How China’s ‘Xinjiang Model’ emulates US, UK and Israeli counter-insurgency strategies

Author: Darren Byler (Note 1)

This article was originally published in Made in China Journal, and our translation is based on the reprint by Lausan Collective .

One day in May 2017, a Kazakh woman was detained in Urumqi, the capital of the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region (Note 2). The woman is a Chinese citizen who may have visited Kazakhstan or have relatives there. She may have joined a Quran study group on WeChat. She may not even know which "tiny clue" of her potential "extremism" led to her detention . Regardless, when she was detained, a scan of her phone revealed she had been in contact with a Uyghur woman in Kazakhstan.

To curry favor with the interrogators, whose first priority was catching "returning terrorists," she made a phone call to the woman in Almaty. She told the woman, Gulbahar Jelilova, that her mother, Gulbahar's partner in cross-border trade, was in the hospital, so Gulbahar Jelilova Hal needed to cross the border to Urumqi to pick up the goods she had ordered for export to Kazakhstan. At first, Gulbahar was skeptical because she had heard about the mass internments of Uyghurs, indigenous peoples, and other minority groups in Xinjiang that had begun earlier that year, but because She knew her partner had a heart condition and thought maybe the story of the illness was true. Since she was a Kazakh citizen born in Kazakhstan, despite being Uyghur, she thought she had nothing to worry about.

The morning after arriving in Urumqi, she realized how wrong her judgment had been. she says:

"At 8 a.m., the police knocked on my door. They showed their badges and said they had some questions for me. I thought they really just wanted to ask a few questions, so I just followed them. (without trying to resist). As soon as we got to the police station they checked my phone. When they couldn't find anything they showed me a picture of my friend and asked me if I knew her. Then I realized they had Detained my friend. They found my phone number in her phone and forced her daughter to call me. Then they accused me of sending 17,000 yuan to Turkey. I said, why did I do this? They Say, 'Take your time and think it over.'"

As it turns out, Gulbahar had plenty of time to think about it all. For the next year, three months and ten days, she was held in a series of detention centers in Urumqi. People suspected of having potential ties to terrorism are investigated in these "black site" detention centres, where conditions are appalling. She shared a 14-square-meter cell with more than 30 other Turkic Muslim women, who were forced to take turns sleeping due to insufficient space to stretch out. The lights never went out. Their movements and words were recorded by cameras and microphones .

Gulibahar does not understand Chinese, but she learned to say "thank you" and "arrive", and also learned to sing the national anthem "March of the Volunteers." Every day, she watches political speeches on a television monitor mounted high on the wall. This was her "re-education" during her detention. The interrogator showed her a brand new Chinese ID card and asked her to memorize the new 18-digit ID number. They told her that she was no longer Gulibahar Gililova, that she was now a Chinese citizen and that she should admit to her crimes.

They told her that she was no longer Gulibahar Gililova, that she was now a Chinese citizen and that she should admit to her crimes.

Gulbahar was involved in a "re-education" system that explicitly targeted Uyghurs and other indigenous and ethnic minorities in "Xinjiang" (Note 3). She is one of as many as 1.5 million people who show "early warning" signs of terrorism. This preventive law enforcement system is based on the counterinsurgency model that emerged in the United States, Israel, and Europe, but adapted to fit the “Chinese characteristics” of China’s Maoist past. Together, these models and technologies created a coercive internment camp system, enforced by more than a million non-Muslim civil servants and police officers (see Byler 2018; see also Yi Xiaocuo's paper on the ordinariness of prison colonization in Xinjiang). The project is supported by a comprehensive, AI-assisted biometric and digital surveillance system.

