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Please take your seats so we can start. Good evening. My name is Hans Steinmuller. I'm an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology here. We're going to talk about China's re education camps in Xinjiang tonight. You might have heard about it in the news. There are camps in Xinjiang where mainly Uyghurs, mainly Muslims, have been detained in the last year.
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And.
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And tonight we have three experts who will discuss these camps, present the evidence that is out there about these camps, who is in the camps, what is happening in these camps and how are people admitted to the camps and what it has to do with the larger changes in Xinjiang society as well as Chinese society and the global fight against terror. Please switch off your mobile phones and please don't film the audience. There will be a podcast of this event. The lectures are being recorded. So Ryan Toom, Rachel Harris and Jude Howell are going to speak for about 15 minutes each and these lectures will be recorded and then put online on a podcast. After that we'll have a Q and A which is not being recorded. If you want to tweet about the event, you're welcome to do so and please use the hashtag LSE Xinjiang. We'll start off with Ryan Tumor, who is a historian of Xinjiang based at Nottingham University. He is the author of Sacred Roots of Uyghur History which came out in 2014 and deals with the history, especially through manuscripts and the history of pilgrimage of Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang. He is currently writing his second book which is provisionally entitled Islamic China and it presents a long term history, a re examination of Islam in China through Chinese, Persian and Arabic sources. Ryan is going to speak about securitization and surveillance in Xinjiang and is going to present some of the evidence about the camps in Xinjiang. Following that will be Rachel Harris, who will speak also about the camps and put them within the context of larger changes in the cultural politics, but also in the relationship between Muslims and non Muslims in China. And finally, Jude Howell, who is a professor here at LSE in International Development, is going to speak about authoritarian governance and the general question of the fight against terrorism. So first is Ryan Toomb.
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I'll do my best. Okay, so thank you all for coming. Thank you for your interest in this issue and thank you to Hans for inviting me to talk. As Hans mentioned, I'm going to talk.
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About.
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What kind of evidence we have for the mass internment camp system that is going on right now and also how that camp system is related to a larger system of surveillance and control for minorities. Throughout Xinjiang, of course, this camp system seems to be targeted mainly at Uyghurs, although Kazakhs and Kyrgyz has also found themselves in these internment camps. There are a couple of things I'd like to point out about Uyghurs, just to give you a little bit of introduction to who they are. The Uyghurs are speakers of a Turkic language. They are almost. They tend to be Muslims. And it's often forgotten that they live very much in the southern part of Xinjiang, where despite the fact that we think of them as minorities in the context of the larger People's Republic of China, they very much lead the lives of numerical majorities in the southern part of Xinjiang. Here you can see them represented by the purple dots. Uyghurs tend to be farmers. That's the most common occupation for Uyghurs. And while it's widely known that they practice Islam, it's sometimes forgotten that the Islam that is practiced among the Uyghurs has quite a number of distinctive local characteristics. Here you can see the tomb of a Muslim saint during a time of pilgrimage. Okay, so what do we know about these camps? The estimate is that in the last two years a system of internment camps has been constructed or converted from previous buildings that has taken in. Our best estimates are several hundred thousand to, to just over a million members of the Uyghur ethnicity. This is about 10%, roughly of the Uyghur population. Now, even if you're, even when you're taking in this enormous number of people, since it's only 10%, there has to be some way to choose who goes into the internment camps. And in fact, because there are quotas for police for bringing people into the camps, there have been some expressions of difficulty from the security services about how to choose. Generally, the idea is that it should be somebody whose loyalty to the party is suspect or who is thought to maybe be engaged in something called extremism. So this is the first question I will try to address as I talk about the first form of evidence we have. The first evidence that came out about the existence of these camps came from eyewitnesses, came from people whose family members who had been disappeared. And that was followed up by police, statements from local police who were called by journalists. And here are a few of the reasons that you might be selected for, for placement in one of these so called reeducation camps or internment camps. Not watching state tv, expressing interest in traveling to a foreign country. These are all things that people have cited that the police have told them about. Why their relatives have been taken away or that the police have told journalists about how they chose people for the camps. Another thing we get from eyewitnesses is people who have left the camps. This includes two people who were formerly employed as teachers within the camps. And I won't go into this too much because I think Rachel will talk a little bit about what the eyewitness testimony says about what happens inside the camps. What I want to talk about mostly with my remaining 12 