The Biopolitics of China's "War On Terror" and The Exclusion of The Uyghurs

Critical Asian Studies
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The biopolitics of China’s “war on terror” and the

exclusion of the Uyghurs
Sean R. Roberts
To cite this article: Sean R. Roberts (2018) The biopolitics of China’s “war on
terror” and the exclusion of the Uyghurs, Critical Asian Studies, 50:2, 232-258, DOI:
10.1080/14672715.2018.1454111
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CRITICAL ASIAN STUDIES, 2018
VOL. 50, NO. 2, 232–258
https://doi.org/10.1080/14672715.2018.1454111
The biopolitics of China’s “war on terror” and the exclusion of

the Uyghurs
Sean R. Roberts
International Development Studies Program, The George Washington University, Washington, DC, USA
ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

This article provides an overview of People’s Republic of China (PRC) Received 6 December 2017
counter-terrorism policies targeting Uyghurs since 2001 when the Accepted 13 March 2018
state first asserted that it faced a terrorist threat from this
KEYWORDS
population. In reviewing these policies and their impact, it Uyghurs; terrorism; China;
suggests that the state has gradually isolated and excluded Islam; biopolitics
Uyghurs from PRC society. Drawing on the writings of Michael
Foucault, it articulates this gradual exclusion of Uyghurs as an
expression of biopolitics where the Uyghur people as a whole
have come to symbolize an almost biological threat to society
that must be quarantined through surveillance, punishment, and
detention. Rather than suggesting that these impacts of China’s
“war on terror” coincide with the intent of state policy, the article
argues that they are inevitable outcomes of labeling a given
ethnic population as a terrorist threat in the age of the Global War
on Terror.
Introduction
On November 29, 2001, just over two months after the September 11th attacks on the
United States, the government of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) released a docu-
ment entitled “Terrorist Activities Perpetrated by ‘Eastern Turkistan’ Organizations and
their Ties with Osama bin Laden and the Taliban,” which asserted that there existed a
broad network of Uyghur terrorists which enjoyed international support and posed an
imminent threat to the security of China and the world. The document argued that this
network involved the participation of virtually every Uyghur human rights and self-deter-
mination advocacy group in the world and was financed by Osama bin Laden and Al-
Qaida. Additionally, it sought to explain the largest incidences of unrest or random vio-
lence in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) of China during the 1990s
as being premeditated terrorist attacks carried out by this previously unknown network.1
The assertions in this document came as a surprise to most international scholars who
had followed the situation of Uyghurs within China during the 1990s.2 While it was
common knowledge that many Uyghurs in China resented the rule of the PRC over
their self-perceived homeland in the XUAR, which they hoped would someday become
CONTACT Sean R. Roberts [email protected] International Development Studies Program, The George Washington
University, 1957 E Street NW, Suite 501, Washington, DC 20052, USA
1
Permanent Mission of the People’s Republic of China to the United Nations 2001.
2
See Millward 2004; Bovingdon 2010, 135–136.
© 2018 BCAS, Inc.
CRITICAL ASIAN STUDIES 233
an independent nation-state of its own, there was little evidence that any organized
Uyghur militant group was active inside China or abroad.3 Furthermore, although there
is no internationally recognized definition of “terrorism,” most of the violence attributed
to Uyghurs inside China during the 1990s hardly qualified as terrorism by any definition.4
Rather, most of the violence described by the document as terrorist acts appear to have
been spontaneous outbursts, non-premeditated clashes between Uyghurs and security
forces, or protests that spiraled out of control when met with suppression.5
Despite the questionable nature of the PRC’s claims about this alleged Uyghur terrorist
network, the Chinese government persisted in releasing documents about it for months
after September 11th, eventually garnering enough international attention to convince
both the United Nations and the United States to officially recognize the alleged threat
posed to China and the world by at least one little-known Uyghur group, the Eastern Tur-
kistan Islamic Movement (ETIM).6 In September 2002, the United States’ Executive Order
13224 and the United Nations’ Security Council Resolutions 1267 and 1390 recognized
ETIM as a “terrorist organization,” subsequently subjecting it to international sanctions
and essentially making it a legitimate enemy in the “Global War on Terror” (GWOT).7
In retrospect, the PRC’s assertions about the Uyghur terrorist threat in 2001 can be
interpreted as mostly a rhetorical shift in how the Chinese state describes an internal
“separatist” threat it perceives amongst its Uyghur population. After a brief period of lib-
eralism in the XUAR during the 1980s, the PRC government became increasingly con-
cerned about the potential of a national liberation movement arising in the region,
especially after the 1990 “Baren Uprising” when a group of Uyghurs allegedly tried to vio-
lently seize control in a southern township near the city of Kashgar.8 These concerns were
further fueled by the fall of the Soviet Union and the resulting independence of the Central
Asian states in 1991.9 As a result, the PRC launched a series of security campaigns to
combat Uyghur separatism in the XUAR during the 1990s, which increased in their inten-
sity over the course of the decade. The PRC’s counter-terrorism measures during the early
3
While Uyghur nationalists abroad supported the idea of Uyghur independence in the XUAR, most of these exiled nation-
alists were in Central Asia and Turkey and had demonstrated little capacity for or interest in organizing a viable armed
resistance, let alone in establishing connections with Al-Qaida or the Taliban. In fact, many of the groups named by the
Chinese government as involved in this alleged Al-Qaida-financed terrorist network were secular human rights activists in
Europe and the United States and were unlikely bedfellows with international terrorists.
4
Famously, in his historical examination of terrorism Laqueur suggested that the phenomenon defied definition because
any attempt to achieve international consensus on the subject “would lead to endless controversies.” Laqueur 1977, 179.
5
See Roberts, forthcoming.
6
The PRC issued an extensive second paper on the Uyghur terrorist threat in January 2002 entitled “‘East Turkistan’ Terrorist
Forces Cannot Get Away with Impunity.” See Government of China 2002.
7
The original Executive Order 13224, which was adopted twelve days following the September 11th attacks, can be found
on the website of the U.S. Department of State at: http://www.state.gov/s/ct/rls/other/des/122570.htm. ETIM was added
to the list of organizations to which this order applied only a year later in September 2002. It should be noted that ETIM
does not fall on the U.S. Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTO) list, which is subject to the strictest sanctions. Rather, it is on
both the “Other Terrorist Organizations” and the “Terrorist Exclusion” lists, which calls for less strict sanctions. The original
UN Security Council Resolution sanctioning Al-Qaeda was passed in 1999.The sanctions laid out in this resolution were
expanded in January 2002 through Resolution 1390. Only in September of 2002, however, was ETIM added to the list of
organizations to which these sanctions were applied.
8
Some reports suggest that the violence that broke out in Baren was spontaneous, occurring after the Chinese military
clashed with some 200 Uyghur demonstrators protesting against recently applied limits on the number of births allotted
minority families; see Millward 2007, 327–328. Other reports, including official Chinese sources, maintain that the inci-
dent was a premeditated attempt to overthrow state control of this small rural area by a religiously oriented separatist
group calling itself the East Turkistan Islamic Party, a siege that was only ended after an extensive bombing of the area;
see Millward 2007, 325–327 and Vicziany 2003, 249.
9
See Roberts 2004.
234 S. R. ROBERTS
2000s initially were very similar, both in their focus and targets, to these anti-separatism
campaigns of the late 1990s, appearing to be a continuation of the security status quo in
the XUAR, albeit now framed in the discourse of a GWOT.
However, the labeling of Uyghurs as a terrorist threat in the context of GWOT has had
grave ramifications for Uyghurs as citizens of the PRC. It has substantively altered the
relationship between the state and Uyghurs, ultimately rendering this conflict increasingly
irresolvable. In many ways, this devolution of Uyghur-state relations is a product of the
powerful associations created by the terrorism label in the context of GWOT, which dehu-
manizes those to whom it is attributed and renders them outside the realm of the “civi-
lized” world. Whereas separatists may be reformed into loyal citizens or engaged to
better understand their grievances, the logic of GWOT assumes that terrorists are virtually
unchangeable and have no legitimate grievances. Terrorists are viewed not merely as a
threat to state sovereignty but as a threat to all of society if not to all of humanity. Con-
sequently, they must be suppressed, eliminated, or quarantined to save society itself.
Using Michel Foucault’s theory of biopolitics to examine this logic, I suggest the “ter-
rorist” label evokes the presence of a biological threat to society, akin to a virus that must
be eradicated, quarantined, or cleansed from those it infects. If such attitudes were not
immediately apparent in the PRC’s transition from its 1990s anti-separatist campaigns
in the XUAR to its counter-terrorism ones in the early 2000s, they have become increas-
ingly pronounced in PRC policies combating “Uyghur terrorism” over time, resulting in a
situation in which Uyghurs as an ethnic group are increasingly excluded from PRC society
as a biological threat to the social order, quarantined so as to not infect the population of
the country as a whole.
This article examines the evolution of this process in PRC policy as part of a larger
project focusing on the impact on Uyghurs of the GWOT since 2001. I argue that the
PRC’s unjustified labeling if all Uyghurs as a terrorist threat has over time made organized
Uyghur militancy, and perhaps terrorism, a self-fulfilling prophecy. This argument is bol-
stered by extensive interviews with Uyghur refugees in Albania and Turkey, many of
whom have been accused of terrorism, including former detainees in Guantanamo Bay,
and a few who in recent years have joined or are contemplating joining militant groups
in Syria. While this article is partially informed by these interviews, it mostly is an
attempt to describe China’s counter-terrorism policies and their implications for
Uyghurs as well as to chart the changing attitudes of other Chinese citizens toward
Uyghurs since 2001. As such, I rely on journalistic accounts, human rights reporting,
and secondary sources rather than fieldwork. Although the heightened security environ-
ment and its limits on international scholarship and journalism in the XUAR bring into
question the reliability of all of these sources, it is noteworthy that recent Uyghur refugees
from Xinjiang who have settled in Turkey generally confirm the picture these sources
paint of life in the region over the last sixteen years.
Excluding undesirables: the biopolitics of GWOT and the making of