China’s repression of rebellion is unprecedented due to its massive internment and use of related technologies. It's like the U.S. war in Iraq, but without organized, armed insurgents and mass killings; it's a clearly targeted "Countering Violent Extremism" (CVE) program with dedicated Internment camps and state-run boarding schools were built. It transformed counterinsurgency in order to produce a new form of contemporary settler colonialism. This political and physical structure of colonialism isolated Uighurs, Kazakhs, and other indigenous and minority communities, depriving them of their land and remaining social institutions, including their languages, beliefs, families, and cultural traditions . This system, characterized by modern technology-assisted law enforcement, produced a racialized relationship of domination between the state and colonizers over their lives.

Global changes in rebel repression

The experience of Gulibahar Gililova and others in her social circle points to broader shifts taking place in the police and detention regimes in northwest China, and in counterinsurgency around the world. As David Brophy 2019 shows, since 2014 the Chinese authorities have adopted forms of Islamophobia and counter-insurgency militarism similar to those in the United States and other countries after 9/11. Similar to the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan in the mid-2000s, Chinese police have transformed “Xinjiang” into a space of exception — a counterinsurgency war zone populated by militant Militants are thought to be hiding among the “neutral population” (Harcourt 2018).

In the U.S. case, the only way to detect and eliminate these hidden terrorists is through a full-spectrum intelligence system that includes all residents of the war zone. Once information advantage is gained, insurgent networks can be tracked and disrupted through a process of removal and isolation. The final step in implementing counterinsurgency is to win the “hearts and minds” of the target population through the provision of humanitarian aid, infrastructure development and vocational training. This was envisioned to legitimize and solidify “regime change.”

A key element of the U.S. experiment in Iraq and Afghanistan was the creation of a "human terrain system." At its peak, the system employed 27 teams of social scientists, specializing in Islam, Arabic or Pashto and Dari, entering people's homes as participant observers to map social relations in Iraq and Afghanistan. map, creating a database that records population communities and ideologies (Kelly et al. 2010). This process, what geographer Derek Gregory (2008) calls “armed social work,” is thought to produce a network of knowledge that anticipates insurgent threats. Ethnographic research can help target insurgent leaders within networks, allowing for their selective removal and incarceration. By 2008, the largest of these camps, Camp Bucca, housed as many as 18,000 prisoners, including future Islamic State (IS) leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi ).

Since 2016, a similar system has been established in Xinjiang (Mahmut 2019). Unlike Afghanistan or Iraq, there is no organized armed insurgency in "Xinjiang," yet Uyghurs and other indigenous and ethnic minority groups in Xinjiang are labeled in similar ways as "potential terrorists." Chinese authorities have used "enhanced interrogation" techniques similar to many used by the Bush administration. An important difference, however, is that the Chinese government views almost all forms of Turkic Islamic practice as a manifestation of psychological illness and strives to achieve this through psychiatric treatment, language education, political indoctrination, and training in a system of camps far more extensive than those in Iraq or Afghanistan. forced factory labor to convert Muslims (Grose 2019).

In Xinjiang, the police are not trying to create regime change, and state institutions are fully under their control. There's more here. Like colonial settlement systems around the world (Wolfe 2006), they sought to create profound cognitive and social cleansing by detaining and retraining entire populations . This is achieved through increasingly stringent nested biometric and digital surveillance checkpoints – culminating in the tight restrictions of camps and prisons . All Uyghurs, aborigines and ethnic minorities in "Xinjiang" are imprisoned to varying degrees in "open air prisons" (sirttiki türme) in their communities.

Transforming the Western Framework

As early as 2007, China's state media and police ideologues began to notice the shift in U.S. militarism, when concerns Discussions of the "Petraeus Doctrine, " a new counterinsurgency manual named after General David Petraeus, signaled a shift in global military science (Yang 2007). Over the next few years, scholars at elite police academies across China began studying counterinsurgency theory, first as practiced by the U.S. military, and then as Israel adapted it and used technological aids (Lu and Cao 2014). In less than ten years, this new theoretical paradigm has been put into practice in "Xinjiang".