minutes or so is particularly the hard evidence that comes from the Chinese government itself. Once we had all these statements about from people who were affected by this system leaking out of China, scholars began to try to track down some other forms of evidence. And notably Adrian Zenz, a scholar in Germany, made use of China's system for contract bids. This is an anti corruption mechanism by which local governments are supposed to publicly advertise the opportunity for companies to build things for the government, for example, or to source equipment for the government. And Adrian Zenz tracked down, I think in his initial study something like a little bit over 50 of these public notifications which were openly online. These mostly now in response to his research, the Chinese government has removed most of these from the Internet. But you can still find them on what's called the Wayback Machine, which is a third party archiving site. And indeed some of them are still out there in the wild. If you want to do some amateur sleuthing with the right keywords search terms, you can find some of these things. So I just thought I'd show you an example of one. This is a bid for a so called legal education transformation school in Batu County. That's Maralbeche in weaker. You can see the organization that's offering this opportunity to build the camp is the united front work department. And when you look scroll down in these bids, these bid announcements, you can often find details about what the contracting company is supposed to provide in the camp. So it gives you some sense of what a legal system education transformation school really is. So for example, in this one you see calls a call for security fencing, something called hardened isolation security doors and windows. These are the sort of low grade barred windows that you find throughout China and various other elements of security stuff here. Across all of these bids you can see the names changing for this institution over time with an emphasis early on on the idea of extremism. And then in the middle of the process of building these things they start to more often mention the idea of transformation. And then in the last six months or a year we Get a switch to vocational skills training in the title. What's really interesting about this is that these things are modular and so you can see them shifting over time and pairing up with each other, giving you the sense that these are the same institution, the same kind of institution simply having an evolution of names. And in fact, we have an example of one institution where a person working there told reporters who asked, what is your institution called? He said, well, let me go out and check the sign because it keeps changing on us. And he literally went outside while they were on the phone and looked at the sign and then came back and told them what it was. Others have done even more with this. The AFP, the news organization, did a survey of over 1,000 Chinese government documents and found these institutions which you see here, which widened our sense of what kind of equipment is used in them, including in one county in Hotan, thousands of police batons, electric cattle prods, handcuffs, pepper spray and. I'll keep moving here. The second kind of evidence that we. Well, no, I'm on the third kind of evidence, aren't I? Third kind of evidence I want to talk about is satellite photos which give us. Let us refine our sense of what these camps are like a little bit. People have been, some of them amateur, amateur investigators have been able to find, simply using Google Earth, the satellite imagery of the very places mentioned in the bids, because the bids will sometimes get very specific location information and then you can find the images of them from the sky. One thing I'll point out here about the kind of thing you can see in these is that not only are there fences around the outside, but if you look at each one of these buildings, you can see additional fences here that control movement between the buildings, very much like you see in prisons throughout the world. You can also see through these satellite imagery how quickly these buildings were put up. Here is a one year span in satellite imagery from the Economist. The last major kind of evidence I want to introduce you to is state propaganda. You may have seen some of the recent propaganda which is aimed at convincing the world that these are benign vocational training centers aimed at giving people skills that will help them get jobs. That is not what the propaganda looked like a year or two ago. There was no international propaganda for these camps a year or two ago. Instead, there was internal propaganda. And in that internal propaganda, the goals were much different. You can see from where the cameraman has placed himself and the composition of and contents of this image that there's much more of an emphasis on the discipline to which These people are being subjected on the enormous number of police clad in a kind of riot gear, of the multiple layers of fencing. And in some of these photos, we have the signs that say what it is. It's a transformation education center. Of course, that has now changed. And the Chinese government has scrubbed a lot of that older propaganda from the web and has started to produce rather sophisticated videos from dressed up camps where they change. They actually change the physical structure. You can see in the satellite image things like rolling out mats to make it look like there are basketball courts. And I'll just show you one specific example. Two things that. Here's the new propaganda image. Two changes we see in this to what is actually going on in the camps. One, look at how old these students are and look at their gender. This is mixed gender, and this is young people, which very much makes sense for a classroom, for a skills training center. But what we know from the eyewitnesses and from the earlier propaganda is they tend to be separated gender, and they have people of