modern Homo Sacer
Michel Foucault suggested that a defining characteristic of states in the modern period is
their tendency to make all politics into biopolitics, which focuses on the productive force
of individual bodies, or citizens, as either productive or unproductive to the polity. The
productive bodies within the polity are viewed as both the object of governance and as a
critical tool in the hands of government, while unproductive bodies are viewed as danger-
ous to the polity and should be “banished, excluded, and repressed,” a process in which the
productive dutifully assist.10
In describing this focus of modern governance on the productive force of human
bodies, Foucault suggested that the biopolitical polity views itself as a living organism,
the health of which depends upon fostering the productive actors within it while excluding
the infectious potential of those who are unproductive or, even worse, counter-productive.
This logic is evident in Foucault’s explanation of the goals of war in a system of biopolitics:
The enemies who have to be done away with are not adversaries in the political sense of the
term; they are threats, either external or internal, to the population and for the population …
in other words, killing or the imperative to kill is acceptable only if it results not in a victory
over political adversaries, but in the elimination of the biological threat to … the species or
race.11
Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek has noted that GWOT represents the epitome of such a
biopolitical war and, in many ways, is a departure from the wars of the modern period that
predate it. As he writes, “we no longer have wars in the old sense of a regulated conflict
between sovereign states in which certain rules apply (the treatment of prisoners, the pro-
hibition of certain weapons, etc.).”12 In place of such regulated wars between states, Zizek
suggests that the conflicts of today have few rules and are posited as being either between
factions within fragile polities, in which more powerful states seek to intervene or mediate,
or a result of attacks on the U.S. or other prominent members of the global economy by
“‘unlawful combatants,’ criminally resisting the forces of the universal order.”13
GWOT, which falls into the second of these new categories of conflict, portrays its ter-
rorist enemy as unlawful and illegitimate, neither politically motivated combatants nor
simple criminals. These terrorist enemies are outside the realm of civilized life and unde-
serving of the rights afforded the “civilized.” In the context of biopolitics, they are excluded
from productive society because they are considered counter-productive forces that seek to
destroy existing society and those who benefit from it. In this sense, Zizek argues that the
terrorist enemies of GWOT have become the modern equivalent of the ancient Roman
concept of Homo Sacer (“sacred” or “accursed” man), those who were banished from
the religious and political community and not afforded the protection of Rome’s laws.14
This construction of GWOT’s terrorist enemies as Homo Sacer, the perpetually excluded
population of a biopolitical regime, is most apparent in the decision by the U.S. government
to keep some detainees in its Guantanamo Bay Detention Center indefinitely without the
status of either “prisoner of war” or “criminal,” outside the protection of the law.15 But it
is also a truly global phenomenon, where states around the world have used the narrative
of terrorism to construct a transnational geography of uncontrolled spaces and dangerous
10
Foucault 1997, 32.
11
Foucault 1997, 256.
12
Zizek 2002, 93.
13
Zizek 2002, 93.
14
The use of the Homo Sacer designation to explain a modern phenomenon of exclusion comes from the work of Giorgio
Agamben, who has used it as a means of explaining the use of concentration camps in biopolitics as a means of biologi-
cally excluding those deemed unproductive or dangerous in modern conflicts. See Agamben 1998.
15
Zizek 2002, 93.
236 S. R. ROBERTS
populations which need not be afforded legal protections and must be quarantined to
prevent them from becoming a security threat to others.16 Furthermore, as GWOT has
evolved into a never-ending war on terror, it is no longer only Muslim combatants who
are assigned the status of Homo Sacer, but it is now increasingly all Muslims who, viewed
almost as a biological group, who are deemed by many outside the Muslim world as
suspect. Thus, some politicians in the United States have recently discussed the banning
of Muslims from travel to America, and hate crimes against Muslims with no affiliation
to terrorist organizations are on the rise in both Europe and the United States.17
In the PRC, a similar biopolitics of exclusion has emerged in the state’s handling of its
alleged Uyghur terrorist threat. China’s early counter-terrorism policies were very much
an extension of anti-separatist policies during the 1990s, but this approach has changed
with time. While state actors viciously punished and excluded Uyghurs deemed counter-
productive to the PRC’s vision for the country during both the 1990s and early 2000s,
they also sought to make other Uyghurs into productive supporters of that vision,
seeking to integrate them into a Han-centric culture loyal to the state. However, as the
repression of alleged counter-productive Uyghurs has intensified under the guise of combat-
ing terrorism, the option of integration has gradually disappeared. Repression increasingly
has begotten violent resistance from some Uyghurs, which, in turn, has led to more repres-
sive state policies and the fostering of more violent resistance. Gradually, this cycle of repres-
sion-violence-repression has led to a complete breakdown in trust between the PRC
government and its Uyghur population and has rendered integration virtually impossible.
Although this process has not led to an official banishment of the Uyghur ethnic group
from PRC society as was the case with the Homo Sacer of ancient Rome, the terrorism label
and the resultant cycle of repression-violence-repression have led to the Uyghurs’ de facto
exclusion by stripping them of legal rights afforded other Chinese citizens, subjecting them
to intense and constant surveillance not placed on other groups in society, and cultivating
an ethnic profile of them in the Chinese public imagination as dangerous to the PRC’s
“harmonious society.” Thus, while the PRC continues to promote opportunities for
Uyghurs to become loyal citizens, even those who seek to take advantage of these oppor-
tunities remain under scrutiny as potential terrorists unless they literally condemn their
own ethnic heritage, leaving them isolated and alienated. In essence, all Uyghurs have
been deemed guilty of terrorist or extremist inclinations and deemed a threat to the
social order until proven innocent.18 To understand how this biopolitics of exclusion
has unfolded since 2001 in the PRC, it is critical to review the evolution of China’s war
on terror in policy and practice as well as its impact on Uyghurs over time.
Uyghurs’ transition from separatists to terrorists and the early years of

