The Wang Lixiong prophecy: ‘Palestinization’ in Xinjiang and the consequences of Chinese state securitization of religion

Controlling Religious Knowledge and Education for Countering Religious Extremism – Case study of the Uyghur Muslims in China

“…This sort of 'misrecognition' (Taylor, 1994, p. 25) of Islamic faith of the Uyghurs would not only sabotage the general Uyghur identity, but also could create hostility among those Uyghur against the Chinese state, as suggested by many China experts (e.g. Botobekov, 2016;Cafiero, 2018;Clark, 2014;Clarke & Kan, 2017;Neriah, 2017;Roberts, 2016Roberts, , 2018Smith Finley, 2018a).…”

“…After two years of relative silence, on February 14, 2017, eight people were killed in a knife attack in Pishan county, Xinjiang (Ng, 2017). Most of these violent events were treated by the government exclusively as terrorist events resulted from religious extremism, while these incidents were primarily provoked by the repressions over the basic human rights of the Uyghur, including the religious rights (Roberts, 2016(Roberts, , 2018Smith Finley, 2018a).…”

Homogenizing nationalists, budding fascists, and truculent exceptionalists: the end of world order in the Indo-Pacific

“…With time, Han economic, demographic, educational, and political colonization, as well as the manias of the Anti-Rightist Campaign and the Cultural Revolution (Thum 2018 ), fueled ethnic tensions. In the 1980s, many Uyghurs embraced with renewed vigor Turkic and Islamic values, and in the early 1990s a few groups advocated insurrection; these groups were suppressed in 1990 and 1997 (Smith Finley 2019 , pp. 85–86).…”

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.…”