부산대학교 도서관

This chapter examines the interconnections between China’s world order politics – encapsulated under the official narrative of China’s ‘Great Revival’ – and its policies towards ethnic minorities. It notes that following the 19th Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Congress in November 2017, President Xi Jinping declared that while China would preserve sovereignty as the underlying principle of international relations it remained ‘dissatisfied’ with a system built by European colonialism and would seek to forge new norms of ‘mutual respect, fairness, and justice’. The chapter argues here that while Chinese foreign policy narratives explicitly highlight Western ‘hegemon anxiety’ as an opportunity to remake world order, Xi’s emphasis on global ‘justice’ reflects intertwined cultural anxieties about Western colonial desires to convert China and non-Han peoples’ desires for identity recognition. Thus while China’s bold pronouncements speak from new global confidence, they also have emerged alongside heightened domestic anxieties, which imagine alternative identities on China’s frontiers as threats to the unification and ‘Great Revival’ (weida fuxing) of the Chinese race (Zhonghua minzu). Such racialized anxieties, the chapter suggests, have contributed to shifts in ethnic policy to promote racial ‘fusion’ (jiaorong) with mass education and intensifying extra-legal security measures in Xinjiang; mass internment camps and ‘orphanages’ to eliminate and transform Uyghur identities. The chapter concludes that the CCP’s ‘window of opportunity’ to transform colonial world order and its ‘mission’ to unify the ‘Chinese race’ are mutually constitutive goals in China’s ‘Great Revival’ narrative of inevitable trajectory towards global power and domestic racial unification.
The Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) is the site of the largest mass repression of an ethnic and/or religious minority in the world today. Researchers estimate that since 2016 one million people have been detained there without trial. In the detention centres individuals are exposed to deeply invasive forms of surveillance and psychological stress, while outside them more than ten million Turkic Muslim minorities are subjected to a network of hi-tech surveillance systems, checkpoints, and interpersonal monitoring. Existing reportage and commentary on the crisis tends to address these issues in isolation, but this groundbreaking volume brings them together, exploring the interconnections between the core strands of the Xinjiang emergency in order to generate a more accurate understanding of the mass detentions’ significance for the future of President Xi Jinping’s China.