all ages up into their 70s and 80s in these things. We also have some leaked images of these buildings, particularly one from a camp that was under construction. And somebody involved in that project sent out a video, did a video tour. And from those, we know that in many of these camps, the teacher is actually separated from the prisoners by a wire barrier, presumably to prevent them from attacking the teacher. In another image, this one goes sort of like up just above the teacher's head. In another image, it goes to floor to ceiling. So that, of course, has been removed in the propaganda image for international consumption. Okay, I have about three minutes left. And with that, I want to talk about how these camps relate to what happens outside of the camps. The camps play several roles, for sure. There are officials who believe that they are going to change the hearts and minds of the Uyghurs who are inside of them and to make them more Chinese and more loyal to Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party. But they also serve a function of simply removing people from the street. You may have seen in one of my earlier slides that particularly people born in the 1980s and 1990s have been targeted. And in some counties, police say that everyone born in the 80s and 90s had been taken into these camps. What that does is prevent people from, say, writing a nationalist poem or attacking a police checkpoint. They also serve to separate parents from their children. And they have what I hope is only a side effect of preventing people from reproducing while they're in these camps. The separation from children is important because it accelerates the assimilation process for children who are essentially being raised as Han Chinese. But what I'll mention for my last couple minutes here is that these camps serve a very important function as a kind of disciplinary backstop to a larger system of surveillance and control. Uyghurs, and in fact, all marginalized people everywhere in the world, have a large toolkit for evading and resisting attempts to control them from the outside. And it's been my experience in Xinjiang that Uyghurs often find ways around controls. For example, it's highly dangerous and illegal now to teach your children how to recite a chapter from the Koran. Certainly to hire a teacher to do that would be an immediate ticket to the re education camp. But until a couple of years ago, people would do things like have class in learning to read the Quran in a car that was driving around the city. Books were banned, but you could always find them if you had the right connection. That has changed. Uyghurs are self policing now to an extent that I have never seen. And that is because of the incredible amount of surveillance and the incredible danger to their lives and livelihood posed by the camp system. There are no criminal charges levied when you go to the camp system. You do not get a trial. You cannot dispute your disappearance. You are simply gone at the whim of your local authorities, not even someone higher up. So that makes all the rest of what I'm about to describe much more effective. That includes checkpoints when you move from one town to another like this one, checkpoints within towns, constant parades of police. And these are my photos now, by the way, From December of 2017, constant parades of police through the countryside. This is remote countryside here, but it's also through the centers of towns, so called convenience police stations, thousands of which have been built in the last two years that look like this, which are every 500 meters or so in major towns facial recognition systems. This is leaving the train station in Urumqi. If you want to get off the train. And you look like a Uyghur, which I guess I did because they sent me here, you have to go and present your Shenfeng Zheng and get your face recognized on the right. You can see an image of my face being recognized from the background noise to check into a hotel. There are tight regulations on all kinds of behavior. This is a sign saying that you cannot pray in public if you do what you're supposed to do and go pray in a mosque that presents its own dangers. You can see a camera there that records who goes in. Because there are population data collection efforts which aim to measure whether someone is, quote, safe, average or unsafe. And you'll see if you look carefully this form that they ask how many times the person prays and whether they do it home, mosque or other. This counts against you. If you pray, there are other forms where you lose 10% if you, if your ethnicity is weaker, phones are constantly checked, you download your phone and scan for supposedly threatening information. And then all this technological sophistication is married to old fashioned brute force, mass human surveillance, which takes its most striking form in the so called ethnic unity projects and the Becoming Family project, whereby according to the Chinese state media in Xinjiang, over a million Han Chinese people in Xinjiang have been sent into the homes of Uyghurs to, quote, become family with them. The guidebooks for how to behave as one of these Han family members tell you how to monitor people. They tell you how to record and gauge their habits and beliefs. For example, serve them alcohol or serve them a pork dumpling and see if they wince when they drink it because they will drink it because they're afraid of going to the internment camp. In some cases people are actually climbing into the Uyghurs beds and spending the night with them. And I'll just leave you with this image because a lot of people think, well, this won't work. You can't force people to change their culture and become Chinese. Well, I think that's largely true for the adults, but it's hard to know what the outcome will be for children. Here you see some of these workers who've been sent into Uyghur village, sort of watching over the Uyghur youth who are learning something about the 19th Party Congress. And I will end there. Thank you.
