State of Terror: China’s Terrorism Against the Uyghurs
By: John A.
Tags: China, Government And Politics, Terrorism, Uyghur Muslims, Human Rights Violations

Last month, in this same publication, this author attempted to answer if America’s police killing of unarmed black men rose to the level of state terrorism. [1] But, if those senseless killings are not considered State terrorism, what could be?

China’s decade long oppression against the Uyghurs, an ethnoreligious group from Xinjiang province in western China, represents an interesting case study. Since 2017, China’s authoritarian government has forcefully relocated one million[2] Uyghurs to approximately 380 plus detention camps.[3] In these camps, Uyghurs are forced to speak/learn mandarin; they have been forced to work for free; [4] and Uyghur women have been sterilized. [5] Outside of camps, and since 2017, the Chinese government has damaged almost 16,000 mosques and demolished 8,500. [6] These State actions are all but the most visible part of decade-long systematic oppression to eliminate Uyghur culture and people. Against this backdrop, and as this author wrote [7], State violence — in this case, actions — meet the threshold of terrorism if it exceeds or it’s outside the State’s legitimate authority to enforce the laws, the actions are instrumental vice objective in creating fear, and they demonstrate a political motive.

Bar Graph by this author. Data provided by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI)

China’s forceful detentions likely fit the first element. This is because the unlawful detentions fall squarely outside the State’s justified (therefore legal) enforcement of laws — even for an authoritarian regime. In Sproat’s, a scholar, argumentation, the Chinese government did not afford the one million Uyghurs a chance to stop, change or alter the “perceived illegal action (despite that action being their ethnicity)”. In other words, by forcefully relocating Uyghurs to detention camps before they had a chance to stop being Uyghurs — the perceived law infraction — China’s government acted outside the State’s legal barometers and therefore illegitimatized their enforcement of such law. Moreover, as Sproat explained, ascriptive laws –such as the ones that formed the legal justification for Uyghur detentions — are from their inception considered illegitimate. This is because these laws are similar to the Nazi laws against the Jews, and some laws enacted during South Africa’s apartheid — in that they are not based on infractions but rather conditions (color, sex, etc.) which individuals cannot change. [8] By forcefully relocating millions of Uyghurs, the Chinese government effectively created circular logic: enforcing illegitimate laws which in turn illegitimatize what would be the State’s legitimate ability to enforce its laws.

But as in this author’s previous analysis, illegitimacy is not sufficient to label a State action or violence terrorism. Instrumentality is a necessary condition. In this case, the Chinese’s government actions need to create fear beyond the immediate person or peoples receiving the action. China’s destruction of Muslim shrines and mosques likely meets this standard. Since 2017, the Chinese government has destroyed approximately 8,500 mosques, according to an analysis conducted by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI). Here, the destruction of the mosques is not itself terrorism. Rather when coupled with the forceful detentions and other actions, the messaging or the instrumentality of the mosque’s destructions implies to the rest of the unaffected Uyghurs and by extension other Muslim minorities in China — to assimilate to traditional Chinese culture or else.

This is similar to ISIS’ 2016 destruction of the Christian monastery Dair Mar Elia in Mosul — which had stood for almost 1400 years.[9] Here ISIS’s actions were not the end but rather a means to one: for Christians to convert, leave ISIS territory or else. Another clear example that meets (and exceeds) the instrumentality element is the Chinese government’s efforts to sterilize Uyghur women. In 2014, the year before the start of the Chinese government actions in Xinjiang, there were 3,214 sterilizations in the region — in 2018, there were 60,440, according to a CNN report. [10] As with the destruction of the shrines, sterilization (repugnant as it may be) is not itself terrorism. Here, it is the coupling with other actions and the clear unambiguous message of fear to other Uyghur women of what is to happen if they have children or do not assimilate to traditional Chinese culture.