[MUSIC PLAYING]
- Welcome.
I'm Ed Steinfeld.
I'm the Director of the Watson
Institute for International
and Public Affairs.
It's really my pleasure
today to welcome you all,
and especially my pleasure to
welcome our guest professor,
Adeeb Khalid.
So this is the Peter Green
Lecture on the Modern Middle
East, and it also
represents a collaboration
between the Center for Middle
East Studies here at Watson,
and the China initiative.
And I really want to
thank my colleague Shahzad
Bashir, for his
generosity and willingness
to co-sponsor this event.
And really, it was
his initiative that
brought Professor Khalid here.
I'm so delighted that we
have this opportunity.
Let me just say a
bit about our guest.
Professor Adeeb Khalid is the
Jane and Raphael Bernstein
Professor of Asian Studies
and History, and also
the Director of Middle East
Studies at Carleton College.
Professor Khalid's work
focuses on Central Asia,
which, of course, lies
at the intersection,
and is integrally part
of Islamic culture,
and the Russian
and Soviet worlds,
and also, if I may say,
the Chinese world too.
Central Asia is this
incredible intersection
of cultures and civilizations,
and very complicated politics,
as the title of today's talk--
The Uyghur's China
Problem, or How
We Got to the Political
Reeducation Camps of Xinjiang--
as the talk underscores.
Professor Khalid is the author
of three prize-winning books,
Making Uzbekistan,
Nation, Revolution,
and Empire in the Early USSR.
Cornell University
Press, in 2015.
The book Islam after Communism,
Religion and Politics
in Central Asia,
from the University
of California Press in 2007.
And Professor
Khalid's first book,
The Politics of Muslim
Cultural Reform, Jadidism--
sorry-- in Central Asia.
Alas, my Chinese expertise
isn't helping with all
of the language necessary.
And that book is from University
of California, in 1998.
Without further ado, let me
again thank Professor Khalid,
and welcome him-- you--
to Brown.
Thank you.
ADEEB KHALID: Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
Well, thank you very much for
that very fine introduction.
I hope I live up to the
promise in my talk today.
And thank you all for coming.
The Uyghurs have
a China problem.
Since the autumn of
2016, the Chinese state
has been putting large numbers
of them, more than a tenth
of the entire Uyghur population,
into political reeducation
camps, for the purpose of
cleansing their brains--
this comes from
official proclamations--
and ridding them off harmful
thoughts, that seem to be
and they equivalent of the
Uyghur culture, it seems.
A vast number of
Uyghur intellectuals
have disappeared into the--
[AUDIO OUT]
And not just
intellectuals, media stars,
members of the
intelligentsia in general.
The scale of the
incarceration is astonishing.
It has been well-documented
through efforts
by people who have tracked the
construction of these camps
through satellite imagery,
through looking through tenders
opened up by the Chinese
government for the construction
of these things, through
changes in government spending,
and house budget outlays
for security expenditures
have markedly increased
over the last three years.
But it's not just that
the camps are there,
and the estimates of
the number of inmates
run from anywhere between
1 and 2 million people,
out of a total Uyghur
population of 10 million.
Outside the camps, Uyghur
society is under siege.
We have the makings of
an amazing surveillance
state of the kind we have--
[AUDIO OUT]
The controls, the surveillance,
encompass all aspects
of Uyghur life and
Uyghur culture.
I was there this
summer, briefly,
for one of the strangest
research trips of my life.
[INAUDIBLE] I could not
actually do any research.
If I did, I would get my
interlocutors into trouble,
and I, myself, might have--
[AUDIO OUT] mostly
observe, and take pictures,
pretending to be a tourist.
But this is a mosque in
the northern Xinjiang
city of Wilayah.
The front door has a
large padlock on it.
It's not-- [AUDIO OUT]
has been shut down,
as have most mosques in Xinjiang
been over the last few years.
And there is a large
red banner that
exhorts people to actively
bring on the mutual adaptation
of religion and socialism.
Here is the Id Kah mosque in
Kashgar, that in better times,
used to be sold as the biggest
mosque in all of China.
Now, it has a red flag on it.
It's still open, it still
functions, but next to it
there's the red flag.