China’s “war on terror”
During the 1990s, the Chinese government encouraged Uyghur loyalty to the state and
integration into a Han-dominated society while severely punishing signs of disloyalty in
16
See Elden 2007.
17
See Evar 2012; Ramakrishna 2017.
18
It is also notable that given the generally observable differences in physical appearance between Uyghurs and other
Chinese citizens, very few Uyghurs are able to escape this scrutiny, literally setting them apart biologically from
others in the country as a potentially dangerous threat.
the name of eradicating separatism. The state’s efforts to instill Uyghur loyalty and foster
integration primarily entailed promoting economic opportunities, but, given the macro-
economic nature and ethno-geographic disparity of the PRC’s development strategy in
the XUAR, these efforts only provided nominal improvements in the everyday lives of
Uyghurs while simultaneously encouraging Han in-migration to the region.19 The
PRC’s attempts to discourage disloyalty included measures to identify and severely
punish separatists while simultaneously suppressing information and any beliefs, includ-
ing the independent practice of Islam, that the state viewed as fostering separatism. As a
result, throughout the 1990s, a variety of state campaigns in the XUAR led to censorship of
publications, music, and other artistic forms of expression that the state viewed as promot-
ing Uyghur nationalism, the arrest of hundreds of suspected separatists, and the insti-
tution of limits on the ability of Uyghurs to informally practice Islam outside the
purview of the state.20
These security measures intensified over the course of the 1990s, especially after a series
of events in early 1997. The first incident was a riot in the northern Xinjiang city of Kuldja
that resulted in multiple casualties, leading to the town being put under curfew and its
transport connections to the rest of the region being cut off for two weeks.21 Although
the details of this event remain murky, it appears to have begun with a protest by
young Uyghur men against restrictions on religious observation, and it spiraled out of
control after security forces clashed with protestors.22 Less than three weeks later, three
bombs exploded on public buses in Urumqi, killing nine and seriously injuring twenty-
eight.23 While no specific organization took credit for the bombings and little details
about the incident are publicly available, it occurred on the same day as memorial services
for the recently deceased Deng Xiaoping, suggesting a political motivation.24
These violent events in Kuldja and Urumqi led to a heightened region-wide crackdown
on separatism and non-sanctioned religious activity that was more intense than any before
it. The crackdown resulted in countless arrests and further restrictions on Uyghur religious
observation, which was limited to men over eighteen at state sanctioned mosques.25 At the
same time, the PRC also began to cut cross-border ties between China’s Uyghurs and those
in Central Asian states, using the then-newly established Shanghai Cooperation Organiz-
ation to ensure that Central Asian security organs would silence the political activity of
Uyghur nationalists living in their countries.26
According to Joanne Smith Finley, this extreme crackdown on dissent and closure of
access to the Uyghurs of Central Asia provided a new impetus among some young
Uyghurs to follow state-prescribed paths toward integration into the PRC’s Han-domi-
nant culture. Seeing few other available options, such youth made the decision to study
19
See Becquelin 2000 and Roberts 2016.
20
Between 1990 and 1995, security forces allegedly found and eliminated over one hundred “separatist counter-revolution-
ary organizations, illegal organizations, and reactionary gangs,” arresting 1831 people. See Millward 2007, 328. The full
scope of PRC strategy for combating Uyghur separatism is best outlined in the leaked “Document No. 7” from 1996. For
details about this document, see Citizens against Chinese Communist Propaganda 1996.
21
Millward 2007, 333.
22
Roberts 1998, 686.
23
Ibid.
24
It is also worth mentioning that these bombings were among the only violent incidents in the 1990s that could justifiably
be deemed a manifestation of Uyghur terrorism if they were indeed politically motivated and carried out by Uyghurs.
25
For a detailed account of this security campaign, see Amnesty International 1999.
26
See Roberts, 2004.
238 S. R. ROBERTS
in Mandarin language schools and to pursue careers that might break the ethnic segre-
gation between Han and Uyghurs. As Smith Finley writes, “In the wake of this event,
Uyghurs found themselves increasingly confronted with a bi-polar world in which they
could resist and face marginalization, or accommodate to ensure survival.”27 However,
it should be noted that not all youth chose accommodation in this new bi-polar world.
According to Smith Finley, it also resulted in a significant number of Uyghurs immersing
themselves in Islam as a means of resistance to integration.28
This was the situation in the XUAR in late 2001 when the PRC began asserting that the
Uyghur separatists it had been pursuing for the previous decade were actually inter-
national terrorists aligned with Al-Qaida and Osama bin Laden. Ironically, these asser-
tions actually came at a time of relative stability in the region. No significant violent
incidents had transpired in the region since 1999, and ties between Uyghurs in the
XUAR and the Uyghur diaspora in Central Asia had been severely curtailed, minimizing
access to separatist sympathizers outside China’s borders. Furthermore, by the early 2000s,
the state was enjoying at least some success in encouraging young urban Uyghurs to inte-
grate themselves into the PRC’s Han-dominant society. In this context, it is likely that the
state’s sudden claim of a Uyghur terrorist threat was less a response to new security con-
cerns in the region than an attempt to justify existing policies suppressing Uyghur nation-
alism and religiosity by framing them in the discourse of a GWOT. The likelihood of such
motives on the part of the PRC leadership is further bolstered by the fact that the shift in
state discourse did not immediately change the tactics or aims of security operations in the
region. However, the shift from combating separatists to combating terrorists did suggest a
new urgency in these security operations and allowed for their intensification over time.
The most immediate result of the new assertions about the Uyghur terrorist threat was
the passing of amendments to China’s criminal legal code in December of 2001. While
these amendments mostly amounted to adding “terrorism crimes” with stauncher penal-
ties to an existing list of crimes under the category of “Endangering Public Security,”
Amnesty International also noted at the time that these new crimes lacked sufficient defi-
nition to be fairly punished.29 As a result, these legal changes laid the groundwork for a
highly subjective and on-going hunt for terrorists in the XUAR over the years that
followed.
Additionally, the shift to a discourse of terrorism allowed the PRC to make even stron-
ger linkages than it had in the past between dissent and Islam. The American-led GWOT
already had created clear linkages between global terrorism and Islamic extremism, which
allowed the PRC to logically justify suppressing unsanctioned religious activities in the
XUAR, which it deemed to be “extremism,” as an aspect of countering terrorism. Along
these lines, PRC officials appear to have quietly changed the official goals of “Strike
Hard Campaigns” in the XUAR during the early 2000s from focusing on what the govern-
ment labeled the three evil forces of “separatists, terrorists, and hard criminals” to those of
“terrorists, separatists, and religious extremists.”30
In the wake of these legal and discursive changes, PRC security organs began a substan-
tial sweep in the XUAR in search of suspected terrorists and the religious institutions that
27
Smith Finley 2013, 235.
28
Smith Finley 2013, 235–293.
29
Amnesty International 2002.
30
Cf. Willy Wo-Lap Lam 2002 and Dupont 2007.
were allegedly influencing them. This widespread crackdown, which has been thoroughly
documented by Amnesty International, resulted in scores of arrests on charges related to
terrorism, many carrying death sentences.31 Aside from arresting alleged Uyghur terrorists
during this time, security forces also launched a massive campaign in Xinjiang to limit reli-
gious observation and access to unofficial information.
This campaign resulted in the arrest of dozens of clerics and civilians for “illegal reli-
gious activities” and “illegal preaching,” the raiding of multiple “illegal religious centers”
and the closing of mosques deemed to have a “bad influence” on youth due to their proxi-
mity to schools.32 It also involved more draconian measures to limit the religiosity of daily
life by monitoring life cycle rituals, such as weddings, circumcisions, and funerals, for
extremist influences, by seeking to prevent Uyghurs, especially school children and gov-
ernment officials, from observing the Ramadan fast, and by forcing Imams to undergo
“political education” on Communist Party doctrine.33 Finally, it focused on stopping “ter-
rorism in the spiritual field” by confiscating unofficial publications and recordings and
mandating anti-terrorism “study classes” for workers in the cultural sphere.34 As a
result, various Uyghur artists were also arrested for the writing and/or reciting of
poems and stories deemed to be expressions of either separatism or terrorism.35
While all of these efforts were similar to the anti-separatist campaigns in the XUAR
during the 1990s, the new focus on “terrorism,” an internationally recognized force of
evil, facilitated a more aggressive approach toward controlling the ways that Uyghurs
behaved and thought. This was a trend that would continue with increased intensity in
the years that followed, but its manifestation during the first several years of the 2000s
was not severe enough to facilitate the Uyghurs becoming excluded Homo Sacer within
the PRC. In fact, during this time, some international scholars began talking about a
“Uyghur-Han rapprochement” due to increased Uyghur integration and a noticeable
decline in alleged Uyghur-perpetrated violence.36 However, these signs of increased inte-
gration were observed primarily among the urban elite and especially among Chinese
language-educated Uyghurs, known as Min Kao Han, to which the international scholarly
community had access.
Indeed, some policies from the early 2000s made it difficult for youth to not “integrate”
themselves into a Han-dominant PRC culture, such as the push for all schools in the
XUAR to emphasize the Chinese language and an associated drastic reduction in
Uyghur language instruction.37 Other policies incentivized voluntary integration,
framed as opportunities to succeed in PRC society. Regardless of their mandatory or
voluntary nature, all of these new paths toward integration were decidedly more
31
Drawing from unofficial reports, Amnesty documents the criminal sentencing of over 100 Uyghurs on terrorism charges
between September and November of 2001, with at least nine receiving death sentences, but it also cites Uyghur dia-
spora sources claiming that some 3000 Uyghurs were detained during this period with twenty of them executed and
scores more incarcerated. Amnesty International 2002, 19–22.
32
Amnesty International 2002, 14–15.
33
Amnesty International 2002, 16.
34
Amnesty International 2002, 17–19.
35
Uyghur Human Rights Project 2007a, 6–7.
36
While not without skepticism, Joanne Smith Finley points out this trend in international scholarship on Uyghurs in the
early 2000s. See Smith Finley 2013, 393–394.
37
This push included ending all instruction in the Uyghur language at Xinjiang University in 2002 and a more general effort
to increase Chinese language instruction and reduce the use of Uyghur in the XUAR’s officially bi-lingual elementary
schools. See: Grose 2010, 100.
240 S. R. ROBERTS
assimilationist than in the past. One of the most extreme examples was the establishment
of twelve “Xinjiang class” boarding schools in the interior of China in 2000 to provide
Mandarin-based instruction explicitly for Uyghur and other minority students from the
XUAR.38 These schools were particularly focused on political indoctrination and enforced
a strict atmosphere of control that one former student compared to a prison.39 Part of this
political indoctrination included overt attempts to strip students of any religious beliefs,
such as only giving one day off for major Muslim holidays during which time students
were required to partake in secular celebrations and refrain from prayer.40
Similarly, various programs were initiated to send Uyghurs, particularly young women
from rural areas, to the interior of China to work in factories accompanied by language
training and ideological courses. While these programs were touted as economic oppor-
tunities for Uyghurs, official accounts also noted that they would help to incorporate
rural Uyghurs into “the ‘great socialist family’ of the Chinese motherland” by improving
their “thinking and consciousness” as well as their manners and civility.41
Thousands of Uyghurs willingly participated in such programs during the first decade
of the 2000s, but most did not jettison their Uyghur identity or proclaim loyalty to the
PRC. Rather, the result was a divided Uyghur community culturally, but one that
remained mostly united around a disdain for Chinese rule and the influx of Han to the
XUAR. Those youth who learned Chinese and embraced these economic opportunities
were often estranged from other Uyghurs, but many also became increasingly nationalistic
and/or religious.42 These unintended consequences of the PRC’s “integration” policies
were especially pronounced among students from “Xinjiang Class” boarding schools.
One study, for example, suggests that the anti-religious propaganda of these schools even-
tually encouraged many of their graduates to embrace Islam more forcefully than before
their boarding school experiences.43
Despite the ineffectiveness of such integration and assimilation measures in creating
loyal Uyghurs, there were remarkably few violent incidents inside the XUAR during the
early 2000s.44 While this was likely due largely to the increased security environment in
the region, it also suggests that, contrary to PRC rhetoric, no viable Uyghur terrorist
threat existed inside the country. However, a number of factors, including the initiation
of policies that targeted all Uyghurs as potential threats to society, were about to make vio-
lence more commonplace.
The Olympics, the Urumqi riots, and the beginnings of exclusion

