Preventative Policing as Community Detention in Northwest China

“No Cracks, no Blind Spots, no Gaps”: Technologically-Enabled “Preventative” Counterterrorism and Mass Repression in Xinjiang, China

“…"Extreme religion", Wang and Shan assert, "attempts to change the true face of national culture and block exchanges and fusion among all ethnic groups" and as such the Party's "cultural guidance" must assist "people of all ethnic groups" to "move closer to secularization and modernization". The central implication is that "there must be an acceleration of 'the deep fusion' of Chinese culture in Xinjiang" in order to eliminate terrorism [25]. As we have seen, the CCP's ability to break the connection between markers of Uyghur religious and cultural identity and what it perceives as "extremism" has been fundamentally enabled by both the implementation of new forms of surveillance, and reinvigoration of older forms (e.g.…”

China’s Official Narratives on Xinjiang: Interethnic mingling, economic prosperity and religious terrorism

“…These measures are informed both by 'foreign models' (such as United States-led occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan) and Chinese intellectuals' theoretical contributions. 82 A WP issued in 2019 defines 'preventive' measures as 'top priority (yufang di yi wei 预防第 一位). 83 'Prevention' manifests as 'transformation through education' (jiaoyu zhuanhua 教育转化), a practice which was previously applied to the members of the Falun Gong.…”

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“…In the same vein, Darren Byler (2019b) has put on display the poignant similarities between the attempts to construct a 'human terrain system' through weaponised ethnography by the US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the way in which the Chinese authorities are acting in Xinjiang, while also unearthing how shifts in US military doctrine in the field of counterinsurgency since the late 2000s were first received and adapted in China, before being put into practice in Xinjiang. This link is also made in an influential recent paper by Sheena Greitens, Myunghee Lee, and Emir Yazici (2020), in which the authors argue that China's rhetoric about Central Asia's Uyghur diaspora began to shift following the attacks of 11 September 2001, with the Party-state drawing connections between Uyghur organisations and jihadist groups, especially those in Afghanistan and Pakistan, instead of emphasising pan-Turkic separatism.…”