The impetus behind this shift from academic research to policy implementation came largely from the tragic events in Beijing and Kunming in 2013 and 2014. The first incident occurred on October 28, 2013, when a Uyghur attacker and his family drove into a crowd of tourists in Tiananmen Square; the second incident occurred on March 1, 2014. This incident is often referred to as " China’s 9/11—several Uyghur attackers killed dozens of Han travelers at Kunming Railway Station (Doyon 2018). Within a year, new forms of policing observed in Palestine, Afghanistan, and Iraq were brought together in a series of NSFC police theory projects, such as the "Community Policing Counter-Terrorism Model with Chinese Characteristics" (Lowe 2017). .

This new model of Chinese policing emphasizes "prevention" through "preemption" and one of its leaders is Cao Xuefei, a young scholar from Shenyang. While Cao Xuefei was studying for a PhD in police science and counter-terrorism at Charles Sturt University in Australia, he and his colleague Lu Peng co-published an influential article discussing the implications of Israeli counter-insurgency theory for counter-terrorism in "Xinjiang".

Cao Xuefei, who was still studying for a doctorate in police science and counter-terrorism at the time, published an influential article discussing the implications of Israel’s counter-insurgency theory for counter-terrorism in “Xinjiang”.

As his thinking continued to deepen, Cao Xuefei and another colleague translated the book "Policing Terrorism" written by CVE expert David Lowe (2017). The award-winning Chinese translation of the book provides an "empirical basis" for China's counterterrorism operations against the Islamic State (IS), which many suspect is linked to attacks on Uighurs in Beijing and Kunming. Lowe's book analyzes the means by which IS affiliates in the UK "radicalize and recruit people to their cause" and highlights the "key" methods of gathering intelligence through surveillance and the use of community informants.

In an article published in the summer of 2016, Chinese policing theorists Ji Yantao and Yin Wei set out to explain how this shift in policing should be adapted to the Chinese context, emphasizing the need to move away from "passive reaction" prevention. Ji Yantao and Yin Wei believe that this new police model should be used to supplement the previous militarized "intervention" and "strike and strict punishment" that were typical in the "Xinjiang" "strike hard" campaign.

However, while they recommended broader action, they were still careful to point out that terrorism in China is rooted in social causes such as "educational, religious, ethnic and economic factors" and is "not directly related to the number of police personnel" (Ji , Yin 2016, p. 144). The party's stance echoes that of CVE advocates around the world , who claim that the Uyghurs' propensity for terrorism is due to their social and cultural systems, without acknowledging the role of police violence and colonial rule . They advocate a shift in the focus of counterterrorism to "preemptive strikes" achieved by civilian intelligence workers. The core concept of this model is "prevention," a word Ji Yantao and Yin Wei repeated 58 times in their 12-page paper.

Chinese policing theorists claim that Uyghurs are prone to terrorism due to their social and cultural systems, without acknowledging the role of police violence and colonial rule.

From their perspective, prevention consists of three interrelated areas: “combative prevention,” “control prevention,” and “protective prevention.” Combat prevention refers to “real-time control of key high-risk populations” (Ji and Yin 2016, p. 150), such as returning terrorist suspects like Gulibahar. Targeting those Uyghurs who have lived in Muslim-majority environments abroad and for whom information is publicly available, especially those with evidence linking them to other suspects, requires "proactive and preemptive strikes."

Once terrorism suspects are detained, they are placed on "controlled precaution" status. In this case, for those who do not have sufficient clues or evidence to show that they have terrorist intentions, "control" measures will be implemented to reduce the possibility of them committing crimes and eliminate their unfavorable behaviors and thoughts. The third form is protective prevention, which refers to preventing the breeding and spread of terrorist ideas among the people through comprehensive intelligence collection and intervention.

In stark contrast to counterinsurgency outside China, all intelligence gathering occurs through communities , state-directed neighborhood watch units in urban areas, or through village-level brigades , a form of law enforcement promoted by party organizations at the most grassroots level. . In "Xinjiang," communities are often made up of party members - overwhelmingly Han - and the police, who also employ Uyghur auxiliary police and mostly Han volunteer intelligence officers, who are mobilized through weekly quotas on intelligence reports. Counterterrorism .

