The training has only one purpose: to learn laws and regulations…
to eradicate from the mind thoughts about religious extremism and
violent terrorism, and to cure ideological diseases. If the education
is not going well, we will continue to provide free education, until
the students achieve satisfactory results and graduate smoothly.
Speech by Chinese Communist Youth League Xinjiang Branch, March 2017
In 2014, after nearly seven years of growing conflicts with the Uyghur population—a Muslim minority from Xinjiang in the extreme west of Chinese territory—the People’s Republic of China announced its plan to re-educate the dissidents of this ethnic group for considering them a threat to its sovereignty in the region. The Uyghurs, who claim their right to maintain their customs and religion apart from the traditions of the majority of Han Chinese that settled the region between the 50s and 70s of the last century, became the target of a political persecution that emphasizes three alleged evils: separatism, religious extremism and international terrorism.
In order to exert control of the region, the Chinese government created a series of camps, the so-called “vocational training centers,” which from the beginning were reminiscent of the internment and forced labor camps that emerged during the Cultural Revolution. By 2018 it was estimated that hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs, and people of other ethnicities such as Kazakhs and Kyrgyz, were detained in these camps, without any kind of trial or legal process. Other estimates, such as that of anthropologist Adrian Zenz, raise this figure to 1.5 million people who are being forcibly “reeducated” in order to “eradicate the ideological virus” of Islam. The fact that prisoners are called “students” and what happens inside the camps “free education” only makes the situation all the more horrifying.
The purpose of these camps is perfectly clear. According to Uyghur economist Ilham Tohti, sentenced to life in prison for “separatism,”
what they want is to force us to assimilate, to identify with the country, such that, in the future, the idea of Uyghur will be in name only, but without its meaning.1
Although it is the ideological factor over the biological what has driven the emergence of the Xinjiang camps, its purpose reveals the essence of every ghetto or camp, containing alterity to avoid “contagion” (7.6, 7.7, 7.14). These camps are thus an enormous totalitarian machine designed to convert alterity into self, birth into forced nationality, geographic periphery into polis, thus eliminating everything that is not-me from the Chinese cultural map (0.24). The effort to achieve the disappearance of the other from the political scenario would seem to point to the definitive confinement of the self within the tower of the polis (7.9), representation of the vertical hierarchy of state structures (1.15). The tower that ate people.
- “Eradicating Ideological Viruses” China’s Campaign of Repression Against Xinjiang’s Muslims, Human Rights Watch, September 9, 2018, https://www.hrw.org/report/2018/09/09/eradicating-ideological-viruses/chinas-campaign-repression-against-xinjiangs ↩︎
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