Canberra: ANU Press, 2022. xiii, 324 pp. (Tables, figures, B&W photos.) US$60.00, paper; free ebook. ISBN 9781760464943.
Xinjiang Year Zero is an exciting book and an important contribution to our understanding of what is going on in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of the People’s Republic of China by providing a grassroots perspective on life under counter-terrorist coercion, detention, and surveillance. Most authors of the 17 articles presented in this book have lived, studied, and worked in Xinjiang and are informed in their assessments by a network of friends and colleagues from the region rather than relying on satellite pictures and documents. Their articles are full of stories of first-hand experiences in dealing with, surviving, and escaping from a Han-Chinese-dominated regime of suppression. These accounts cannot but convince the reader that reports about what has been going on in Xinjiang during the last decade are not anti-Chinese propaganda but reveal a state strategy identified as a form of settler colonialism by the editors and most of the contributors (see especially the introduction by the editors and Ye Hui, 19–30). The book tries to walk a tightrope between criticizing coercion, dispossession, and oppression in Xinjiang and not participating in the kind of China bashing that dominates media production in the US and its allied countries around the world. The contributors want to show that “leftist” perspectives do not inhibit discussing the dark sides of China’s rise. They suggest viewing China as integrated into the global capitalist system and their contributions reveal the extremes this economic system can generate under geopolitical and domestic pressures.
In order to present this argument, the authors develop three narratives. By calling the strategy of the PRC government “colonialist” and integrating the detention regime in Xinjiang into the global history of concentration camps (see Andrea Pitzer, 1–6) they argue that Beijing’s strategy is a continuation of colonialist policies invented in Europe and the US. The Muslim ethnicities of Xinjiang, once the majority of inhabitants of this multi-ethnic region, are coerced into accepting that the influx of Han Chinese settlers is turning them into a minority and forcing them into adapting to a Han Chinese lifestyle (see David Brophy, 51–64). Under the guiding principle of civilizing the country, elements of traditional Muslim culture such as the sacral Mazars and the design of Uyghur houses (see Rian Thum, 127–144, and Timothy A. Grose, 117–126) are said to reveal superstition and lack hygiene as well as the common modern devices which people need to learn about in order to become valuable members of the modernizing nation. While these policies are now being internationally criticized as “Chinese” and “authoritarian,” the inventors of these policies have never engaged in self-criticism.
The aim of Beijing’s strategy is to provide diligent and obedient workers for efficient exploitation, turning previously independent and self-assured members of the Muslim ethnicities into dispossessed, intimidated, and dislocated members of the global working class (Darren Byler, 163–174). As a result of the globalized economy, the beneficiaries of this strategy are Chinese citizens, as well as global companies.
What is described in the volume as surveillance strategies is like a laboratory for electronic devices in combination with a vast army of collaborators from among the Han Chinese as well as the Muslim population of Xinjiang (see Nicholas Loubere and Stefan Brehm, 175–182, as well as Darren Byler, 183–204), the results of which can easily be transferred to other regions of China and the world at large. India’s policies in Kashmir are given as an example how the Chinese experience in Xinjiang is already a global phenomenon (see Nitasha Kaul, 219–230). What was once invented outside China is being modernized in Xinjiang and dispersed to other countries in the world. When the contributors criticize China they do this in order to make readers aware of the overall entanglement of these strategies and their implications for everyone inside and outside China.
This is a bold argument and an argument which will not easily find supporters on the Chinese or the Xinjiang side of the discussion, nor among China’s critics in the so-called West. Nevertheless, it is irrefutable with regard to the historical and economic entanglements of Beijing’s policies. The question is whether or not knowing about the historical implications and colonialist intentions behind these policies is important beyond the attempt to convince “leftists” that they do not need to come to the defence of Beijing’s Xinjiang policies in order to preserve their “leftist” identity. I would argue that it is important to uncover these entanglements, but I would also argue that we need to go into more detail in order to understand why China as a victim of nineteenth-century European colonialism has been pursuing settler colonialism in Xinjiang at least since the founding of the PRC and the establishment of the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps (Bingtuan) in 1954. While Ye Hui touches on this question by making clear that the Qing Empire had refrained until the latter half of the nineteenth century in acting as a colonizer of the region, the contributors seem to be trapped by their explanations into believing that there is no alternative to establishing “carceral colonialism” (see Guldana Salimjan, 95–104). However, if we look at Beijing’s policies towards Xinjiang we realize that they have been varying between coercion and benevolence. Why is this so? The overall explanation given in Xinjiang Year Zero prevents the authors from looking at this question, and the reason why this is so can also be found in the choice of perspectives included in the volume.
The choice of contributions shows that the editors brought academics together with activists and journalists. Additionally, we find specialists on cultural, economic, social, and historical issues looking at the situation in Xinjiang from their respective angles. However, there is not a single China specialist among the authors who could contribute to analyzing the specifics of CCP politics vis à vis Xinjiang and its multiple Muslim ethnicities. Xi Jinping and the CCP leadership are not forced by the circumstances to do what they do in Xinjiang—it is their policy decision. And we need to understand why they chose this option despite the fact that it has done enormous harm to the peoples of Xinjiang, and to China.
Susanne Weigelin-Schwiedrzik
University of Vienna, Vienna