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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