And here is a People's
Convenience Security
Checkpoint, where people--
[AUDIO OUT] They can also
recharge their phones,
and get tea.
But these police checkpoints
litter the urban landscape
of Xinjiang.
There are places where
every other street corner
will have a cabin like that.
There are police patrols.
There are facial recognition
cameras that are everywhere.
And on top of that, there
is a certain campaign
of rectification
of Uyghur culture,
including its architectural
rectification.
In 2009, before this campaign
began, the old city of Kashgar
was basically bulldozed
and then rebuilt,
because ostensibly the adobe
structures in the old city
were not safe enough in
an earthquake-prone zone.
So people are better off
living in concrete and steel,
multi-storey buildings,
than in these adobe houses.
The old city was then
rebuilt. The sign there says--
it's in three languages--
that what you're seeing
there is 1,000 year old street.
But it looks more like a
pedestrian mall in California
or in Disneyland.
And here is the world's
newest medieval city gate.
That is also a Triple Five
national tourist attraction.
So Xinjiang's culture
has been sort of rendered
into a tourist site for the gaze
mostly of non-Chinese tourists.
I just could not
resist taking a picture
of this picture being taken.
By this says, Xinjiang serves as
the exotic and internal exotic
[INAUDIBLE] the Han
Chinese [INAUDIBLE]..
One of these is from the old
city, the other from Urumqi,
where, again, traditional
Uyghur culture
is on display, but with the
red lanterns that mark it
as patriotically Chinese.
Mosques are closed.
If they're not closed,
they have cameras on them.
Those cameras are
ubiquitous, every 50 meters.
And these are not just ordinary
closed circuit surveillance
cameras.
They have facial
recognition built into them.
So Chinese citizens,
pedestrians, but specifically,
Uyghur can be
tracked at all times.
Here's another mosque
with a red flag on it.
This is from Kashgar's
rebuilt old city.
Some old mosques, many of
them have been demolished.
This one has turned
into an art gallery.
And here's my favorite--
they changed this
one into a bar,
where one can knock back a--
[AUDIO OUT] at one's leisure.
So clearly the Uyghurs
have a China problem.
And in stating the
issue this way,
I'm quite deliberately trying
to reframe an issue that
is usually seen through
a lens centered on China,
that China has an
Uyghur problem.
Journalists trying to
describe to their readers
how the Uyghurs are distinct
from the rest of the people
of the People's Republic
would say that, well, Uyghurs
are actually closer
to Central Asian
than to other citizens of China.
That is already to buy into the
official framework of history
as espoused by the
People's Republic of China,
that China's current
boundaries are
a reflection of some natural
age-old unity, that China
is a trans-historical
entity that
has existed across
the millennia,
and that all national groups
living within its boundaries
are Chinese in some way.
China's a state where
the government actually
takes it on itself also
to teach you history
and to set down proper
historical facts.
That would be very nice,
and makes historian's jobs
a lot easier, I suppose.
But there have been a number
of white paper documents
that have laid out the
official position on--
[AUDIO OUT]
relationship to China.
The most recent one was
published in July of this year.
And it basically
states, China is
a unified multi-ethnic country,
and the various ethnic groups
in Xinjiang have long been
part of the Chinese nation.
Throughout its long
history nation,
Xinjiang's development
has been closely related
to that of China.
It also says that
there was never
anything called East
Turkestan, which
is the term that was quite
commonly used for this region,
up until at least
the Second World War.
Xinjiang, by the way,
is a Chinese term
that means "new frontier"
or "new dominion."
And so it is new.
Now, we'll come to where
that newness comes from.
The State Council also
states that Xinjiang
is a multinational
multi-religious place, to which
the Uyghurs have
no special claim,
and that Islam is neither an
indigenous, nor the sole belief
system of the Uyghurs.
This assertion that China,
in its present boundaries,
is a trans-historical
everlasting entity
is what leads us to believe
that the Uyghurs are
[INAUDIBLE] in some way.
This has been a position
that all Chinese governments,
over the last century and a bit,
have held, From the late Qing,
to the Nationalists,
through the PRC,
that China is a
single nation state
with inviolable
political boundaries.
