Since spring 2017, the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in China has witnessed the emergence of an unprecedented re-education campaign. According to media and informant reports, untold thousands of ...Uyghurs and other Muslims have been and are being detained in clandestine political re-education facilities, with major implications for society, local economies and ethnic relations. Considering that the Chinese state is currently denying the very existence of these facilities, this paper investigates publicly available evidence from official sources, including government websites, media reports and other Chinese internet sources. First, it briefly charts the history and present context of political re-education. Second, it looks at the recent evolution of re-education in Xinjiang in the context of 'de-extremification' work. Finally, it evaluates detailed empirical evidence pertaining to the present re-education drive. With Xinjiang as the 'core hub' of the Belt and Road Initiative, Beijing appears determined to pursue a definitive solution to the Uyghur question.
This article argues that China’s campaign of reeducation and forced labor in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region through so-called Vocational Skills Education and Training Centers (VSETCs) ...represents a significant conceptual innovation over prior labor reform. Beijing’s erstwhile penal labor systems treated labor as an integral part of reeducation but suffered from limited reeducation results, low work productivity, and poor resocialization outcomes. In contrast, the VSETC system pragmatically eschews Maoist tenets of labor’s transformational power: its internment camps prioritize intensive reeducation, followed by a process of gradual release into potentially more efficient nonprison enterprises. The resulting potential profitability gains translate into higher economic sustainability—an essential prerequisite for the system’s primary goal of long-term assimilation and coercive integration of resistant ethnic groups into Beijing’s social order. However, VSETC’s and the region’s focus on control and disintegrating ethnic social capital undermines its integrative efforts, replicating a long-standing weakness of prior labor reform.
This paper argues that in China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, work placements of re-education detainees and Xinjiang’s implementation of the national Poverty Alleviation through Labor Transfer ...programme for the transfer of rural surplus labourers operate under fundamentally different policies. Drawing on new documentary and witness evidence, it is argued that within Xinjiang’s unique context of frontier settler colonialism, its recent coercive labour transfer programme evolved alongside decades-long efforts to facilitate surplus labour transfers throughout China. From 2014, when Beijing shifted the region’s work focus towards de-extremification, Uyghur underemployment was framed as a matter of social stability and national security. Between 2017 and 2019, labour transfer coercion dramatically increased alongside campaigns of mass internment and of enforcing poverty alleviation work goals. Xinjiang’s shift in 2021 from a campaign-style mobilizational to an institutionalized approach deepens coercive risks of this often poorly understood coercive labour strategy.
Chinese academics and politicians argue that Xinjiang's 'terrorism' problem can only be solved by 'optimizing' its ethnic population structure. High ethnic minority population concentrations are ...considered a national security threat. 'Optimizing' such concentrations requires 'embedding' substantial Han populations, whose 'positive culture' can mitigate the Uyghur 'human problem'. Scenarios that do not overburden the region's ecological carrying capacity entail drastic reductions in ethnic minority natural population growth, potentially decreasing their populations. Population 'optimization' discourses and related policies provide a basis to assess Beijing's 'intent' to destroy an ethnic minority population in part through birth prevention per the 1948 United Nations Genocide Convention. The 'destruction in part' can be assessed as the difference between projected natural population growth without substantial government interference and reduced growth scenarios in line with population 'optimization' requirements. Based on population projections by Chinese researchers, this difference could range between 2.6 and 4.5 million lives by 2040.
In 'Tibetanness' Under Threat?, Adrian Zenz pioneers an analysis of remarkable recent developments in Qinghai's Tibetan education system. While marketisation processes threaten these positive ...developments, educational strategies of Tibetans in the Chinese system explore new ways of being 'Tibetan' in China.
In 'Tibetanness' Under Threat?, Adrian Zenz pioneers an analysis of significant recent developments in Qinghai's Tibetan education system. Presently, Tibetan students can receive native language ...education from primary to tertiary levels, while university minority departments offer Tibetan-medium majors from computer science to secretarial studies. However, positive developments are threatened by the dire career prospects of Tibetan-medium graduates. Tibetans view marketisation as the greatest threat to ethnocultural survival, with their young generation being lured into a Chinese education by superior employment prospects. But Zenz questions the easy equation of Tibetan education as 'unselfish' ethnic preservation versus the Chinese route as egocentric careerism, arguing that the creative educational strategies of Tibetans in the Chinese education system are important for exploring and expressing new forms of 'Tibetanness' in modern China.
Based on an entirely unexplored source of data, this paper analyses the evolution of Tibetan representation and preferentiality within public employment recruitment across all Tibetan areas from 2007 ...to 2015. While recruitment collapsed after the end of the job placement system (fenpei) in the early to mid-2000s, there was a strong increase in public employment recruitment from 2011 onwards. Tibetans were underrepresented within this increase, although not severely, and various implicit practices of preferentiality bolstered such representation, with distinct variations across regions and time. The combination reasserted the predominant role of the state as employer of educated millennials in Tibetan areas to the extent of re-introducing employment guarantees. We refer to this as the innovation of a neo-fenpei system. This new system is most clearly observed in the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) from 2011 to 2016, although it appears to have been abandoned in 2017. One effect of neo-fenpei, in contrast to its predecessor, is that it accentuates university education as a driver of differentiation within emerging urban employment. The evolution of these recruitment practices reflects the complex tensions in Tibetan areas regarding the overarching goal of security and social stability (weiwen) emphasized by the Xi–Li administration, which has maintained systems of minority preferentiality but in a manner that enhances assimilationist trends rather than minority group empowerment. 根据一组完全没有被研究过的原始数据, 本文分析了 2007 年至 2015 年之间, 整个藏族地区公职人员招聘中藏族的代表比例和优待的演变。虽然在 2000 年代早中期工作分配制度结束后, 招聘一度瓦解, 2011 年以后公职人员招聘又有强劲增长。藏人在这波增长中没有被充分代表, 但是并不严重。各种隐性的优待招聘实践还增加了这种代表比例, 在不同的地区和时间有明显的区别。这种组合重申了国家在受教育的千禧一代的就业中的主导地位, 以至于到了重新引入就业保障的地步。我们把此种创新称为新分配制度, 这种情形在西藏自治区最为明显。相对于它的前身, 新分配的一个效应就是它强调了大学教育在新兴城市就业中作为划分的驱动因素。这些招聘实践的演变显示了习李政府强调的安全和维稳的总体目标在藏族地区的复杂的张力 ——它虽然保持了少数民族优待的制度, 却在某种意义上强化了藏族的被同化而不是少数民族的自主性。
AbstractChina's minority education in general – and Tibetan education in particular – is often viewed as a hegemonic tool designed to assimilate minorities, seeking to integrate them into Han culture ...and society, while at the same time marginalising them through discourses of cultural inferiority and backwardness. The aim of this article is to go beyond seemingly straightforward portrayals of minority education (and especially of Tibetan education) as a device for sinicisation by analysing the historically situated, complex and often contradictory dynamics of how it has facilitated the simultaneous expression and suppression of different aspects of Tibetan 'culture' and language. Through an evaluation of the development of Tibetan-medium education in Qinghai province, it is demonstrated that minorities are not just passive victims at the hand of a dominant state, but strategising agents who can creatively explore and expand the political and cultural space within which they operate.
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