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Thanks a lot, Ryan. Our next speaker is Rachel Harris. She will pick up exactly where Ryan left it and continue talking about the camps as well as the wider context. Rachel is a reader at the School of Oriental and African Studies here in London. She is an expert on Uyghur culture and religion, has done 20 years of research in Xinjiang, also in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan. She's the author of two monographs, 2004 Singing the Village Music, Memory and Ritual, published by Oxford University Press in 2008, the making of a Musical Canon in Chinese Central Asia. She has headed a Leverhulme project over four years which was called Sounding Islam about Islamic music in China, and is currently doing research on intangible cultural heritage music and identity formation in Xinjiang and elsewhere amongst Uyghurs. Rachel over to you.
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Great.
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Okay. How am I doing with the sound levels? Can you hear me okay there? A bit louder. I can certainly shout. Okay, so thank you very much, Hans, for organizing this. Thank you all for turning out on this miserable day that's miserable in terms of weather and politics in this country as well. Right. At least we can distract you from that for an hour or so. Thank you, Ryan, for your excellent introduction. I'll probably be mirroring a little bit what Ryan's been saying, but there's no harm in backing things up. So as we've seen then, when these camps first came to light. Let's have a look. Government sources denied really for quite a long time, the actual existence. And we had extraordinary accounts of Western journalists muscling into Xinjiang and playing these cat and mouse games with the Xinjiang security forces. But as evidence became too strong, as we've seen, to really continue the denial of the existence of these camps, the authorities shifted position and acknowledged the camps, but portrayed them to the international community as these kind of benign vocational training centers, as we've seen, which were intended to counter extremism and to support economic development. And as Ryan has suggested, the government, the internal propaganda very often had a different slant. So government sources which were aimed at the peoples of Xinjiang explained that the members of the public who had been chosen for re education had been infected by an ideological virus. These sources argued for the need to eradicate religious extremism in particular, in order to counter the growing number of violent terrorist incidents which the government argued were spreading like an incurable tumor, a cancerous tumor over the region. So what I want to do in my 15 minutes is to really explore some of the impact on human beings of the spread of these policies and to talk in particular about the detention of individual people and of intellectuals and academics and artists. So what do we know then about who is being detained? As Ryan said, they are overwhelmingly Turkic Muslims, primarily Uyghurs, but also Kazakhs and other Turkic peoples. A few Hui Muslim Chinese have also been detained, we know. And far from targeting people who might be reasonably considered vulnerable to radicalization.
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The.
