Sheena Greitens on Understanding China’s Policies in Xinjiang

In a recent article for International Security, a peer-reviewed journal, Sheena Greitens, Myunghee Lee, and Emir Yazici examine the change of Chinese state policy in Xinjiang that led to the internment of 1 to 3 million people in the region. Greitens spoke to The Diplomat’s Ankit Panda about their findings, the impact of “war on terror” rhetoric, and why it’s important to engage with the arguments put forth by the Chinese government – namely, counterterrorism – to explain the policies that have draw widespread international criticism. 

Tell our readers a little bit about the core argument of your article. 

Over the course of 2017–18, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) crackdown on Uyghur and other Muslim minorities in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) generated increasing international scrutiny.  A reported 1 to 3 million people have been detained in a large network of recently-constructed camps, where they must undergo forced re-education and political indoctrination. PRC authorities have also put increasing pressure on Uyghur diaspora networks, increasing surveillance and pressure to repatriate to China.  

Most explanations for what’s happened focus on domestic factors in Xinjiang itself: political violence and contention involving China’s Uyghur population; the CCP’s turn toward a more assimilationist “second-generation” minority policy, and the leadership of Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region party secretary Chen Quanguo. These factors are important for understanding the overall security buildup and repression in Xinjiang. We believe that to explain the strategy shift that occurred in early 2017, however, there’s one additional factor that should be considered: the CCP’s belief that they had to prevent the threat of terrorism from diffusing back into China from outside the country.

That belief came from a couple of sources. First, emerging contacts between Uyghurs and Islamic militant organizations in Southeast Asia and the Middle East in 2014-2016 drew increasing attention from the CCP.  Second, following Xi Jinping’s promulgation of the “comprehensive security” framework in mid-2014, the CCP concluded that large swathes of the population were more vulnerable to jihadist infiltration than they’d previously thought. They compared it to a virus: even people who showed no sign of ill health could be “infected” by an extremist virus unless they were “inoculated.” So targeting diaspora networks aimed to cut off a likely vector by which the CCP believed terrorist threats could re-enter China, while detention and re-education were supposed to “inoculate” the population from “infection.”

Did Chinese leaders learn from how the West has handled transnational terrorism in the post-9/11 era? Just how serious, in your estimation, was the transnational terrorism challenge in Xinjiang? 

China’s rhetoric about Central Asia’s Uyghur diaspora began to shift during the “war on terror” that followed the attacks of September 11, 2001. Instead of emphasizing pan-Turkic separatism, the CCP drew connections between Uyghur organizations and jihadist groups, especially those in Afghanistan and Pakistan. 

The capabilities of these groups, and their actual connection to terrorist incidents in Xinjiang, are debated. Western scholars are largely skeptical: even the most generous estimates of Uyghur militant capability don’t imply that insurgency is either present or imminent. That’s important. But in 2014-16, contact between Uyghurs and some Islamic militant groups in Southeast Asia and the Middle East shifted from a wholly theoretical possibility to a nascent reality, albeit at a very low level. In 2015-16, we also saw statements from leaders of militant groups in the Middle East, including some affiliated with al Qaeda and Islamic State, suggesting a desire to target China. Leaked documents published in late 2019 by the New York Times quote Xi Jinping as saying, “East Turkestan’s terrorists who have received real-war training in Syria and Afghanistan could at any time launch terrorist attacks in Xinjiang.”    

We argue that this combination of external factors alarmed the CCP, and precipitated an escalation of detention, etc. in Xinjiang, to try to ensure that those ties wouldn’t develop further or extend back into Xinjiang.  That’s why we titled the article “preventive repression.” 

A range of reporting has suggested that between 1 to 3 million ethnic minorities have been detained in camps, leading to greater international scrutiny. When adopting these extreme tactics, do you reckon that the Communist Party underestimated the probable international blowback or that it simply decided the blowback would be worthwhile?

It’s not clear from what we could access how much blowback they anticipated. We say in the article that our sources do not allow us to definitively identify the CCP’s true underlying intentions in its policies toward Xinjiang. We do think it’s likely that parts of the Chinese party-state use the language of counterterrorism to try to deflect or reduce international pressure, but internal documents also appear to confirm the importance of a perceived terrorist risk in the minds of senior party leaders.  

It’s also clear that China has attempted to build an international coalition that will express support for its policies; when 22 countries sent a letter to the UN Human Rights Council asking China to change its policies, that letter was countered  by another one from 37 countries, defending the PRC’s “counter-terrorism, deradicalization and vocational training policies.”  

What are the main policy prescriptions for the United States and other governments critical of Chinese practices in Xinjiang from your research?

What we say in the article is that we should engage with the counterterrorism arguments that the CCP makes. We don’t, however, suggest that the U.S. or anyone else should uncritically accept those arguments. So I think our work leads, for example, to very different policy implications than the recent Foreign Affairs piece on China and counterterrorism.  

Our work suggests that the CCP may genuinely perceive that it faces an increased terrorist risk.  At the same time, however, we emphasize that the CCP’s approach to this issue has led to imprisonment and involuntary re-education of huge numbers of people who have shown no evidence of anything other than normal Uyghur cultural or Muslim religious practice.  (The whole metaphor of inoculation, ironically, makes that very clear.) It’s important that we continue to communicate to the people who have suffered from these policies that the U.S. and international community understand that China is targeting many innocent people who are not “terrorists.”  

Recent U.S. rhetoric has moved toward the phrase “it’s not counterterrorism.” I’m personally not sure that this is helpful. Arguing over whether this is a CT policy allows the CCP to replay graphic images of violence and use them to promote the narrative that Uyghurs are dangerous and only the CCP can hold the country together. 

I’d rather see democratic countries come together and say, “Maybe you do perceive a terrorist threat – but that’s really missing the point. Nothing about counterterrorism, including the international agreements you’ve signed onto, offers a moral blank check for human rights violations of the kind you’re carrying out in Xinjiang.” I also think we should be pointing out that indiscriminate repression commonly backfires – so even if all the CCP cares about is regime preservation, this is a strategy that poses very real risks to them. 

A couple of other points that come from the article. First, it would be helpful (for lots of reasons, China’s policies in Xinjiang among them) for the U.S. and other democracies to create an international solution to the problem of foreign fighters in Xinjiang that both addresses this as a real security issue for countries of origin, but is compatible with human rights (i.e., doesn’t repatriate people to countries where they will likely be persecuted). If China is truly concerned about the risk of returning fighters, then let’s address that risk, but do so in a way that’s fully compatible with human rights.  

Finally, we argue that China’s linking of international terrorism with policies of domestic repression poses an operational conundrum for countries that seek to collaborate with China on common terrorist threats. Mass internment of Chinese Muslims will likely make it harder, not easier, for many countries to justify and craft law enforcement and counterterrorism cooperation with the PRC. (Turkey’s criticism of China’s treatment of the Uyghurs is a recent example.) At the same time, however, if cutting off counterterrorism cooperation with China increases their own terrorist risk, countries that collaborate with China on these efforts will face significant and potentially difficult trade-offs. (This may be why countries that conduct significant counterterrorism cooperation with China were largely absent from the letters that adopted a public stance on Xinjiang.) If policymakers in the U.S. or elsewhere want those countries to act differently, they’ll have to craft solutions that realistically address the trade-offs and challenges those countries face.