So what's up with race? The Uyghurs in China

DW (English)

Racism research tends to focus on the US and Europe, although it’s also widespread in Asia. Like in China, where the Uyghur ethnic group has suffered many of the same experiences as indigenous peoples under colonialism. What is ‘state racism’?

Transcript

00:00Uyghur people were essentially criminalized en masse as terrorists.

00:06They never really came to grips with the idea that China is a diverse place.

00:11So what's up with race in China?

00:15In the same way that European empires were being built

00:19in the 18th and 19th centuries, China was doing the same thing at the same time.

00:25They conquered Xinjiang, which is now the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region,

00:30they conquered the Tibetan Plateau,

00:32and they ruled over these places in the same way that Europe ruled over its colonies.

00:39Traditionally, it has been an area where peoples from

00:43many different parts of Eurasia have moved through.

00:46That's Professor James A. Milward.

00:49His research focuses on Chinese history and the Xinjiang region.

00:53The Indic peoples, Indo-European-speaking peoples,

00:58Mongolian, Turkic-speaking peoples, as well as Chinese-speaking peoples.

01:03So it really is the center of the Silk Road.

01:06The Uyghurs have been adherents of many different religions over the centuries.

01:12But today they are mainly Turkic-speaking and culturally Muslim.

01:18That makes them different from the Han population of China.

01:23The Han are the largest ethnic group in China,

01:26with their own culture, traditions, and writing system.

01:31There's like 55 different minority nationalities in China,

01:35and all of them are compared on a number of levels to the Han Chinese majority of China,

01:42which is seen as like, you know, the typical and ideal representative of the Chinese state.

01:49That's Gerald Roche,

01:50a researcher whose area of expertise is colonialism and state racism.

01:55I work from a particular theoretical approach to racism

02:00that comes ultimately out of the work of Michel Foucault.

02:04He talks about race as the production of death by the state.

02:10More on that in a moment.

02:12But first, the Uyghurs living in the Xinjiang region.

02:15The Chinese state had these elaborate surveillance mechanisms.

02:20They sort of were collecting massive reams of data, biometric data,

02:24data from people's cell phones about their digital footprint,

02:28about their mobility patterns, where they went, who they met with, and things like this.

02:33They were aligning all of these different sort of indicators

02:37to suggest how likely it was that someone would pose a threat to the state

02:41as a terrorist or as a separatist.

02:44Without the basis of people necessarily having done anything

02:47that would be technically illegal in China,

02:50they would be detained simply on that basis.

02:54So you have this kind of complex algorithmic construct of race,

02:58which is in some ways independent of the physical body.

03:02They implemented very extreme policies of putting people in camps.

03:10They called them training centers or schools and things like this,

03:14but they were essentially prisons.

03:16And in that context, trying to retrain people to understand their own Chineseness.

03:24Many of these people who were thrown into the camps had children,

03:27and there were many women as well as men.

03:29So many families were separated.

03:31And to an extent we don't really know fully,

03:34but certainly tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of children

03:39were taken away from their families, taken away from their villages,

03:43were put into boarding schools.

03:45This is another very grim echo of colonial experience

03:49in the Americas and in Australia.

03:51Canada, the United States and Australia all had boarding schools

03:55designed to deracinate Native children,

03:58to make them forget their language, to forget their own culture,

04:01to keep them away from their own traditions

04:04and to turn them into little Christian children.

04:07It's thought that thousands of Indigenous children

04:10died in those Christian boarding schools.

04:12We don't know how many people have died in Chinese camps until now,

04:15but many experts believe the number is high.

04:18Racism manifests as the state's capacity to cause certain groups of people

04:26to be more likely to die prematurely.

04:29And indeed, we see this kind of empirically in a range of different contexts,

04:35where groups that are minoritized on the basis of race,

04:39in particular states, die younger than the average national life expectancy.

04:46So in Australia, for example, Indigenous people here

04:50die seven or eight years younger than the national average.

04:54In America, Black Americans die younger than the national average.

04:58And in India, Indigenous people and lower caste people

05:04die younger than the national average.

05:06This way of thinking about racism is different

05:09from kind of more standard public definitions of racism,

05:13which tend to look at race as kind of either incorrect beliefs in an individual.

05:21I think there's actually a direct connection in terms of ideas

05:26that have been floating around the world that have been shared.

05:29The logical connection goes like this.

05:33If one people, which is more powerful,

05:36perhaps has certain technological or military advantages,

05:40moves into the territory of another people

05:42and is displacing them and taking over their land or making them work for them,

05:46this is obviously what we call colonialism.

05:48In order to justify doing that,

05:50the more powerful people tends to come up with various stories that it tells itself.

05:55We are chosen by God.

05:57Or we are technologically superior.

06:00Or we're culturally superior.

06:02Or they are inferior.

06:04They need our help.

06:05Or they're savages.

06:07They need to be eliminated.

06:08All of these kinds of stories.

06:11But I think there's a danger if you suddenly say,

06:14Aha, look, Asians do it too.

06:16Aha, look, the Chinese are doing it too.

06:18Look, everyone does it.

06:19So it's not such a big deal.

06:21That's not the right way to approach this.

06:23We recognize the phenomena where it happens

06:25and then try to address it

06:27without lessening our own concerns about what happens in our own societies.

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