And that has to do
with the Qing's concern
with foreign encroachment,
European and Japanese
encroachment, and
the unequal treaties
that they had been
forced to sign.
And so, the assertion there was
that China is a single country.
The Qing then were
toppled in 1912,
and the Chinese, or basically,
the nationalist regime
that succeeded them,
was faced with a choice.
Well, I would assert
an imperative--
that they were happy
to see the Qing go.
The Qing were,
after all, Manchus,
but they did not want
to let go of the empire
that the Qing had
built. And therein lies
the roots of the conflict,
whose later stage is being
played out Xinjiang right now.
Now, let me pull
back a little bit
and say that, as a
historian of Central Asia,
I would rather put the
matter rather differently.
Uyghurs are not more
similar to Central Asians
then to the Chinese,
they are Central Asian--
those Central Asians
who were conquered
by a China-based empire
in the 18th century.
So here is-- oops.
Sorry, I-- no.
Here.
[AUDIO OUT]
-- to derail my own talk.
[AUDIO OUT]
All right.
So some of it depends on
how you define Central Asia.
So there's the
continent configuration,
and at the center of it
lies Central Asia, right?
That's straight forward.
But that region, like
most geographic regions,
does not have
necessarily a universally
agreed upon definition.
What we can say is that
what is now Xinjiang,
and what is now post-soviet
Central Asia-- the five Stans--
have been a single cultural
and geopolitical region.
And this map, from the Cagatai
Khanate from the 13th century,
might be reaching
a bit far back,
but that does represent a
certain cultural wholeness
and a cultural unity
that we still see.
That's what connects the Uyghurs
to the rest of Central Asia.
And I got to this
because I was asked,
and I foolishly
accepted, to write
a general history of
modern Central Asia
for a broad audience.
And in trying to imagine how
I should define Central Asia,
the map that I came
up with is this.
And here, Xinjiang and the
five post-Soviet republics
of Central Asia, have
a lot more in common.
They have had much greater
intertwined histories than they
have with neighboring regions.
This is how I define
Central Asia for myself.
And it was this region,
or maybe this region,
that was then divided up
by neighboring land-based
empires--
those of the Russians from the
north, and those of the Qing
in the east--
over the course of the 18th
and early 19th centuries.
And this is why I have a problem
when people say that Uyghurs
are more like Central Asians.
Well, it depends on
how we define Uyghurs,
and how you define Central Asia.
But Uyghurs are Central Asians
who were conquered by China.
Of the things that one faces
in writing about Central
Asian history on this scale
is exactly what China is.
And according to
the State Council
of the People's
Republic of China,
in that white paper
that I just quoted,
China is the current
boundaries of the PRC,
and that represents some
unity that has existed
for at least 3,000 years.
But if you look at the map--
[INAUDIBLE]
[AUDIO OUT] All right.
So this is an excellent gif
I downloaded from somewhere.
I use it for teaching.
I can't remember
where I got it from.
My apologies to the
copyright owners.
But it does give you a sense
of the moving boundaries
of China-based empires, and the
amount of time that Xinjiang
was part of any
entity based in China.
And those are large not
very large periods of time.
And basically it was the
Han dynasty, and then
the Qing, and then the PRC--
let's go back to this--
that controlled Xinjiang,
that made Xinjiang
a part of a Chinese state.
Xinjiang became
most recently a part
of a Chinese state through
a series of conquests
between 1755 and 1759, when
the Qing empire conquered.
The Qing were
Manchus, and they ran
basically an
inner-Asian empire that
was built on conquest that
recognized difference, treated
its different subjects
quite differently.
They did not set out--
they made Xinjiang part of
the same state as the Chinese,
but the Qing did not
really have any interest
in turning the inhabitants
of Xinjiang into Chinese.
They were different non-Manchu
subjects of their empire,
just as were the Han.
And for much of the--
Qing rule over Xinjiang
was troublesome.
There are any number of
revolts, and then Qing rule
was overthrown in a
massive revolt in 1864.
Xinjiang was conquered a second
time between 1879 and 1881.
And even then, a
huge space, far away
from the capital's central rule
was very thin and very weak.