In the run-up to the Beijing Summer Olympics of 2008, the PRC increased its security in
all areas of society to prevent any disruption of the games. With the PRC’s Minister of
38
These twelve four-year schools, modeled on similar institutions established far earlier for Tibetans, initially enrolled 1000
Uyghur students per year, with the intention of having a steady enrollment of 5000 by 2007. See Yan and Song 2010.
39
Grose 2015.
40
Grose 2015, 110–111.
41
Uyghur Human Rights Project 2007b.
42
Jennifer Tayman, who has studied Chinese-educated Uyghur youth in Urumqi, notes that they felt estranged from others
in their ethnic group, but “like the rest of the Uyghur community, the Min Kao Han … in Xinjiang were not supportive of
the Han presence in the region.” Taynen 2006, 46.
43
Grose 2010, 112–119.
44
As Justin Hastings notes in his review of Uyghur unrest in the XUAR, violent incidents after 2001 were “rare until 2008 and
2009.” Hastings 2011.
Public Security already claiming that terrorism represented “the greatest threat to the
Olympic Games,” the Uyghurs were particularly targeted.45 As early as January 2008,
the Chinese government reported that it had captured members of an alleged ETIM ter-
rorist cell, and in March, it claimed to have foiled a plane hijacking by a Uyghur terrorist.
After protests in Tibet spiraled out of control and led to unrest in March, the pressure on
Uyghurs only intensified. In April, PRC security forces claimed to have foiled two other
planned Uyghur terrorist attacks on the Olympics, and there were reports of mass
arrests throughout the XUAR as well as of efforts to limit the travel of Uyghurs.46 Inter-
national media outlets expressed skepticism about the state’s claims to have foiled so many
terrorist attacks in the run-up to the Olympics, especially given the recent paucity of vio-
lence in the XUAR, assuming it was staging a show of force as a tactic of deterrence, but
the PRC continued to be adamant that it was suppressing an actual Uyghur terrorist threat
to the games.47
In general, these heightened security efforts targeting Uyghurs included ethnic profiling
and carried a stronger message of ethnic exclusion than had past measures to combat
separatism and terrorism, effectively shielding the games’ international audience from
this population entirely. This “quarantining” of Uyghurs in advance of the Olympics
was especially visible in Beijing, where Uyghurs were reportedly refused hotel rooms,
and local sources suggested that as many as 4000 to 5000 were either detained or expelled
from the city in the months prior to the games.48
These measures did not distinguish between “good” and “bad” Uyghurs but targeted
the entire ethnic group, sending a clear message to Uyghurs that they were not
welcome to be a part of the largest international event in China since the establishment
of the PRC in 1949. The Chinese state employed similar exclusionary policies against Tibe-
tans during the Olympics, but as one report on these policies suggested, “the Uyghurs are
under greater pressure than any other ethnic minority because the government sees them
not only as potential protesters but also as potential terrorists.”49
At the same time, national media coverage in China of counter-terrorism measures and
their alleged successes in foiling Uyghur attacks on the Olympics raised fears of Uyghurs
among the general populace, and a series of events in July and August of 2008 only inten-
sified these fears. In July, a little-known splinter group of Al-Qaida based abroad and
known as the Turkistan Islamic Party (TIP) released a frightening video showing
graphic footage of bombs going off in China and warning that Uyghurs would attack
the Olympics in retaliation for their treatment by the PRC government.50 Although no
attacks occurred during the games, in early August there were three violent incidents
that involved Uyghur attacks on policemen and security organs in Xinjiang just prior to
and after the opening ceremonies. While the details of these attacks, like most violence
45
Elegant 2008.
46
Saidazimova 2008.
47
Elegant 2008.
48
York 2008.
49
York 2008.
50
See: Turkistan Islamic Party (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwO_wX5olNQ&feature=related). I have elsewhere
characterized this organization as being essentially a shell propaganda wing of Al-Qaida at this time, likely interested
in recruiting Uyghurs to Al-Qaida’s global causes. While a Uyghur allegedly led it and appears in its videos, there was
no evidence at the time that it had a real fighting force or that it was capable of carrying out terrorist acts. See:
Roberts, forthcoming.
242 S. R. ROBERTS
in the region, remain unclear, the state and the Chinese media portrayed them as terror-
ism, raising the Chinese public’s anxiety regarding Uyghurs and the threat they posed to
society.
Following these acts of violence, the Chinese Communist Party Secretary of the region,
Wang Lequan, declared a “life or death struggle” against terrorists.51 The aggressive crack-
down that followed reportedly mobilized some 200,000 public security officers and armed
police and included official orders to punish the families and neighbors of suspected ter-
rorists as well as alleged terrorists themselves. According to official accounts, nearly 1300
Uyghurs were arrested for “state security crimes” in 2008, including charges of terrorism,
substantially more than in previous years.52 The oppressive environment that these
measures cultivated among Uyghurs over the course of 2008 undoubtedly contributed
to the tensions that exploded in Urumqi in the summer of 2009.
On July 5, 2009, massive riots and ethnic clashes broke out in the city, resulting in the
worst ethnic violence in PRC history. These riots were apparently sparked by clashes
between security forces and a large group of Uyghur demonstrators protesting the
government response to attacks on Uyghur migrant laborers at a factory in southern
China which had resulted in at least two deaths.53 When security forces sought to
suppress the protest, violence erupted and quickly spread through the city as Uyghurs
and Han citizens attacked each other in street violence that continued for nearly three
days. Official sources reported at least 197 deaths, the majority of whom were ethnic
Han, but Uyghur groups outside the PRC claim that many more Uyghurs were killed
than Han.54
While there have been conflicting reports of this violence, most reliable sources
acknowledge that it was not premeditated, but reflected a boiling over of existing tensions
between Uyghurs and Han in the region. The reasons for these tensions were numerous,
including the top-down model through which the state has promoted development and
increased Han migration to the XUAR.55 However, the branding of Uyghurs as terrorists
and their increasing exclusion from PRC society as a “dangerous population” during and
following the Olympics were likely also contributing factors.
The official response to the 2009 riots was to further increase security measures in the
region, including a virtual state of martial law enforced by security forces. This included a
heavy security presence in Urumqi for months afterwards and stepped up security oper-
ations elsewhere in Xinjiang. Extensive searches for Uyghurs alleged to be involved in the
violence were carried out, including door-to-door searches of Uyghur-populated apart-
ment buildings and neighborhoods.56 The number of those arrested and jailed in connec-
tion with the riots remains unknown, but the Financial Times reported that at least 4000
Uyghurs had already been arrested within two weeks of the events.57 Arrests of Uyghurs
accused of involvement in the riots continued for months afterwards in both Urumqi and
51
Uyghur Human Rights Project 2008, 2.
52
53
Ryono and Galway 2015, 235.
54
Human Rights Watch notes that the numbers of deaths from the violence and the ethnic identity of the dead remain in
dispute. Uyghur human rights groups abroad, for example, claim that at least 400 Uyghurs were killed in the second day
of rioting, disputing the official statement that the majority of those killed were Han. See Human Rights Watch 2010, 20.
55
Roberts 2016.
56
Human Rights Watch 2009.
57
Hille 2009.
in other areas of the XUAR.58 Among the reportedly thousands detained in connection
with the riots, a substantial number remain unaccounted for, leading Human Rights
Watch to categorize these as “enforced disappearances.”59
Additionally, strict restrictions were placed on communications throughout the region.
Immediately after the riots began, the government shut down the Internet throughout
Xinjiang. Access was only restored incrementally between December 2009 and May
2010. In addition, cell phone text messaging was prevented until January 2010, and inter-
national phone calls were blocked until December 2009.60 In short, state security organs
put the entire region under lock-down for almost an entire year following the riots.
While clearly not a terrorist attack, the Urumqi riots marked a turning point in
Uyghur-state relations as well as in general Han attitudes toward Uyghurs. The intense
ethnic violence that took place during the riots resulted in a palatable increase in wide-
spread Han fears of Uyghurs throughout the country. The riots also suggested that
efforts to integrate Uyghurs into PRC society had failed, even in Urumqi, where
Uyghurs were considered to be much more cosmopolitan than elsewhere in the region.
As a result, after 2009, the PRC escalated its efforts to squash Uyghur dissent and
repress Islam in the XUAR. Although this was not a departure from past practices, the
intensity with which these policies were implemented after 2009 increased significantly.
The escalating cycle of repression-violence-repression and the

