Xinjiang on Balance

SWRG will soon release research on the PRC's anti-terror re-education campaign in Xinjiang and the varied US and Western political response. Our preliminary research thus far suggests the following:

Flawed and biased analytical premises and terms of reference

Construing and analysing CPC counterterrorism activities in Xinjiang as, or in terms of, political violence may be contextually insensitive. Researchers deploying such discourse and terms risk applying of political and cultural chauvinism and corresponding confirmation bias.

The CPC has likely carefully assessed - far more than is commonly credited to them in current research literature - the trade-off between backlash from systematic political-plus-physical-integrity interdiction, and the cost in deaths and domestic instability due to unchecked jihadist terrorism. The PRC's response of re-education based suppression is comparatively subtle and limited given that the origins and aetiology of the Xinjiang terrorist attacks. These attacks have been a result of domestic diffusion of activated Jihadist ideological memes transmitted via a trans-nationally exposed Uyghur Islamic fundamentalist diaspora.

The metaphorical discourse of ideological transmission-infection used by the PRC is not unreasonable given that Jihadist narratives are constructed and purposed to effect radicalisation by group epistemic updating and psycholinguistic impact including high-motivating affect. Allegations that the PRC is using anti-terror imperatives as an excuse for needless repression are difficult to endorse given the severity of the terrorist acts and the geopolitical and ideological dynamics involved in their propagation. Meanwhile, the US State Department risks its rhetoric appearing as an endorsement of religiously inspired terrorism under the auspices of defending freedom of religion. This rhetoric furthermore appears rooted in a partial equivocation between corporeal and symbolic threat: negative affect because of limiting of religious fanaticism does not equal acts of religious terror involving bombing civilians and attacking them with machetes.

The State Department freedom of religion narrative is further problematised by the historical heavily militarised US response to religiously inspired domestic terrorism at the Branch Davidian complex of David Koresh in Waco Texas in July of 1993, which resulted in 73 violent deaths including the killing of young children. In contrast - there is no known reliable evidence of deaths due to the re-education preventative countermeasures of the PRC against violent jihadists in Xinjiang.

Flawed human rights discourse with religionist premises

Most human rights orientated criticisms of the CPC's Xinjiang response - especially those emanating from the US and US State Department - are heavily ideologically laden on various political and ideological axes orthogonal to the question of human rights. Most relevantly, some of these are religiously motivated. Moreover, the salient motivating religious disposition is fundamentalist Christian and, although it is historically deeply opposed to Islam, that cult is arguably far more opposed to atheistic socialism, and is so on a specific religious basis that is severe enough in doctrinal expression to be considered to constitute serious bigotry.

The US and China: Dissimilar geopolitical environments

Sustaining a peaceful secular society in China involves a completely different set of challenges to those faced in the US due to geopolitical and geographical facts. The US has no land locked borders with large Islamic autocratic and theocratic nations. Where the US does have a problematic border (Mexico) the US response has been to build a physical wall partitioning an entire continent.

If Xinjiang were part of the US, and bordered by Islamic territories, it is quite possible that US democratic culture and human rights policy would render the US response to parallel threats initially ineffectual. It could be forecast that once such jihadist motivated violence took hold in the US, a stronger response would be delayed due to said cultural, ideological, and political imperatives. This would be followed by rapid escalation of terrorist activity that outpaced and overwhelmed domestic police capabilities, and subsequent development of the government's response into a militaristic intercession involving martial law and deployment of both the US National Guard and professional armies. Such a costly and chaotic outcome is probably wholly forestalled by the PRC's strategy.

Where the US has historically faced Islamic terrorism on a scale comparable to (in a different operational format) that experienced in Xinjiang - such as the September 11 2001 attacks on New York's World Trade Center: the response was nothing less than the initiation of a full scale hot war against Afghanistan.

Recently 70 nations gave support to the PRC's efforts in containing the religiously motivated terrorism affecting Xinjiang since the early 1990s. This is not realistically able to be attributed to China's global economic initiatives in many cases. It's apparent that even among many first world nations the PRC's actions are interpreted as neither an unreasonable curtailing of freedom of religion, nor as embodying human rights abuses any more severe than those documented in The United States.