China Has Chosen Cultural Genocide in Xinjiang—For Now

The news out of Xinjiang, China’s western region, this summer has been a steady stream of Orwellian horrors. A million people held against their will in political reeducation camps. Intelligence officials assigned as “adopted” members of civilian families. Checkpoints on every corner and mandatory spyware installed on every device.

The targets of this police state are China’s Muslim Uighur minority, whose loyalties the central government has long distrusted for both nationalist and religious reasons. An already uneasy relationship deteriorated further in 2009, when Uighur protests led to violent riots and a retaliatory crackdown. Hundreds died in the clashes or were disappeared by security forces in their aftermath. Since then, a handful of deadly terrorist attacks outside of Xinjiang itself have served to justify increasingly heavy restrictions on the group’s rights and freedoms.

The Uighur are a problem for China, and perhaps an intractable one. They are reluctant subjects of the Chinese state, they sit on the route most key to Xi Jinping’s signature Belt and Road Initiative, and increasing oppression has so far only prompted further resistance.

But as far as we know, China isn’t massacring the Uighurs. This is not to say that the repression hasn’t been violent. It has. Members of the security forces are committing torture and extrajudicial killings with impunity. But there is no evidence that China is systematically employing lethal violence in an effort to physically eradicate the Uighur minority. Why not?

It’s certainly not out of any reluctance to use deadly force. Restrictions have escalated alarmingly in recent months, with the authorities treating Islam as a contagious ideological disease whose sufferers must be quarantined. The vast network of internment camps has more than doubled in size since the beginning of 2018, and people no longer emerge from them after a few days or weeks. Now, they disappear for months or what may become years. Uighurs living abroad report that their relatives back home don’t answer their calls anymore. They don’t know if their loved ones have cut off overseas contact to avoid arousing suspicion or if they’ve vanished into the camps like so many others.

While the official language around Uighurs still portrays them as happy subjects of the state, the rhetoric of “terrorists” and “separatists” has become increasingly dehumanizing—and all-encompassing. Any Uighur, especially a young man, can be imagined as an extremist who must be eliminated. In China’s tightly controlled online environment, hate speech against Islam and Uighurs goes almost unchecked by the authorities. In practice, it’s now extremely hard for Uighurs to live outside of Xinjiang; Han Chinese have received detention time merely for renting rooms to Uighurs outside of the region—while their renters have been sent to the camps in Xinjiang.

By any measure, China is committing crimes against humanity in its treatment of the Uighurs.

By any measure, China is committing crimes against humanity in its treatment of the Uighurs.

Specifically: the offenses of arbitrary imprisonment and persecution, both of which qualify as crimes against humanity “when committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population.” Former detainees have also described torture inside the camps. This, too, is crimes against humanity if it’s widespread or systematic—as a recent Human Rights Watch report indicates is the case.Some members of the Uighur community say the abuse goes further. They allege that China is committing a cultural genocide. Cultural genocide means the elimination of a group’s identity, through measures such as forcibly transferring children away from their families, restricting the use of a national language, banning cultural activities, or destroying schools, religious institutions, or memory sites. Unlike “physical” genocide, it doesn’t have to be violent. Uighur activists point to the forced separation of families, the targeting of scholars and other community leaders for detention and “reeducation,” the bans on Uighur language instruction in schools, the razing of mosques, and the onerous restrictions on signifiers of cultural identity such as hair, dress, and baby names as evidence that China is trying to eradicate the Uighur identity.

Cultural genocide is not a defined crime in international law. Although it was discussed at length during the drafting of the 1948 Genocide Convention, the distinction between physical and cultural genocide did not make it into the final document. Of the actions that might qualify as cultural genocide, only the forcible transfer of children is criminalized.

In practice, this absence hasn’t been such a problem. The type of acts that qualify as cultural genocide generally occur alongside, or as a precursor to, mass violence. Nonviolent actions undertaken in pursuit of the destruction of cultural identity therefore often serve as the evidence of intent necessary for a mass slaughter to qualify as genocide. For example, the devastating violence unleashed against the Rohingya by Myanmar’s military has been accompanied by clear efforts to eliminate Rohingya cultural institutions and leaders, and it follows decades of restrictions on members of the group’s ability to marry, procreate, or seek education freely. What on their own might look like atrocities committed as part of a particularly brutal counterinsurgency campaign begin to look like genocide when considered in the context of a long history of efforts to eradicate the group’s identity.

Source: foreignpolicy.com