consolidation of exclusion, 2010–2015
By 2010, a new level of racial profiling for Uyghurs had developed among both state
actors and many ethnic Han in the country, who assumed that all Uyghurs should be
considered as potential terrorists or at least as potential sympathizers with terrorism.
These societal attitudes toward Uyghurs were also accompanied by increased scrutiny
and surveillance. By the first anniversary of the 2009 Urumqi riots, XUAR officials
reported that “40,000 high-definition surveillance cameras with riot-proof protective
shells had been installed throughout the region.”61 In Urumqi, there were also reports
that city officials were placing permanent barriers between Uyghur and Han neighbor-
hoods.62 Finally, the state increased its security presence throughout the region and
instructed security organs to strictly monitor Uyghurs for signs of extremism and poten-
tial terrorism.
In addition to these efforts to monitor and control the general Uyghur population and,
in some cases, to separate it from Han neighborhoods, substantial controls on the practice
of Islam were also established. Many of these controls utilized public institutions, includ-
ing schools, hospitals, and mosques, to regulate Uyghurs’ public behavior, beliefs, and
dress, to prevent Uyghur children from embracing Islam, and to control the messages
they received from their own religious leaders.63 Additionally, the security presence
became particularly pronounced in the southern Uyghur-majority centers of the region,
where communities were decidedly more devout than in Urumqi.
58
Uyghur Human Rights Project 2010, 42–43.
59
60
61
The Guardian 2011.
62
Radio Free Asia 2016.
63
See Uyghur Human Rights Project 2013.
244 S. R. ROBERTS
These new security measures and social controls only served to increase tensions in the
XUAR. While this tension did not result in another ethnic riot, it did increase the fre-
quency and severity of violent incidents. Violent incidents resumed after the post-riot
crackdown in August of 2010, when the bombing of a police station was reported in
Aksu, and continued over the next several years with increased frequency, especially in
the southern Uyghur-majority regions of the XUAR. While information about this vio-
lence remains limited, the majority of instances between 2010 and 2013 appear to have
been clashes between Uyghurs and law enforcement officers. Fewer, but not an insignif-
icant number, involved spontaneous or deliberate violence between Uyghur and Han citi-
zens.64 Although Chinese officials questionably labeled all of these incidents as terrorist
acts, it is valid to note that there was a noticeable increase in the incidents that were
both premeditated and politically motivated, indicating a rise in local Uyghur political
militancy.65
This increase in violence facilitated an escalating cycle of repression followed by vio-
lence and more repression in the following years. In the wake of every act of violence
or in advance of important public events, the state increased its security presence,
recruited “volunteer” security officers to monitor public places, established numerous
checkpoints, and conducted widespread security sweeps in local Uyghur communities.66
These security measures focused particularly on religiously devout Uyghurs, who were
already under pressure from broader state efforts to limit public expressions of Islam. 67
In turn, after each of these intensive security lock-downs, the incidents of violence only
became bolder and more sophisticated, eventually leaking out of the XUAR to elsewhere
in China.
By 2013, this cycle of repression and violence had escalated to the point that some
Uyghur-initiated acts of violence began looking increasingly like planned terrorist
attacks by any definition of the term, appearing to be well organized and targeting citizens
by surprise in public spaces. The first of these events, which was also the first time that
alleged Uyghur-initiated political violence had occurred outside of the XUAR, involved
three Uyghurs who drove a truck into a crowd on Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in
October 2013.68 This was followed by several more dramatic incidents of violence over
the next two years that involved significant casualties, including the killing of thirty-
three people with knives by a band of masked Uyghurs in a train station in Kunming
and a bombing in Urumqi that killed forty-three, both in 2014, as well as the grisly slaugh-
ter of some fifty Han Chinese workers at a coal mine in 2015.69 In total, at least ninety-
eight violent incidents were reported inside and outside of the XUAR involving
Uyghurs in 2013 and 2014, resulting in between 656 and 715 deaths, a pattern which
64
65
There is no international definition of terrorism. However, the violence between Uyghur and Han citizens occurring at this
time would likely not qualify as terrorism by most recognized definitions given its apparent spontaneous nature. Whether
the attacks on police and security organs can justifiably be termed “terrorism” is a more contested question. By the legal
definition of terrorism in the United States, they likely would be considered terrorist acts since they did not target military
personnel actively involved in combat (see: United States Department of State 2004, xii). By other definitions, which
include security and law enforcement as legitimate combatants in conflicts within states, these incidents would likely
be more accurately described as acts of war undertaken by non-state militants (see Garnor 2002).
66
See B.B.C. 2012.
67
See. for example. Evans 2012 and Hille 2012.
68
Rajagopalan 2013.
69
See B.B.C. 2014a; B.B.C. 2014b; and The Guardian 2015.
continued into 2015.70 This represented a substantial escalation in the frequency, severity,
and political nature of violence perpetrated by Uyghurs, and it only served to instill in the
Han majority population more fear of Uyghurs and a conviction that they were a threat to
society.71
Predictably, this violence also led to new and more forceful state security operations vis-
à-vis Uyghurs. The search for terrorist organizations and extremists intensified substan-
tially after 2013, as did arrests.72 These efforts to locate and punish alleged terrorists
and extremists were complemented by a variety of repressive strategies to control
Uyghurs’ movement, access to information, and beliefs. Already in 2013, reports
emerged of the denial of new passports and the selective confiscation of existing ones.73
By 2014, access to Internet sites were also more stringently controlled in the XUAR
than elsewhere in the country, numerous Uyghur website owners were imprisoned for
the content of their sites, and access to both online services and text messaging was fre-
quently cut in the wake of public disturbances or in advance of important events.74
There also was a noticeable increase in efforts to control religious belief and expression
as authorities stepped up their monitoring of mosque attendance, launched house-to-
house searches for religious literature and attire, and established checkpoints to enforce
a new “project beauty” campaign to prevent Uyghurs from wearing traditional Islamic
attire. In the southern Uyghur population centers of the XUAR, the atmosphere
became so oppressive for religious Uyghurs that one reporter suggested in 2014 that
China was waging “an all-out attack on Islam” in the region.75
It was also at this time that PRC authorities arrested and sentenced to life in prison the
only independent Uyghur public political voice in the country, economics professor Ilham
Tohti of the National Minorities University of China (Minzu Daxue) in Beijing. Tohti was
an outspoken advocate for the integration of Uyghurs into the PRC, albeit also a critic of
existing state policy in the XUAR.76 Tohti’s life sentence for alleged separatism, extreme
even in the context of the PRC’s punishment of dissenting intellectuals, illustrates the
lack of tolerance the state and the Chinese Communist Party now had for any substantive
dialogue with Uyghur voices. The message sent was that the only option available to
Uyghurs was uncritical loyalty to the state. The alternative was exclusion if not elimin-
ation. This message has only become clearer since.
Welcome to the Panopticon: quarantining the Uyghurs since 2016