And actually, after
the 1880s, as a result
of the unequal treaties
granting extraterritorial rights
to European subjects, that the
Qing had been forced to sign,
Xinjiang was actually
more closely tied
to the Russian empire and
to Russian Central Asia,
than to mainland China.
And after the Trans-siberian
railway was completed in 1891,
it was easier for Chinese
officials appointed to Xinjiang
to go to Vladivostok, take
the train all the way to what
is now Kazakhstan, and then
re-enter Xinjiang that way.
The Russian ruble was the
most significant currency
in the bazaars of Xinjiang,
and Xinjiang trade, but also
Xinjiang intellectuals, were
much more likely to look west,
not to the Russians, but
to the Muslim communities
of the Russian Empire, and then
farther afield to the Ottomans.
And this is where, from the
early 20th century, when
new kinds of ideas and
new kinds of education
begin to arrive in
Xinjiang, a lot of it
comes not from China, but
from Russian Central Asia,
from other Russian Muslim
communities, such as those
of the Qatars in
present day Qatarstan.
Kazan was a major center
of Muslim learning,
and many of the--
let's see.
Oh.
[AUDIO OUT]
In Bulgar, the
White Mosque, that
was a number of Russian
traders, most of whom
happened to be Qatar
Muslims, and that's
where a lot of ideas of Muslim
modernism began to arrive.
And they came not from China,
but from Muslim communities
in the Russian empire,
and then farther afield
from the Ottomans.
The fact that Asian
populations of Xinjiang--
Uyghurs and others
are turkophone.
They speak Turkic
languages that are mutually
intelligible to those in
Russian and Central Asia,
and with the
Ottomans [INAUDIBLE]..
And it was here that perhaps
the most significant ideas--
significant for our
purposes-- those of nationhood
begin to arrive.
Perhaps the most important
was the idea of Turkism,
that the people
of Xinjiang shared
a common Turkic ethnic origin
with other Central Asians,
other Turks, and the Ottomans.
This is not pan-Turkism,
which is the idea
that all Turkic
peoples should unite,
which has always been
a pretty marginal idea.
Turkism, this recognition
of ethnic origin,
and that ethnic origin is
significant to one's sense
of self, and should be the basis
of one's political community,
that was absolutely central.
And that means that Uyghur
intellectual developments
were tied to what was going
on in Turkic countries--
Russian Central Asia, Qatarstan,
the Crimea, and the Ottomans,
and in some ways, much
more closely linked
to that than anything
that was happening.
Once the Qing dynasty collapsed
and China became a republic,
for Chinese thinkers
there was a question
of how to conceptualize
the Chinese state.
And here, there is a fundamental
problem that they all face,
that was best expressed
many decades later.
This is a wonderful
quote from Mao Zedong.
China is a big and rich
country, but the population
that's Chinese
relies on the wealth,
and the natural resources
are in territories that are--
[INAUDIBLE]
That is, in some ways,
a fundamental issue.
And so this is 40 years later.
The republic is gone.
This is into the communist era.
But the problem is still there.
So initially, under
Sun Yat Sen, the idea
was to reimagine China as
a union of five nations.
The five being the Han Chinese,
the Manchus, the Mongols,
the Tibetans, and
interestingly, the Muslims,
which isn't a race
or a nation, but that
included both Hui, the
Chinese-speaking Muslims,
and the Turkic speaking
Muslims of Xinjiang.
So this is the national
flag of that republic.
But that fell by the wayside
when China's fragmentation
during the nationalist era.
And then the Japanese
invasion later on
made an emphasis on absolute
essential unity much more
significant to emphasize.
Then official rhetoric shifted.
For Chiang Kai-shek and
the nationalist leadership,
increasingly there was this
idea that all different ethnic
groups in China are genetically
and racially related--
[AUDIO OUT]
-- pride of China.
It was a problematic position
to take, but it was taken.
The Chinese communists
were in the opposition,
and before they took power,
came up with something else,
with a different way of
conceptualizing diversity.
And for that, a
lot of those ideas
came from the Soviet Union.
Here we need to take a step
back and switch our focus
to what had been going
on in the Russian empire
after the collapse of
that empire in 1917.