Although China's community enforcement draws on European and American anti-terrorism discourses, Ji Yantao and Yin Wei believe that "the people" must feel pressure to report their neighbors to fill blind spots in the intelligence system. This community enforcement is implemented by monitoring the Muslim population for 75 signs of Islamic "extremist" behavior, including going to mosques, studying the Quran and using the common greeting "Asalaam Alaykum." Unsanctioned religious knowledge and practice and relationships with other suspects are of particular concern. Unlike counterinsurgency outside of China, each state-run surveillance unit is supported by a civilian police station and monitors surveillance through video surveillance, digital media history searches, biometric tracking, and manual surveillance during coercive political activities . “Seamless” surveillance of people within its jurisdiction (Zhang 2016).

When Ji and Yin wrote in 2016, the "re-education camps" in Xinjiang had not yet been fully completed, and the purge of indigenous and ethnic minority societies such as Uyghurs and Kazakhs had not yet begun. Less than a year later, the 1.5 million Uyghurs and other members of indigenous and ethnic minorities in Gulbahar and "Xinjiang" began to be pushed into these "preventive" areas and subjected to the various forms of social abuse that came with it. Clean.

“Xinjiang Model”

In November 2016, a new article appeared written by Wang Ding and Shan Dan, theorists from the local police academy in “Xinjiang.” The author believes that the preventive policing model proposed by other police theorists needs to be adjusted under a clear "Xinjiang model", which can not only convert religion, but also promote the "deep integration" of Turkic ethnic minorities and Chinese culture. They wrote that this new model would combine the full range of intelligence "war mode" used by the US military with a "criminal mode" aimed at eradicating the root causes of terrorism, namely "extremist" religious ideologies. Combined. These two models of preventive policing will be combined with a “governance model” focused on “restoring social order to normalcy.”

But what exactly is the “normality” of social order that Wang and Shan mentioned? As they say: "In contemporary times, religion without 'culture' has no future" (Wang and Shan 2016, p. 25). This is why they believe that the process of "deep integration" of Chinese culture in "Xinjiang" must be accelerated, and this process is actually the most prominent feature of the "Xinjiang model" of counter-terrorism. They believe that these adjusted counter-terrorism methods are necessary due to the special environment of "Xinjiang". Because as a border area that has not yet been completely settled by Han immigrants, the local population generally lacks market integration.

But the deeper issue is still religion, which, as Wang and Shan said, is a "personality issue." The only solution to the problem, they wrote, was to prevent people from being "brainwashed" by an "illiterate" religion. The implication is that because Turkic Muslims seriously lack "culture", and the word "culture" clearly refers to "Chinese culture", the "deep integration" of Chinese culture in "Xinjiang" must be accelerated .

The implication is that because Turkic Muslims seriously lack "culture", and the word "culture" clearly refers to "Chinese culture", the "deep integration" of Chinese culture in "Xinjiang" must be accelerated.

Because Islam has been deeply integrated into the way of life of people in "Xinjiang," Wang and Shan believe that Turkic Muslims need to relearn almost every aspect of their lives. The only way to truly do this is to involve all non-Muslims in the region in the process. They believe that people with Chinese culture need to "occupy the public opinion position, cultural position and network platform" in the entire "Xinjiang" society (Wang and Shan 2016, p. 26). In this article, they allude to the need to displace Uyghur and other indigenous and ethnic minority cultural leaders through the full implementation of settler colonial measures . Only in this way can all kinds of unstable factors be nipped in the bud.