Since the 2016 appointment of Chen Quanguo as Communist Party Secretary in Xinjiang,
security measures against Uyghurs have reached new heights. Chen has brought his
experience as Party Secretary of the Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR) to his new
70
Uyghur Human Rights Program 2015, 7.
71
These fears and associated hatred have mostly been documented by examining the anti-Muslim comments of China’s
“netizens” on social media, which increased markedly after 2013 (cf. Erie 2016). However, a survey of Chinese citizens
after the Kunming attacks suggests that these attitudes were not limited to online commentators. See for example,
Chen and Ding 2014.
72
Cf. Branigan 2014; Agence France-Presse 2015.
73
Uyghur American Association 2013. Although this report acknowledges that confiscations had been occurring regularly
since 2006, the authors note an increase in these policies in the region in early 2013.
74
Olsen 2014.
75
Denyer 2014.
76
Phillips 2016.
246 S. R. ROBERTS
position in the XUAR, but with more vigor justified by the state narrative of Uyghur ter-
rorism. Under Chen, Xinjiang has increasingly become a security state within a state, and
Uyghurs have been virtually quarantined from the rest of the PRC, marked as pariahs who
pose a threat to society writ large. Although it remains too early in Chen’s tenure to know
the extent to which his regional administration will seek to control and monitor Uyghur
society, the measures already adopted in the region under him suggest this will be exten-
sive if not unprecedented.
This emerging security state environment in the XUAR was initially justified by
counter-terrorism legislation passed by the National People’s Congress in December of
2015 that defines “terrorism,” “terrorist activity,” and “terrorist organizations” in a way
that criminalizes virtually any Uyghur expression of dissent or religiosity as well as
many Uyghur cultural traditions as signs of terrorism or extremism.77 Additionally, the
law gives the state extensive powers of surveillance and censorship, especially regarding
Internet communications, in its fight against terrorism.78
Shortly after this law’s adoption, it was supplemented in the XUAR with additional “de-
extremification regulations,” which target virtually all public expressions of Islam in the
region and provide a legal basis for policing Uyghurs’ thoughts, appearance, and behavior.
According to this new regulation, “extremification … refers (to) speech and actions under
the influence of extremism that spread radical religious ideology, and reject and interfere
with normal production and livelihood,” clearly signifying the biopolitical nature of the
label.79 The regulations further provide a laundry list of newly criminalized behavior,
thought, attire, and physical appearances that signify “extremification” and enlist the
population as a whole to root out the “extremified” among them.80 In addition to crimi-
nalizing the wearing of veils and certain beard styles, the list of newly illegal activities
include such standard religious practices as using religious ceremonies in weddings and
propagating the adherence to halal eating practices.81
These measures have been the legislative basis for the state’s increasing control of its
Uyghur population since 2015, which I argue has increasingly led to the exclusion of
this ethnic group from PRC writ large. In many ways, the general actions of the state
vis-à-vis Uyghurs since this time appear to share the same goals that have governed
state policies toward the Uyghurs since the 1990s – punishing dissent, curtailing the influ-
ence of Islam, and seeking to assimilate them to a Han-dominant PRC civic culture.
However, the aggressive ways in which these goals have been pursued over the last
several years have resulted in the virtual quarantining and exclusion of the Uyghurs as
an almost biological threat infecting society, bringing into question whether the goal of
their assimilation is even possible in the present context. These extreme actions include
the limitation of Uyghur mobility, both within the PRC and globally, an unprecedented
system of mass surveillance targeting Uyghurs, and the creation of “re-education” mass
detention camps where allegedly hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs are being held
extra-judicially and indefinitely.
77
China Law Translate 2015.
78
Buckley 2015.
79
80
81
Gan 2017a.
In terms of the limitations on Uyghurs’ mobility, in October 2016, the authorities

