The Belt Road Project as A Triggering Element of the Securitization of the Uyghur Issue

Abstract

The Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) is considered based on its ethnocultural, religious, and historical diversity. In its national security documents, known as the White Paper, China associates the region with extremism, separatism, and terrorism; and thus recognizes the Uyghurs as a threat. At the crossroads of OBOR's (One Belt One Road) three separate land corridors, Xinjiang, which has a crucial place in Beijing's hegemony-building process, is a region regarded critical from a geopolitical and geo-economics perspective. In this context, Beijing securitizes the Uyghurs, with whom China claims that its own values, political goals, and perception of the future are not compatible, from the "threat" point of view. This approach can also be interpreted through the conceptual elements envisaged by the Copenhagen School, such as immigration waves, horizontal and vertical competition, and depopulation.

Legitimation of Violation and Noncompliance: China’s Preventive Repression in Xinjiang

“…At the same time, a heated scholarly debate on the cause of widespread human rights abuses in Xinjiang has given rise to a wide spectrum of perspectives on the Uyghur crisis, including China's neo-totalitarian turn under Xi Jinping (Klimeš and Smith Finley, 2020), a state-sanctioned, legislated, and securitized Islamophobia or anti-Muslim racism (Shibli, 2021), xenophobia or racism as a tool for control and power in the region (Abdulla and Shamseden, 2021), Chinese state securitization of religion (Smith Finley, 2019), the Chinese emphasis on national security and stability in Xinjiang at the expense of Uyghurs (Debata, 2022), a state-led secular nationalist vision by framing Muslims as security threats (Malji, 2021), the securitization of the Uyghur "through their (re)construction as a terrorist threat" and the invocation of the USled "war on terror" (Baker-Beall and Clark, 2021: 22), the continuation and intensification of internal colonialism pursued by the Chinese state and dominant Han group (Debnath and Chatterjee, 2021), the party-state's governance of Xinjiang shaped by dynamics of colonialism, settler colonialism, and associated state-building Clarke, 2022), the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) as a triggering element of the securitization of the Uyghur issue (Tüysüzoğlu and Kurt, 2022), and Xinjiang's securitization aimed to construct a unified (Han-)Chinese state rather than driven by the BRI (Frenzel, 2021). Although these diverse perspectives have expanded our understanding and knowledge of the root cause of the human rights crisis in Xinjiang through the lens of constructivism, internal colonialism, securitization theory, identity politics, political economy and each explanation seems to complement with each other, they overlook China's institutionalization of the legitimation of repression through its long-term experience of, engineering of, and experiment with social control in the region.…”