated Press (AP) and the other by Xinjiang scholar Adrian Zenz, revealing a systematic campaign of forced sterilizations and other measures to reduce the populations of Muslim minorities, in particular the Uighurs, in Xinjiang. The measures of this cruel but long-term and methodical campaign to reduce the Muslim populations are various, including forced sterilizations, forced intrauterine devices, state-mandated pregnancy checks and state-imposed abortions, as well as the imprisoning Muslim women who have too many children, among other birth-controlling measures.

Conclusion

This ruthless and multi-year effort to bring complete control over Xinjiang is about much more than securing a strategically important and mineral-rich region for Xi Jinping’s signature ‘Belt and Road’ initiative. And the methods, however ruthless, may be working. ETIM seems to be a shattered organization and there have been no terrorist attacks in the province since December 2016. For the years 2015-18, for which data is available, birthrates in certain counties in Xinjiang have collapsed by as much as 60%. Contrast this with the slight decline in the nationwide birthrate, which is down 4.2% for the year 2019, despite the ending of China’s infamous ‘one-child’ (计划生育) policy.

In seeking to preserve China’s territorial integrity and squashing any organized opposition, the Chinese government has shown itself willing to go to extreme lengths to achieve its strategic interests, none of which is more important than maintaining Chinese Communist Party rule.