By mid-2017, much of what these scholars had advocated had been put into practice when Gulibahar Gililova was lured back to Xinjiang as a suspected “returning terrorist.” Like thousands of others, she was targeted for "sex prevention" arrests. From that point on, she was placed on "controlled precaution" until she was eventually released on "protective precaution." Although she was found innocent of anything other than being a Uyghur and a Muslim, the "Xinjiang-style" counterinsurgency turned her life upside down.

community as prison

In counterinsurgency warfare, those with the least power in society suffer the most. According to independent researchers from the Iraq Body Count (IBC), the number of recorded civilian deaths in Iraq since 2003 has reached nearly 200,000 (IBC 2019). In Afghanistan, U.S. forces and their allies have killed more civilians than the Taliban (Zucchino 2019). These deaths, combined with the knock-on effect of widespread disruption of social life through surveillance and purges, have created enormous forms of violence by breaking social networks and tearing families apart. The pain caused by counterterrorism is passed down from generation to generation by those who survive and spread throughout entire communities (Al-Mohammad 2016).

As Arun Kundani and Ben Hayes (2018) point out, in Europe and North America, Muslim communities are asked to bear the brunt of the social violence associated with CVE programs . Families, mosques, employers and teachers are tasked with assessing whether their friends, relatives and students are “preparatory offenders”. In the UK, as in China, extremism is “portrayed as a virus” and, contrary to empirical evidence, religious ideology is cited as the main cause of violence (Kundani and Hayes 2018). Without considering the role of structural violence, colonialism, and institutionalized Islamophobia, Muslims and those racialized as Muslims—especially those who practice their faith in public— are simply assumed to be latent terrorist .

Yet despite all these similarities, it is important to note that in liberal societies, civil rights and free speech can serve as a bulwark against mass extrajudicial detention and death. This is not the case in Iraq and Afghanistan. This is not the case in China either. As one local official in Xinjiang recently said , what happens to Uyghurs and other indigenous and ethnic minorities “has nothing to do with human rights violations. Uyghurs have no rights.” (ITV 2019) This statement is inconsistent with China’s common interpretation of human rights. It coincides: Human rights mean the rights of most Han people to be free from terrorism (Liu 2019). This in turn means they have the right to be free from fear of Uyghurs and other indigenous and ethnic minority groups, the only populations in China listed as terrorists.
The procedural violence Gulibahar Gililova faced was greatly reduced by the relative privileges of her Kazakh citizenship. Without citizenship, she would still be subject to some form of detention like thousands of others. Racialized religious discrimination, invasion of privacy, political censorship, disappearances, detention without due process, and lack of individual and collective autonomy have become institutionalized in Xinjiang. For most Uyghur, Kazakh, indigenous and ethnic minority communities, their detention remains unpredictable. Their neighborhoods themselves have become their prisons.

Note:

(1) Darren Byler is an anthropologist who focuses on China’s Han settlement colonial plan in Xinjiang, as well as its mass incarceration, forced labor, and cultural genocide of Turkic Muslims and other ethnic minorities. This article was first published in Made in China Journal in October 2019. The original title was "Preventative Policing as Community Detention in Northwest China" . Our translation is based on Liu Umbrella ’s reprint of this article. Translated with the authorization of the author and Liu Umbrella.

(2) Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, also known as "Xinjiang", "Northwest China", "East Turkestan", "Uighuria", "Ili (Ghulja)", " Tarbagai", "Altay", "Dzungarstan and Altishahr" or "Dzungaria and the Tarim Basin Region", below Referred to as "Xinjiang". "Xinjiang", which can be understood as "new territory", "new border" and "new frontline" in Chinese, is a highly controversial concept. This concept first appeared in the Qianlong period in the 18th century. Later, Zuo Zongtang reoccupied the area in the mid-to-late 19th century, and the name began to be officially used.

(3) Uyghurs are the group most affected by China’s large-scale internment and surveillance in Xinjiang, but other indigenous peoples or minority groups are also affected to a similar extent. Therefore, like Liu Umbrella, we changed “Uyghurs and Turkic Muslim groups” in the original text to “Uyghurs, indigenous peoples and ethnic minority groups”. As Han Chinese or third persons, we hope to convey the breadth and complexity of how the CCP’s mass surveillance and arrests impact different groups by using the most accurate terms possible. This is the first step in decolonial practice.