Because the former
Russian empire
was put back together
by the Bolsheviks, who
then reconceptualized it as
a federation of allegedly
sovereign republics, based on
national self-determination
of various different
nations inhabiting
the former Russian
empire, who were
granted territorial autonomy.
So the Soviet Union was a union.
It was a federal union,
and, conceptually at least,
it was a union of territorially
autonomous republics.
Why did the Soviets do that?
There is really no real
basis in Marxism for that.
But the Russian
Revolution had seen
massive national mobilization
by all the non-Russian peoples
of the Russian Empire,
and thought the Soviets,
then this was a way
of co-opting some
of the appeal of nationalism
within a Soviet framework.
And so, you have the creation
of all these national republics
over the course of the 1920s,
including Central Asia.
The Uyghurs
neighbors all acquire
these territorial republics.
A lot of this was built
from the seat of the pants.
The Soviets came up
with all these things
as challenges
presented themselves.
But by the end of the
1930s, the basic formula
of Soviet nationalities
policies were in place.
The Soviet Union was
a socialist country
built on the
friendship of peoples
who each enjoyed
territorial autonomy,
and they were
ostensibly sovereign.
Ostensibly is important
here, but still.
The Russian are conceptualized
as their elder brothers.
The most advanced people who
are shepherding their younger
siblings along the
path of progress
to the nirvana of a
classless society.
But at the same time,
the Soviet Union
was never conceptualized
as a Russian state.
It was a multinational
state built on a federation.
The Russians were seen
as elder brothers,
but beyond that, they
had no further claim
on ownership of the state.
And then, after the
Second World War,
actually was a crucible
that really made--
where the common sacrifice
and the common slaughter
allowed people to
develop a sense
of common Soviet patriotism.
In the post-Stalin period,
there was some sort of--
decentralization is
too strong a word,
but there was a
devolution of power.
And in each of these
national republics,
indigenous political
elites came into power.
They enjoyed a great
deal of autonomy,
as long as they did
not rock the boat,
as long as they fulfilled
the economic demands
of the center--
and the Soviet economy
was centralized.
But they enjoyed language and
considerable cultural autonomy,
but also their power over
the allocation of resources.
So these non-Russian political
elites became a real reality
in the years from the
mid-'50s on, especially,
which has one of
the reasons why,
when the Soviet
Union fell apart,
there were these indigenous
elites that would take over.
And what happened
in Central Asia,
is that these Central Asian
communist elites reinvented
themselves as national
leaders, and some of them
are still there in power.
But what does all of that
have to do with the Uyghurs?
First of all, the very idea
of an Uyghur national identity
was first dreamed up--
first imagined--
I'm sorry, I don't
mean to say it's only a dream.
All nations are imagined.
The Uyghur nation was imagined
in Soviet Central Asia,
in the early 1920s, among the
substantial Uyghur diaspora
that had shown up in
the Russian empire
through long-term labor
migration, but also
long-term population transfers,
and so on and so forth.
But also, the fact that
other central Asians
were acquiring
territorial autonomy,
having their books published
in their languages,
language rights, and
so on and so forth,
became a model for
emulation or aspiration
for Uyghur intellectuals.
In the interwar period,
Xinjiang continued
to be much more closely
linked with the Soviet Union
than to the rest of China.
This as much because
of the weakness
of the central Chinese stage--
Xinjiang was actually
ruled between 1916 and 1943
by a succession of three
Han Chinese governors, who
ruled after a tight fist,
but with very little election
to China, to the capital.
And sometimes they actively
flouted China's commands--
Beijing's and
Nanjing's commands--
and the last of
them, Sheng Shicai,
actually took Xinjiang into a
position almost of a satellite
state with the Soviet Union.
And among other things, he
introduced a whole series
of postulates from Soviet
nationalities policies
into Xinjiang.
He wanted to make Xinjiang
a model province for all
of China, by bringing
about Soviet-style policies
of managing national difference.
He then granted Uyghur--
again, the use of a term
Uyghur and Xinjiang itself--
but granted language rights,
and so on and so forth.
That interwar period
also for saw two attempts
at creating eastern Turkestan
republics, either as completely
independent of China, or
enjoying a much greater degree
of autonomy within China than
had ever been contemplated
by any Chinese government.