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Camps have scooped up huge numbers of ordinary Muslims. We've seen various official documents listing the signs of radicalization. These include up to 75 specific signs to look out for. They include veiling, growing a beard, praying, fasting, eating halal. So everyday religious experience, religious practice, really being targeted. In more recent months then, we've seen really the extension of this campaign far beyond the religious sphere to include signs of a lack of loyalty to the party A lack of enthusiasm for the ongoing campaigns, links to abroad. We've seen the inclusion of many officials, intellectuals and artists. And so many overseas Uyghurs have had their relatives detained. And we have now records of. Of hundreds of individuals who we know to have been detained. And these have been documented by news organizations such as Radio Free Asia, human rights organizations like Human Rights Watch, and also by these initiatives such as the Xinjiang Victims Database, and also an organization called Atayort in Kazakhstan. And these kind of individual testimonies that you can see here, you can find hundreds of them on YouTube, as I say. And they are really being produced through extraordinary acts of bravery by families abroad whose loved ones have been detained. And although these families obviously are afraid of speaking out, and they are very often subject to very direct intimidation because they do speak out, nonetheless, they really want the situation in the region to gain a wider audience. They want people outside to know and to care and to do something about this. And so they record these videos and they upload them. And this movement then, this popular movement, is really getting a lot of kickback. Now, we've seen just in recent days, the leader of this Atayot organization in Kazakhstan, a man called Syrik Jan Bilash, been actually arrested by the Kazakh authorities. So there we see the Kazakh government coming under direct influence of China and also cracking down on these initiatives to speak out. So how does the regime in the camps work then? How does it aim to destroy these kind of ideological viruses that the inmates are supposed to be infected with? So we have also now quite a few detailed accounts of what goes on within the camps from former detainees. So the daily regime, then we've seen what the classrooms look like. And we know from these testimonies that the detainees are subject to a regime of forced repetition. They do a lot of chanting. They have to chant about their gratitude to the party. They have to chant how much they love Xi Jinping. They have to recite the thought of Xi Jinping. They do a lot of singing. This is a topic dear to my heart as an ethnomusicologist. We have even some video smuggled out of the camps which show detainees singing these kind of revolutionary songs from the Cultural Revolution era. Without the Communist Party, there is no new China. And they have to sing this before they get their food. Other kind of echoes of the Cultural Revolution. We have a lot of these kind of techniques of self criticism, obviously, coming up in the testimonies. So this requirement from detainees to apologize for their previous adherence to the Islamic faith, to apologize for praying for wearing modest clothing, to apologize, for teaching the Koran to their children. Instructors lecture about the dangers of Islam and internees are required to take tests on this kind of information. If they participate enthusiastically in this kind of self criticism and in the test, if they do well, then they're rewarded. If they're seen as non compliant, then they are punished. Punishments include solitary confinement, beatings and deprivation of food. So we have a lot of accounts of some really terrible situations, bad conditions, the administration of unknown medication, instances of torture, of abuse and deaths occurring in these camps. We really have some quite harrowing accounts from people who got out. People like Mihrigal Tursun, who spoke with reporters in Washington in December 2018. The educator and intellectual Abduvili Ayup, now in Turkey, leading a very precarious life in terms of his visa status. And he's given some really shocking tests to testimony about suffering rape at the hands of the guards in these camps. And Abduvelli, we think it's often not particularly clear why people are detained, but we think that he was detained because of his active efforts to promote Uyghur language and culture. So he opened a Uyghur language school, and we think that might be his problem. And the fact then that so many politically moderate, religiously moderate, and highly educated intellectuals like Abduveli Ayup have been detained in these camps provides the clearest counter evidence to the narrative that we have from the government that they are intended to tackle extremism. So there was a report that came out in January 2019 from the Uyghur Human Rights Project, and they've documented 338 Uyghur intellectuals who are known to be detained. And of course, there may be many more that we don't have specific information about. So they include. I've put a few faces up here just so you can encounter the humanity of these people. Mohammed Saliha Jim he was 82 when he was detained. He died in custody in early 2018. The former Xinjiang University president, Tashpulla Tip, sentenced to death in 2018 on separatism charges. Chimengul Awot from the Kashgar Publishing House. My own colleague, Rahila Dawood, a professor of folklore in Xinjiang