announced that all residents of the XUAR had to submit their passports for review to
the Public Security Bureau (PSB) reportedly for “safekeeping,” effectively forcing
Uyghurs to ask state permission before traveling.82 Subsequently, in 2017, a large
number of Uyghurs studying abroad were ordered to return home at the end of the
current school year for briefings, presumably including a review of their loyalty to the
state accompanied by a judgment regarding their return abroad.83 Many of these students
have disappeared after being detained on their arrival in China without notice from the
authorities of their whereabouts.84 There have also been some reports that cities through-
out the XUAR have fenced in Uyghur neighborhoods entirely with security patrols stand-
ing by at their singular entrances to check the documents of those who come and go.85
Finally, the checkpoints created both within and between urban areas are clearly designed
to keep tabs on all movements of Uyghurs regionally and to limit those movements as the
authorities see fit.
Their mobility now limited, Uyghurs are subjected to an unprecedented level of surveil-
lance, much of which employs new technologies. Throughout the region, authorities have
initiated random examinations of Uyghurs’ smart phones for suspicious applications and
content at checkpoints, reportedly placing spyware on the phones in the process.86 In
Kashgar, shop owners are being required to install password-activated security doors,
panic buttons, and cameras, to which security organs have full access.87 In the Bayingolin
region of the XUAR, officials have mandated that all cars be equipped with GPS trackers
and RFID (radio-frequency identification) tags that allow security organs to account for
them at all times.88 Throughout the region, kitchen knives and other cutting instruments
that could be used as weapons are etched with permanent serial numbers that can be
linked to the identification numbers of those who purchase them.89 Furthermore, the
network of surveillance cameras on streets throughout the region has widened even
more than after 2009 and now employs facial recognition software to track those it
records, and many large public spaces, including bazaars, now employ checkpoints com-
plete with metal detectors and facial recognition or iris scan machines to identify known
suspicious individuals.90
Coupled with this electronic surveillance, the XUAR is also reportedly establishing a
biological database to assist in tracking Uyghurs. In order to do this, the government is
fast-tracking its collection of DNA from residents, asking all who apply for passports
for genetic samples while creating an infrastructure for the forcible collection of DNA
from all who live in the region. The ultimate goal of this DNA collection appears to be
the eventual establishment of a genetic database of all residents, which can presumably
be linked with other information about them gleaned from other sources of surveillance.91
82
Wong 2016.
83
Feng 2017.
84
Shih 2017b.
85
86
Shih 2017b.
87
Wen 2017.
88
Philips 2017.
89
Millward 2018.
90
Shih 2017b.
91
Human Rights Watch 2017a.
248 S. R. ROBERTS
This ominous combination of biological data with electronic surveillance goes beyond
anything that could have been imagined in Foucault’s original articulation of biopolitics,
but the relevance to his ideas are evident.
While these technological and biological means of surveillance have attracted the most
international media attention, human surveillance is an even more critical component of
Uyghurs’ present state of alienation within the PRC. Most notable in this regard is Chen
Quanguo’s establishment of “convenience police stations” (便民警务站) throughout the
major population centers of the XUAR. These police stations, for which 31,000 new secur-
ity officers are being recruited, are located throughout urban areas, often only a few
hundred yards from each other, and play a critical role in the surveillance of suspicious
activity, particularly among Uyghurs. Although these stations are characterized by the
state as a form of community policing, they are equipped, as James Leibold and Adrian
Zenz have reported, “with the latest anti-riot equipment, and, in some cases, high-tech sur-
veillance equipment such as face and voice recognition software, which is used to track
suspects and even build profiles of likely troublemakers.”92 Leibold and Zenz have
called this mass deployment of security personnel the “scaffolding of the security state,”
and Chen Quanguo himself has ominously characterized it as “grid-style social
management.”93
While these electronic and human surveillance measures are able to track individual
Uyghurs in public spaces, flag those wearing attire deemed suspicious or illegal, and
monitor nefarious behavior, they are less effective in controlling Uyghurs in the private
sphere. Nonetheless, under Chen, XUAR authorities have also established ways to
monitor the private lives of Uyghurs as well as their thoughts and beliefs. This monitoring
of the private sphere is most obviously accomplished through surveillance of private com-
munications. Aside from random checks of and placement of spyware on smart phones, the
XUAR is now home to a particularly sophisticated Internet surveillance apparatus, which
patrols the web for suspicious behavior, information, or commentary generated by
Uyghurs and collects big data on Uyghur communications.94 However, the state’s intrusion
into private lives has also gone beyond such obvious means of electronic surveillance.
In rural areas, for example, the tracking of private lives has even involved essentially
pairing local party officials with specific families to, according to the official Global
Times newspaper, “take the party’s teachings to the grassroots” and “to fend off separat-
ism, extremism.”95 These officials are called upon to regularly visit these families, eat with
them, and even stay at their houses as a means of keeping track of their attitudes and
activities. In other instances, the state is calling on citizens to monitor and report on
each other. According to one report from Khotan, the government advertised in a local
newspaper that it is offering up to five million Yuan ($730,000) for “inside operational
information” on actual planned terrorist attacks along with lesser rewards for reporting
on extremists and potential terrorists. According to the advertisement, the smallest of
these rewards, 2000 Yuan ($260), is for reporting on “face coverings and robes, youth
with long beards, or other popular religious customs that have been radicalized.”96
92
Leibold and Zenz 2016.
93
94
95
Hui 2018.
96
Martina 2017.
Human Rights Watch has suggested that these various means of electronic, biological,
and human surveillance are aggregated by the Public Security Bureau in the region to
establish a “predictive policing” program that is intended to flag those who may be a secur-
ity concern in the future.97 At the center of this system of predictive policing is an appar-
ently extensive database on Uyghurs that is known as the “Integrated Joint Operations
Platform”.98 While it remains unknown if all of the above means of surveillance contribute
to the data in this system, the potential exists to create an all-encompassing means of
accounting for the Uyghur citizens of the PRC, including not only their record of beha-
viors, but also their thoughts and beliefs as gleaned from their contributions to social
media, their history of electronic communications, their physical appearance, and their
reported interactions with peers.
This unprecedented degree of surveillance creates a situation where virtually every
movement, correspondence, and human interaction of Uyghurs is monitored, recorded,
and potentially disaggregated to the level of the individual, who can then be asked to
answer for his or her activities. While this system of mass surveillance remains limited
by the inability for real-time human monitoring of all that is recorded, it creates a situation
akin to the Panopticon prison described by Michel Foucault, where every move a person
makes and every word he or she says is possibly monitored, rendering an environment
where “the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its
action.”99 Even more alarmingly, in some ways, this system goes beyond the traditional
Panopticon prison and the potential for state control of its population imagined by Fou-
cault due to the ability to record and store information about individual Uyghurs that may
not be monitored by actual humans in real-time. Thus, this surveillance has the ability not
only to predict future disloyalty, but also to remain with individuals into the foreseeable
future, allowing for post-facto punishments of past transgressions.
While these various means of surveillance and control are presumably aimed at iden-
tifying and limiting the impact of those Uyghurs that the Party views as disloyal to the
state, the actual impact on Uyghurs inside China is far broader. In effect, these measures
are applied to all Uyghurs, suggesting that they are all potential suspects of terrorist
activity or of sympathy with such activity. Thus, while previous counter-terrorism
efforts have primarily impacted the lives of religious Uyghurs or of those who may
express secular dissent, the measures adopted under Chen have more explicitly targeted
the entire population with severe ramifications for even many of those who have
sought to demonstrate loyalty to the state and to integrate into the PRC as much as
possible.
The most obvious indication of this wider targeting of the ethnic group writ large,
including those declaring loyalty to the state, is that the counter-terrorism measures
since 2016 have also included increased scrutiny of the work of ethnic Uyghur government
officials. This scrutiny of Uyghur state officials has been articulated as a purge of “two-
faced” people (两面人) who appear to be fighting terrorism while actually sympathizing
with it.100 In Khotan, for example, a report notes that ninety-seven cadres were punished
for failing to report on key terrorist suspects in their area, under-reporting the number of
97
98
Ibid.
99
Foucault 1977, 201.
100
Reuters 2017.
250 S. R. ROBERTS
people attending the local mosque, and not reporting on life cycle rituals (such as naming
ceremonies, circumcisions, and weddings) conducted outside officially designated
locations.101 In another incident in Khotan, a Uyghur official was punished for refusing
to smoke in front of a group of elder men, a behavior that his inspectors viewed as “extre-
mist.”102 While these efforts to weed out “two-faced” officials initially appeared to target
lower-level officials in densely Uyghur-populated regions like Khotan, they have recently
expanded to target more prominent Uyghur officials as well prominent businessmen and
intellectuals. In January 2018, for example, four of the wealthiest businessmen in the city of
Kashgar were allegedly arrested on counts of “religious extremism,” and a month later the
president of the region’s largest university was purged from his position and allegedly
detained.103
If such targeting of prominent Uyghurs demonstrates how far the counter-terrorism
efforts currently underway in the region have departed from their supposed goal of iden-
tifying and punishing potential terrorists, it is the on-going operation of mass extra-judi-
cial detention camps around the region that reflects how far these efforts have gone toward
targeting all ethnic Uyghurs. First first established in early 2017 as “Counter-Extremism
Training Schools” (去极端化培训班), Human Rights Watch notes that officials now
mostly refer to these camps as “Education and Transformation Training Centers” (教育
转化培训中心).104 Given the political sensitivity surrounding these camps, there have
been very few first-hand accounts of the activities inside them. However, some reports
from local media sources as well as a few accounts in international sources provide a
partial picture of who has been interned in the camps as well as the activities to which
they are subjected inside them.
Chinese media sources suggest that party cadres are also stationed at these camps and
interact with the detainees, and the Xinjiang Daily newspaper has written that they are
“just like a boarding high school … except the content of learning is different.”105
Despite their depiction as schools, these are neither voluntary nor intended exclusively
for youth. Rather, according to Human Rights Watch, local authorities have forcibly
sent thousands of Uyghurs and other local Muslims of all ages to these camps under suspi-
cion of political disloyalty to the PRC.106 As a local police officer told Radio Free Asia,
Five kinds of suspicious people have been detained and sent to education camps: people who
throw away their mobile phone’s SIM card or did not use their mobile phone after registering
it; former prisoners already released from prison; blacklisted people; “suspicious people” who
have some fundamental religious sentiment; and the people who have relatives abroad.107
Furthermore, in one recent account from the journal Foreign Policy, a Uyghur who had
been studying in the U.S. reports that his experience in what appears to be one of these
camps was much more like a prison than a school.108 He describes being assigned to a
dingy and crowded room with nineteen other Uyghurs that was equipped with a single
101
Gan 2017b.
102
Associated Press 2017.
103
Radio Free Asia 2018a and 2018b.
104
Human Rights Watch 2017b.
105
106
107
108
Special Correspondent 2018.
light bulb, a single large platform bed, and a toilet and sink.109 He further details being
subjected to a monotonous and regimented daily routine that included meager meals,
hours of forced marching, and hours of watching propaganda films about the signs and
negative impact of extremism.110
No official information has been released about the numbers of Uyghurs interned in
these camps, and estimates have ranged from 100,000 to 500,000 and even 800,000.111
That said, it is evident that the numbers are very large indeed and that the Uyghurs in
the camps come from all walks of life, including many who have long sought to avoid poli-
tics and religion entirely. In other words, the internment effort is mass and targets the
Uyghurs as a people rather than a clear profile of those the state is likely to suspect of ter-
rorism. As one state official from Kashgar reportedly articulated the camps’ goals in this
regard at a public meeting, “you can’t uproot all the weeds hidden among the crops in the
field one by one – you need to spray chemicals to kill them all; re-educating these people is
like spraying chemicals on the crops … that is why it is a general re-education, not limited
to a few people.”112
As such, these camps reflect perhaps the clearest example of how the PRC’s counter-
terrorism policies toward the Uyghurs since 2016 have taken on an exclusionary character
that verges on characterizing them as Homo Sacer, outside civilized society and the pro-
tection of the law. Giorgio Agamben, who first brought the concept of Homo Sacer into
the parlance of modern philosophy, has suggested that the totalitarian states of the twen-
tieth century designated Homo Sacer through the ultimate technology of biopower – the
concentration camp.113 While the mass internment camps that have been established
throughout the XUAR may not reflect the brutality of the well-known examples of con-
centration camps in the twentieth century, they share a similar mass character and the
common purpose of isolating or quarantining a specific population within the polity.
In short, the measures presently being employed in the XUAR to control the Uyghur
population are unprecedented and represent an all-encompassing approach that has
shifted from a focus on targeting dangerous Uyghurs to one that seeks to control the
entire ethnic group as a virtual biological threat to the body of society. The various
means of quarantining, monitoring, intimidating, and influencing the behavior of
Uyghurs have essentially excluded Uyghurs from normal PRC society. While there
remain Uyghur state officials and wealthy Uyghur businessmen with highly placed Han
contacts who appear to be above scrutiny, this group is quickly shrinking in number. Fur-
thermore, even these privileged Uyghurs who may escape open scrutiny still must daily go
through the multitude of checkpoints and metal detectors in the region, have their cell
phones examined, and have their daily movements recorded by cameras with facial recog-
nition. As a result, it is likely that even these people feel increasingly isolated in PRC
society and aware of their vulnerability as members of an ethnic group suspected of
terrorism.
Furthermore, this sense of exclusion is not only cultivated by the state, but it is
reinforced in the attitudes of the majority Han population in the country, who have
109
110
111
See Human Rights Watch 2017b, Millward 2018, Special Correspondent 2018.
112
Radio Free Asia 2018a.
113
Agamben 1998.
252 S. R. ROBERTS
been fed a healthy media diet of sensational news about Uyghur terrorism. Since the 2008
Olympics, when much of the Han public began to perceive of Uyghur terrorism as a viable
threat, observers have reported a noticeable increase in disdain for both Islam and
Uyghurs within China’s larger population.114 This fear and disdain is partly a reaction
to actual violence that has been perpetrated by Uyghurs, particularly during the 2009
Urumqi riots as well as in the attacks of 2013 and 2014 in Beijing and Kunming respect-
ively, but it is also fostered by the PRC’s own media promotion of the threat of Uyghur
terrorism and its association of this threat with both the Uyghur ethnicity and Islam.
As state action to control Uyghurs has increased so has the prevalence of such media.
While some Uyghurs continue to seek paths of accommodation, learning Mandarin,
studying and working in other regions of China, and forging friendships with Han in
this environment, increasingly they find it virtually impossible to actually integrate into
PRC society where they have become shunned. In many ways, this result is contrary to
the aims of the state, which appears to still be trying to assimilate Uyghurs to the
PRC’s Han-centric civic culture. However, it is also a result that was pregnant in the
state’s decision to brand Uyghurs as terrorists in the context of the GWOT, a war the
essence of which is biopolitical.
Conclusion: the consequences of the biopolitics of China’s war on terror

