October 1st, 2020 | Written By - Barbara Yang '21
China’s Belt and Road Initiative is an infrastructure project that will pour 1 trillion dollars into connecting China with the rest of the world. The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI)’s intended goal is to augment employment, job opportunities, investment, and consumption, as well as cultural connectivity by emulating the ancient Silk Road by building trade routes among Asian, European, and African countries. Money spent on infrastructure such as rail routes, roads, and pipelines are intended to connect industrial clusters which will make up “economic corridors.” At the heart of three out of six planned BRI economic corridors is Xinjiang, an autonomous region situated in the northwest of China.
The history and relationship between Beijing and Xinjiang is a rocky one. The autonomous region of Xinjiang became formally part of the Chinese Qing dynasty in 1884, following the Dungan Revolt, despite vehement resistance from the local population against this annexation. As 91% of the Chinese population is of Han descent, the population of Xinjiang, almost half of whom are Muslim Uyghur minorities, have long been oppressed by the Han majority. For example, most of the well-paid jobs in Xinjiang were given to the Han while the Uyghurs face systematic oppression from the government. In addition, as China is a state-enforced secular nation, Uyghurs have historically faced crackdowns and limitations on their religious expression and assembly. Racial and ethnic tensions escalated and eventually led to a series of violent protests, as well as terrorist attacks, such as the 1997 Urumqi bus bombing and others,, the most consequential of which are a series of attacks carried out in the spring of 2014 in the capital city of Xinjiang, Urumqi. In May of 2014, the Chinese government launched its “严厉打击暴力恐怖活动专项行动” (“Strike Hard Campaign against Violent Terrorism”) in response to the series of violent attacks carried out by Uyghurs in Xinjiang. To counter so-called “Muslim extremism,” the local governments began to increase the number of “‘convenience police stations’ across the region to stabilize Xinjiang with a ‘grid-like’ security apparatus.’ These police stations also began utilizing sophisticated technology to monitor and surveil the citizens of Xinjiang, resulting in millions of Uyghurs detained in “re-education camps.” The technology for these surveillance systems, including ‘night-vision’ capabilities as well as facial recognition, makes way for a loss of privacy with intrusive policing tactics as well as predictive policing. Predictive Policing programs based on metadata analysis are already being implemented and utilized by local authorities. The guidelines and behaviors that the police are flagging as suspicious are vague, such as “having family living abroad or having certain foreign apps like WhatsApp installed on one’s phone.”
An estimated 1 million Uyghurs are being held in detention centers in Xinjiang. Beijing originally stated that the purpose of the detention centers was to “re-educate” Uyghur Muslims and help them assimilate into Han society by allowing them to attend vocational training as well as counter Muslim extremism. In addition to being detained in these camps, an estimated 80,000 Uyghurs were forcibly relocated in 2017 to 2019 to factories for foreign companies such as Nike. In addition, PPE manufactured in China was also made by prison labor. The Chinese government claims that by relocating Uyghurs to factories, they are“ensur[ing] ‘100% employment rate’ for trained Uyghurs.”
However, the underlying truth behind these centers is two-fold: one, these camps were internment camps that held Uyghurs extrajudicially, often without charges against them or convicted in sham trials; second, as Xinjiang is at the center of the BRI, the Chinese government needed total control over the autonomous region to fully develop the area completely as Uyghur presence will most likely put up resistance against government action.
Image Published on Forbes; Originally from Getty Images
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