University, was detained quite early on in December 2017. She was a good friend and she was an outstanding academic. She had an international profile and she had a deep care and concern for the culture of her people. Like many others of these intellectuals who are now detained, she was celebrated and rewarded by the state for her research. And then suddenly all that was gone and she was detained for reasons that we still do not know clearly. So this kind of fall from grace of so many intellectuals then suggests, as several observers in the west are now saying, that a kind of policy of eliticide is going on. And it's been very interesting that this kind of language, the wiping out of the cultural elite, is being used by academics with roots in Eastern Europe. So people like Henrik Sadowski has been talking about this, and the Czech academic Andre Klimez has talked about the precedents historically in terms of Soviet policy in the 1930s. Klimes says it makes the community easier to be subjugated, more cooperative, more docile. You have this. Whenever an authoritarian regime comes, they first target the intellectuals. We've also seen a wave of leading Uyghur artists disappearing into the camps. And they include the pop star Ablajan Ayup, who was known as the Uyghur Justin Bieber. What did he do wrong? Maybe it was singing about Uyghur language education. The folk musician Abdurinhit, another folk musician, Perida Mahmoud. What on earth was her problem? She sang these really very charming traditional love songs. She became very famous in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution. Perhaps it was because she visited abroad. Who knows? Adil Midjit, the much loved comedian, another of my close friends and collaborators, Senebeh Tursun, the classical Mukam singer. Again, she had a big international profile. She performed in Paris, in la, at the Edinburgh Festival, she sang Mukham. That's the kind of music that China put forward to the to UNESCO as a prized form of intangible cultural heritage just 10 years ago. And now Cenavar has also disappeared. So how else can we understand this kind of policy then? Unless it is a deliberate move to deprive Uyghurs of their cultural memory. The detention of these much loved artists, of course, is a huge blow to Uyghurs outside of China and undoubtedly inside. But the levels of terror within the region are now such that no protest and no opposing voices could possibly be raised there. I think that without a doubt, this policy of targeting the cultural leaders adds weight to the charge that what is going on there now is a form of cultural cleansing and part of a wider policy targeting Uyghur culture, which aims to remould the region's peoples as secular and patriotic Chinese citizens. May I take another couple of minutes or am I done?
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Okay.
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So very briefly then, to link this to the wider picture in China and several academics, again, colleagues in America and Australia are drawing attention to the ideological underpinnings of these new policies. So we can see in the writings of Chinese scholars like Ma Rong and Hu Lianhe of the United Front Work Department, a strand of argument then that calls for the. A move away in China from the kind of nationalities policy which has dominated the People's Republic for the last 70 years, and instead to adopt the policy of the melting pot to blend ethnic groups together into a cohesive state race of Guozhu. And I think that we can see a very direct connecting line then between this kind of articulation of policy ideas and the practice that is now going on within Xinjiang, both within the camps and without. So we see it in the rollout of these unity villages where Han Chinese migrants and Uyghurs are encouraged to marry and produce mixed offspring, in the orphanages where the children of the detainees are being raised to understand that their parents culture and religion is dangerous and abnormal. And also this wider mobilization of the Turkic Muslims of Xinjiang to adopt Chinese language and eating practices and Chinese festivals then, as we saw during Chinese New Year with the mass mobilization of the people of Hotan and Kashgar to sing and dance in Chinese New Year celebrations. So I'll stop there. Thank you very much.
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Thank you very much, Rachel. Our next speaker is Chut Howell, who is going to speak about the larger context of the fight against terrorism in China. So as many of you might know, for the Chinese public, the main justification of the changing policies towards Muslims and towards Xinjiang mainly have their justification in two incidents which happened in 2014, when a car crashed into a crowd at Tiananmen and several people knifed down passersby at the main train station of Kunming, which was said to be Islamist terrorists and Uyghurs. So Jude Howell is going to speak about the fight against terrorism in China. And she speaks as an. As an expert professor of international development here at LSE who has written about the same problem in the Middle east and globally. She is the author of a book and an edited volume together with Jerry Milind In 2009, counterterrorism, aid and Civil Society before and after the War on Terror. She has worked a lot about governance in China as well, social policy. She was the former head of the center for Civil Society here at lse. And her last edited volume just came out this year, is about NGOs and accountability in China.
