Demanding an End to Uyghur Oppression – Jacobin magazine

China initially conquered the Uyghur homeland in the mid-eighteenth century and ruled it as a dependency for a century, before being pushed out by local revolts in the 1860s.

You only see the type of colonialism usually associated with European states in the late nineteenth century. The Qing Dynasty conquered the region again in the 1880s and began a civilizing mission which included Han settlement. By most accounts it was a failure and the Qing Dynasty fell in 1911, followed by a fragile Republican government that inherited the Qing Territory. Throughout this period, the region was loosely controlled by Han governors who had tenuous relationships with the central authorities and ran it as their own little feudal empire.

After the Chinese Revolution in 1949, it was unclear what was going to happen to the region. It could have ended up like the Mongolian Peoples Republic, an independent Soviet satellite state. But eventually it was folded into the Peoples Republic of China [PRC].

Since 1949 there has always been a drive by the PRC to integrate this region, but there hasnt always been the capacity to do so. Initially, it tried the Soviet model of coopting local elites and governing through them. That ended in failure by the late 1950s, and then you had a series of chaotic mass social campaigns under Mao that didnt allow the state to focus on this region in particular.

It was only in the early 1980s that the state really started thinking, How do we incorporate this region into China? and, How do we define our nation? Is it a multicultural nation? A nation-state?

There were a lot of very progressive ideas in the Chinese Communist Party generally and a lot of this affected the Uyghur region positively, including discussions about whether the region should have more substantive autonomy, more of a role for local peoples in governing and so on. But that began to end with the Tiananmen Square Massacre and, in particular, the fall of the Soviet Union.

From that time onward, the CCP began to look at what happened to the Soviet Union and determine how to prevent that from happening to China. They wrongly identified ethnic self-determination as one of the causes of the fall of the Soviet Union and started targeting any signs of a desire for self-determination which throughout the 1990s, they referred to as separatism.

So the settler colonial process only really begins in the 90s, which makes it much less drawn out than it seems if youre first talking about this region becoming a part of modern China in the mid-eighteenth century.

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Demanding an End to Uyghur Oppression - Jacobin magazine