There were other
people who worked
within a Chinese
framework, without talking
about the republic, but who
also saw much greater degrees
of autonomy, which would
mean language rights, control
over resources, and
so on and so forth.
All of that fell by the wayside
once the People's Republic
was established, and the
People's Liberation Army
took Xinjiang.
It was called the peaceful
liberation of Xinjiang,
because the Guangdong,
the nationalist forces,
surrendered.
The PLA marched in only to
find that there was really
no basis of support among
the indigenous population--
[INAUDIBLE] [AUDIO OUT] a
future communist Xinjiang.
At the same time, the PRC
had adopted several aspects
of Soviet nationalities policy.
There was an
ethnographic expedition
that led to a census,
that recognized
55 non-Han nationalities,
or minzu, in China,
and there was some structure
of territorial autonomy
that was implemented.
And so, there are
certain similarities
between Soviet and
Chinese practices,
and Soviet and Chinese
iconography of national defense
within the states.
Here is a Soviet
poster from early 1950.
All the various peoples,
nationalities of the Soviet
Union, expressing joy together.
Here's a Chinese poster.
Here's a very famous--
[AUDIO OUT] Stalin.
And is a very famous
poster of Mao,
leading all the various
minority nationalities
to joy and happiness.
What you will notice
in all of these,
both Soviet and
Chinese practice,
the nationalities
are folklorized.
They are minorities because
they wear their funky costumes,
here, and here, and here.
And that is very much
with us in China today,
where the non-Han
nationalities--
[AUDIO OUT] have to be depicted.
If they start wearing business
suits and working in offices,
then we don't know
what to make of them.
But it's much more
easy to associate them
with folkloric dress, and
folkloric culture, and dance.
Especially for the Uyghurs.
This is a postcard that I
own, that I scanned here,
that has Uyghurs dancing--
[AUDIO OUT] [INAUDIBLE]
of a mosque.
That's how you express your
cultural and ethnic identity.
All right.
So there are these similarities.
In some ways, you would think
that the Chinese and the PRC
had borrowed Soviet practices
of managing national difference,
but there are some very
fundamental differences.
One is that the
Soviets did talk about
national self-determination.
And proletarian national
self-determination
is expressed through these
territorial republics.
In practice, that might not have
been the case, but in the PRC,
that's not even a
theoretical option.
China remained a single state.
Autonomy was very limited.
China was never turned into
a federation, and ultimately,
the official title for
Xinjiang is the Xinjiang-Uyghur
autonomous region, but Uyghur
have no title to Xinjiang
in the way that Uzbeks had
Uzbekistan, or Kazaks had--
[AUDIO OUT]
And finally, one way
of integrating Xinjiang
into China, has been
a planned policy
of demographic transformation.
And so, here is a chart
of how the percentage
of Han and percentage
of Uyghur populations
has changed over time.
In 1949, the Han population
was about 6% of Xinjiang.
By the late 1970s,
it was up to over 40.
There was a brief
period when it fell,
but since then it
has picked up again.
To a certain extent, this
is people just showing up
to find jobs and betterment,
but to a great extent,
this is an actual planned--
[AUDIO OUT] All right.
So this obviously creates
a great deal of unhappiness
among--
[AUDIO OUT] [INAUDIBLE]
in your own homeland.
But before we get to that,
let's talk about a couple
of other more positive things.
There was a policy
of language rights.
There was officially sanctioned,
officially sponsored,
officially funded, cultural,
historical, ethnographic
research in the 1950s.
Then the madness of the
Cultural Revolution put
paid to everything
for about 15 years,
and picked up again
in the late 1970s.
And there you have the emergence
of an Uyghur intelligentsia,
and modern Uyghur
culture, where Uyghurs
can begin to imagine not just
their present, but their past,
which is the same thing that
had happen in Soviet Central
Asia under official auspices.
But here there are
two differences.
First, there was no
Uyghur political elite
that emerged in the way that it
had emerged in Soviet Central
Asia.
Uzbekistan, by the 1980s,
it's really run by Uzbeks.
In Xinjiang, nothing
like that happened.