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Thank you. Can you hear me okay? Oh, it is working, right? Okay. Well, again, thank you very much for coming on this horrible day. And we all wait in trepidation. At the results of what's going on in about 100, no, but 500 metres away from us at the moment in Brexit. So thank you for coming. And I also want to thank very much Rachel and Ryan for their presentations, which were very detailed and quite disturbing and a matter of great concern. I'm going to speak about something. I'm going to speak more about the broader picture and the broader context within which this is taking place. So three things I really want to talk about in the 15 minutes I have, and I think I'll be quicker. One is the general background and the second is the counterterrorism strategy per se. And then the third thing is generally about authoritarianism and how authoritarianism is able to deal with certain issues. So just first of all, on the background in China, I mean, I think this is coming at a time when China's growing sort of presence internationally is raising concerns among some Western countries, particularly in the context of growing populism and protectionism. On the economic front front, China has a number of concerns. First of all is the impact of the global recession on China, with global demand shrinking and the impact of that on manufacturing and industry and so on. And of course, China is trying to move up in the production cycle and innovate and sort of gain a lead in this area of robotics and electronics and artificial intelligence. And with this emergency mind, issued the Made in China report in 2025, laying forth its strategy. Again, this kind of backfired on China because European countries and the USA all saw this as a threat to their potential growth and leading role in these areas. The current US trade war in China is also having an impact on China's economy. We know that factories are closing and the government, of course, in the context of recession, is very concerned about labor unrest. We have the Huawei issue, the detention of Meng Wan Wancha in Canada and the threat of extradition to the US and other countries also beginning to look very, scrutinize very carefully Huawei's technology and the potential use of it for security purposes. And of course, the other big initiative that China has taken under Xi Jinping is the well known Belt and Road Initiative, which actually goes through some quite unstable regions in the area like Pakistan and Afghanistan. And so there's much at stake for the Chinese government in keeping Xinjiang stable, whether this is to prevent secessionist struggles in Xinjiang or to prevent terrorists, so called terrorist groups operating out of Pakistan and Afghanistan, from infiltrating Xinjiang and targeting Chinese workers in those countries and otherwise, either way, this could have a deleterious impact on the Belt and Road Initiative. China's invested, for example, over $62 billion in the China Pakistan Economic Corridor. So there is an awful lot at stake there and an awful lot of reasons why China is concerned to keep Xinjiang stable as a key province on the way to Pakistan and Afghanistan. So politically, because of the economic situation in China at the moment, there are also concerns about labor unrest, not just around issues of extremism, but labor unrest is also a concern for Chinese government and general instability. And we see in the last five or six years a more generalized increase in repression against dissenters in China. This began already in 2012, during the latter years of the Hu Jintao Wenjiao period. It has intensified, particularly in 2015. There was a lot of coverage of the arrests of rights lawyers in China, of feminists, of labor activists. And the situation worsened again last year with the detainment and disappearance of many workers and students from renowned universities like Renmin University and Peking University, who was supporting striking workers in the Jasix factory in the city of Shenzhen. So it looks as though the current regime under Xi Jinping is quite different to the Hu Jintao Wen Jiaobao era, where we saw a more, you might describe it now as a more relaxed and tolerant approach to people organizing themselves independently, to people identifying problematic issues, exposing issues, and trying out new ways of doing things. So drawing on the social forces for the purposes of innovation and addressing new needs was about giving more space to social actors in the Hu Jintao Wenjiao period, in the Xi Jinping era, which is now what we observe is a process of party encapsulation. The party has to lead, and it has to envelop and take credit for any experimentation or initiative. So this policy of the signification of religions of what we're seeing in Xinjiang also points more generally to processes of normalization and homogenization and encapsulation of society by the party. Another interesting dimension of this is also the growing suspicion of foreigners, foreign organizations, and foreign influence, which actually also goes back to the color