The present situation of Uyghurs in China is a direct result of almost two decades of the
state’s increasingly oppressive counter-terrorism campaigns. As this article’s review of
these campaigns and the policies behind them suggests, over time they demonstrate a
gradual shift in the PRC’s approach toward Uyghurs from one that sought to integrate
them into a Han-centered society while suppressing dissent to a virtual quarantine of
the entire ethnic group. The decision to label Uyghurs as a terrorist threat was central
to this process. As in many countries engaged in “wars on terror,” in China the terrorist
label has come to represent a virtual biological threat to the social order. This is a threat to
the health of the organism it imagines as China’s “harmonious society,” a threat that can
only be mitigated by quarantine or elimination.
However, it is unlikely that Uyghurs can be either fully quarantined or eliminated
peacefully. As I have argued elsewhere, the increasing exclusion of Uyghurs within the
XUAR has also been the driving force in the recent creation of a viable Uyghur militant
movement in Syria.115 Almost all of the Uyghurs now in Syria left the PRC illegally via
Southeast Asia after the post-riot crackdown in 2009. While they likely did not leave
the country with the intention of joining militant groups, they did leave the country
under duress and with a sense that their identity and religion was under siege from the
state. As a result, they were vulnerable to recruitment into militant groups claiming to
fight against the enemies of Islam.
While there are no confirmed statistics of the number of Uyghurs in Syria as of 2017, it
is likely that, together with their families, they number in the low thousands.116 Although
114
See Shih 2017a.
115
See Roberts, forthcoming.
116
The Syrian Ambassador to the PRC recently claimed that over 5000 Uyghurs were fighting in Syria’s civil war, and a report
from the Israeli Foreign Ministry has suggested that the number was over 3000. See The Japan News 2017; The New Arab
2017.
little concrete information is available about the intentions of these Uyghur fighters in
Syria, they may eventually turn their attention back to their homeland. Indeed, the one
Uyghur refugee whom I interviewed in Turkey who had fought in Syria suggested that
this was the reason most Uyghurs, including himself, had participated in the Syrian
civil war. As he said, “My goal was to return to China with knowledge of how to wage
war; I came not to stay in Istanbul, not to stay in Syria, but to learn weaponry and
return to fight for Eastern Turkistan.” Furthermore, an attack on the Chinese Embassy
in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan during the summer of 2016 by a Uyghur who had allegedly
fought in Syria suggests that some of these fighters are already turning their focus back
to symbols of the Chinese state.117
It is difficult to say whether the Uyghurs in Syria will ever find a way to return to their
homeland to wage an actual insurgency, but the fact that there now exist Uyghurs declar-
ing such an intention suggests that the number of such people within the XUAR may also
be growing, especially as they find themselves even more excluded from society now than
after 2009. While incidents of violence in the XUAR decreased dramatically during 2016
and 2017, recent history suggests that this brief moment of peace is likely temporary. In
the final analysis, the PRC may find that its branding of all Uyghurs as a terrorist
threat has not only undercut the goal of integrating Uyghurs into its Han-centric
society, but also has facilitated a self-fulfilling prophecy – the creation of a viable
Uyghur militant insurgency like the one it has long claimed to face.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Sean R. Roberts is the Director of International Development Studies and an Associate Professor of
Practice at The George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs in Washing-
ton, DC. He has a Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Southern California
where he wrote his dissertation on the Uyghurs of Kazakhstan. He frequently publishes on the
Uyghurs of both China and Central Asia, and he is presently writing a book-length manuscript
on the self-fulfilling prophecy of Uyghur militancy.
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Critical Asian Studies

ISSN: 1467-2715 (Print) 1472-6033 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rcra20

The biopolitics of China’s “war on terror” and the

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The biopolitics of China’s “war on terror” and the exclusion of

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

Excluding undesirables: the biopolitics of GWOT and the making of

Uyghurs’ transition from separatists to terrorists and the early years of

The Olympics, the Urumqi riots, and the beginnings of exclusion

The escalating cycle of repression-violence-repression and the

Welcome to the Panopticon: quarantining the Uyghurs since 2016

In terms of the limitations on Uyghurs’ mobility, in October 2016, the authorities

Conclusion: the consequences of the biopolitics of China’s war on terror

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