There are Uyghurs in the
party, but in the 70 years
since Xinjiang has been
part of PRC, [INAUDIBLE]
five years, when the Xinjiang
committee of the Communist
Party of China was
headed by an Uyghur.
All other times, it's
been run by Han Chinese.
That was not at all the
practice in the Soviet Union.
The second was that
Uyghurs kept running up
against limits of expression
about how they could imagine
their history, and
that would result
in censorship, arrests,
suspensions, firings,
and so on and so forth.
The biggest vehicle for an
Uyghur national imaginary
was the historical novel.
Writing about the present was
hard and politically fraught,
but you can write about the
past, nationalize the past.
And from the mid-1980s,
the historical novel became
the major vehicle for
the creation of an--
[AUDIO OUT]
But there were limits.
And then something else
happened that, again,
happened outside of Xinjiang,
as much as anything else.
The Soviet Union fell apart.
Mikhail Gorbachev started
reforming the Soviet state,
and it came crashing
down, partly
as a result of mobilization
along the lines of the rights
of the Union Republic.
And the Soviet Union actually
did not collapse, it dissolved.
The legal act that
ended the Soviet Union
was the dissolution
of the Union treaty.
It was less of a collapse
than the unraveling--
and that's why we
have 15 republics that
come out of the Soviet--
[AUDIO OUT]
For Chinese observers
of Soviet reform,
this whole thing was a
complete catastrophe.
Gorbachev was a fool,
and Soviet policy
had been all on the wrong
track since Khrushchev.
And so, it was read in China.
They had given their
minzus, their minorities,
too much power, and
look what they had done.
They had destroyed the state.
So from 1991, China's already
pretty limited commitment
to territorial autonomy
and cultural pluralism
began to shrink again.
It was at the same time as
all that that China also
began to open up.
Uyghurs could travel more, as
could all Chinese citizens.
They were much more tied
to the rest of the world,
and they had the example of
their inflation neighbors.
And so, there has been this
process of Uyghur hopes rising,
and the Chinese state
pushing back against them.
Uyghur discontent
rising, the Chinese state
seeing that as a
threat to stability.
And so, this
back-and-forth has gone on,
and it has resulted
in a number of things.
Xinjiang is really
a dual society,
in which the Han and
the non-Han live side
by side, but with rather
limited interaction.
Uyghurs speak Chinese,
no Han Chinese
speak Uyghur in any
significant numbers.
There are also everyday
forms of resistance,
and then occasionally, it
would break out in violence.
Riots mostly, that
Chinese see as a sign
of separatism and disloyalty.
And this was the story of
the 1990s and the 2000s.
There was a turning
point in 2009,
when there was a massive riot
in Urumqi, the capital, that
had nothing to do
with separatism
or with Islamic militancy.
It was a protest
against the fact
that Han Chinese implicated in
the murder of Uyghur workers
in eastern China, had
not been punished.
There was a massive protest
organized against that.
That then turned
violent, and that
took on an ethnic character, and
Uyghurs rampaged and destroyed
Han Chinese businesses.
They were put down
two days later.
Han Chinese came
out on the streets
and started beating up Uyghurs.
It was a massive,
horrifying, violent episode.
But it was about
discontent in that fashion.
The Chinese state's
response was to blank out
all internet for a
year in Xinjiang,
and basically see this
as a sign of separatism.
And since about 2000,
the language use
has been about the three
evils of separatism--
extremism, meaning Islamic
extremism, and terrorism.
And so, co-opting the
global post-9/11 discourses
of anti-terrorism for this.
After 2009, all sorts
of restrictions period
of another strike-hard
campaign began,
and that begat more violence.
And the next five years saw
quite a bit of violent episodes
by Uyghurs in Xinjiang,
a few times outside
of Xinjiang as well.
But nothing ever
happened in 2016,
when this current
campaign of incarceration
and political
re-education began.
And I think that has little to
do with anything that happened
in Xinjiang itself, and more
to do with other priorities
that the Chinese
state has, which
is its belt-and-road
initiative, which
is a massively ambitious
program to reshape Eurasia
as an economic space,
an expression of China's
new-found status
as a global power
and an economic powerhouse.
And if you look on the map,
it's all premised on the notion
that China controls
Xinjiang properly.