revolutions in Georgia, Kyrgyzstan and Ukraine in the mid-2000s. And already from that period onwards, we see this growing surveillance of foreign organizations. Perhaps a culmination of this most recently was in the passing of the 2017 NGO law, which took effect in 2018. And this marked really, perhaps a high point in this trend of suspicion, making it much more difficult for foreign organizations to have developmental, programmatic activities in China and to fund local organizations. Another issue also politically that is relevant here is that China, like many Other countries faces the issue of how to deal with returned so called terrorist fighters. And it's estimated that there were about 5,000 Uyghurs that went to fight in Syria. And so this must also be an issue that is in the minds of the Chinese government at the moment. So if we go on and look at the counterterrorism strategy, we had very, very detailed and quite moving reports here about the internment for 1 million Uyghurs and other Muslims in labor reeducation camps. The issues of terrorism and what you define as terrorism are not specific to China, but are issues for many countries and as we saw in the war on terror, raise an awful lot of questions around the balance between freedom and security and so on. And they also raise questions around who is a terrorist. How do you define it? What is one woman's terror? Terrorist is another woman's freedom fighter. I mean, up till 2008, the US government still saw Nelson Mandela as he was still on the terrorist watch list. So what constitutes being a terrorist is always very, very contentious. Who do you define as being a terrorist in your policies, your laws and your actions? And one of the biggest risks here, and this has certainly been also experienced in Western countries, is that whole swathes of people become categorized as terrorist. Whether that's through the policies that the government implements, whether it's through legislation or whether it's the way that people are represented in the political discourse or the media. So it's very big issue and the west has also faced that. And how do you ensure that groups, whole groups of people like Muslims do not become categorized automatically as terrorists too? And I think China is at risk, very much at risk of doing this with parts of its counter terrorist strategy. I mean the counterterrorist strategy and very detailed descriptions you gave. I certainly capture that both repression and encapsulation, homogenization and normalization. I mean, for those of students here perhaps who studied Foucault, it seems to be a live sort of enactment of the Panopticon. And Foucault's ideas about surveillance and going right down through the control of behaviors and bodies and so on. You can't help but think of Foucault's idea. I mean, what's quite distinctive in China's counterterrorism strategy is also the, its community focused strategy. Both in the west you have the hearts and minds strategy and in China talking about capturing people's souls and controlling behaviors and so on. And I think this community focus, as opposed to focusing on individual, is very vulnerable to associating whole groups of people, in this case Uyghurs, with terrorism, which I think is very, very problematic. And actually we were talking a little bit about issues of resistance, and it seemed it's very, very difficult situation in Xinjiang. But I think once you start. Once whole groups of people start being categorized in a certain way, then I think what you're doing is stockpile piling resentment, ultimately, whether it's in the immediate term or in the medium term, has to be seen. But I think this can have a counterproductive effect. Finally, just a few words on authoritarianism. I think in authoritarian regimes, counterterrorist strategies face certain limitations and constraints. They usually have very weak civil societies and lack independent media. So without these, there's very little scope for holding the government or counterterrorist agencies to account. As our colleagues here also already talked about, not much is perhaps known in China amongst the general public about the situation in Xinjiang. So the absence of independent media means that you don't have much debate about these issues domestically. Perhaps that makes it easier for a government to have countries terrorist strategies that are more repressive, but they're problematic. They're problematic particularly when China now wants to present itself as a more. As an acceptable, international, responsible international player. And this is a problem. So lack of transparency makes it much harder for China to defend itself or any authoritarian regime to defend itself internationally. And I think an important issue here is having greater openness and transparency so that researchers can go into Xinjiang and can go into some of the camps and have a look themselves and have some independent monitoring of the situation. So I think I'll stop there. Thank you.
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A
Thank you very much, Jude. So we had three great presentations.