SOAS China Institute Events
Seminars are free and open to the public, no booking required. Please note that admission is on a first-come, first-served basis.
Monday 2 July 2018, 5pm
The “People’s War on Terror” in Xinjiang
Adrian Zenz in conversation with Rachel Harris
Room G3, Main Building, SOAS, University of London, Thornhaugh Street, Russell Square, London WC1H OXG
New Evidence on the Re-education Camps in Xinjiang
Adrian Zenz
Around a year ago, troubling accounts began to emerge from China's north-western Muslim frontier region of Xinjiang about large swathes of the Uyghur and Kazakh minority populations disappearing into clandestine political re-education camps. The Chinese government denies that these camps exist, but new research shows substantial official evidence for the existence of a vast re-education network in the region, consisting of heavily secured facilities, some of them large enough to host thousands of detainees. We can assume that between several hundred thousand and just over one million Muslim adults are currently detained. It is therefore likely that the region's re-education network exceeds the size of the entire Chinese re-education through labour system that was abolished in 2013. Just as Xinjiang has become China's testing ground for cutting-edge surveillance technology, Beijing may use the experiences gathered from this re-education drive for its social re-engineering efforts across the nation.
Is it really about “Religious Extremism”?
Rachel Harris
Over the past ten years, through my work on the Leverhulme Research Project Sounding Islam in China, I have observed the steady rise of religious piety in Xinjiang, and the accompanying state discourse of religious extremism and terrorism. Rather than targeting those vulnerable to radicalization, the “anti-extremism campaign” in Xinjiang has sought to eliminate all visible and audible expressions of Islamic faith. Coercive forms of disciplinary state power now condition the experience of everyday life for millions of Uyghurs. The mechanisms of control extend across the region and right into family homes, underpinned by a system of mass detention whose scope now goes far beyond the religious sphere to encompass anyone who has connections abroad, or has promoted Uyghur cultural identity, or simply fails to demonstrate adequate loyalty to the state.
Further details:
https://www.soas.ac.uk/china-institute/events/02jul2018-the-peoples-war-on-terror-in-xinjiang.html
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