If that is an area
of turbulence,
then the whole
thing falls apart.
It's premised on the
control Xinjiang,
and there are all
sorts of reasons
to believe that the
Chinese state decided--
[INAUDIBLE] its Uyghur
problem once and for all.
All right.
So I will begin to wrap up.
But I will say that this
fundamental tension between how
Uyghur see themselves and
their relationship to Xinjiang,
and how the Chinese
state sees itself
and its relationship
to Xinjiang,
that this fundamental
dissonance is
at the heart of this problem.
What has happened
is that by 2016,
or today, the Chinese state
has acquired enormous resources
that in previous decades
would have been inconceivable.
China's economy has
grown more than 40-fold
since the onset of the reform,
ever since the death of Mao.
And that gives it an
ability to control
this vast and distant space.
Up until 1980, no Chinese state
would even contemplate that.
And that, in some ways, is what
defines the present moment.
I'll just finish with
a couple of thoughts.
One is, where do we base
the current campaign
or incarceration?
What kind of historical
comparisons can we think of?
People have argued that the
notion of political reeducation
can be traced back
to Confucian ideals
of the perfect ability of man--
of humans.
But there are also
Marxist notions
of re-forging human
beings through labor,
and overcoming
false consciousness.
Both Stalin and Mao had
political reeducation camps.
Both had forced labor camps.
The campaign today
against mosques--
so the exposure and
destruction of mosques--
and against
intellectuals, is eerily
reminiscent of Soviet
interreligious campaigns
of the late 1920s and 1930s.
That's what I wrote about
extensively in my last book.
The difference here, is
that for the Soviets,
the foot soldiers of a
lot of those campaigns
were Central Asians,
and they were driven
by the sense of creating a
modern rational society free
of religion, of basically
modernizing Kazaks,
and Turkmens, and
Uzbeks, rather than
what is going on
here, which is much
more about the Chinese
state seeing Islam or Uyghur
culture basically as
a mental disease that
stands in the way of
their loyalty to China.
And finally, there is
one other episode--
that all Uyghur are suspect.
The only episode like that we
can see in say, Soviet Central
Asian history, are a
series of deportations,
usually of smaller national
groups, that Stalin carried out
during the immediate aftermath
of the Second World War,
where whole nation national
groups were accused
of disloyalty and treason
to the Soviet Union
and to the Soviet fatherland--
Crimean Tartars, Volga
Germans, the Chechens--
and deported to other
parts of the Soviet Union.
So that was the only other
comparison I can find,
but ultimately, the
problem is the difference
between the Soviet
Central Asian case
and the Chinese
Central Asian case
is that China is still seen as
a unified multi-ethnic country
which fudges something.
So what is a multi-ethnic
Chinese culture,
for all intents and purposes,
in all visual representations?
[INAUDIBLE] [AUDIO OUT]
Chinese culture?
That China is very much a
national state of the Chinese,
and that the Chinese Communist
Party has basically--
this is exhibit A for the
claim that all through the 20th
century, nationalism and
communism went hand in--
[AUDIO OUT] For a lot
of national movements,
communism was the [INAUDIBLE]
[AUDIO OUT] Communist Party,
has been a Chinese national
party that sees communism
as the best way of ridding
China of all its problems,
and building a new China.
And that rhetoric is
very much there today.
And in that sense,
this is different.
The Soviet Union-- the Soviet
was ethnically, and nationally,
and culturally new.
The Soviet Union
is the only country
that has ever existed that
had no geographic or ethnic
[INAUDIBLE] in its name.
And in that sense, Soviet-ness
meant modernity and progress,
not an ethnic indicator.
One could be Uzbek and
Soviet at the same time,
in a way that Uyghurs cannot be
Uyghurs and Chinese at the same
time.
And finally, there is that
difference in the demographic.
With the Russians,
the highest percentage
that the Russians ever composed
of the Soviet population
was 53%.
The Han Chinese portion of
the Chinese population is 93%,
and there is that demographic,
which makes all the difference.
All right.
I don't have any formal
conclusions for this talk,
because I could not
think of anything
that would not be depressing.
So I think I will just
stop talking here.
Thank you very much.
[APPLAUSE]
