Chinajobs – especially in the lucrative oil and
natural-gas sector – were not offered to
them. They saw themselves becoming
poorer in relation to the people around
them and more desperate in terms of
how they would provide for their families
and create a better life for their children.
Those are the conditions that have pro-
duced a lot of the tensions and violence
in the region.
How are the Uyghurs perceived from the
mainstream Chinese perspective?
Most people in China have encountered
Uyghurs in their home cities. That’s
because Uyghurs have been pushed into
forms of labour migration and often the
grey economy: in the food-service sector
or, in some cases, selling drugs illegally
and other petty crime. For the most part
they’re involved in setting up restaurants,
selling kebabs and other Uyghur food – a
popular cuisine throughout the country.
Yet because they’re associated with the
grey economy they’re often seen as ‘crim-
inal’ and ‘dangerous’. And because they
speak their own language they’re seen
as strangers, not fully part of Chinese
society. They also look different, so there’s
a racialized component to [this].
Back in the 1980s and 1990s, in their
homeland, the Uyghur ethnic identity
came under threat and so there was a
push to revive it. A number of historical
novels were published that really united
Uyghurs around a shared common
history in a new way. Then in the 2000s
and 2010s, as new forms of media began
to circulate – VCDs [a precursor to the
DVD] of Uyghur movies and then movies
in translation from parts of the Islamic
world such as Iran and Turkey – the
Uyghurs began to identify more and
more with an Islamic and Turkic identity.
Their commitment to Islamic piety and
ethnic difference also affected how they
were perceived in China.
Is it fair to say that Beijing is using
this clampdown against extremism as
an excuse to turn the Uyghurs, mainly
pastoralists and small-business owners,
into factory workers, so they contribute
more to the Chinese economy?
As the economy is taking off, the gov-
ernment is looking for new populations
that can produce things at a low wage.
The Uyghurs are now engaged in textile
manufacturing in association with these
camps. A lot of the jobs that are being
done in Xinjiang today would have
been done in eastern China in the past.
So we’re seeing a move towards [creat-
ing] a population of workers that can
be paid less and trained to do the same
work as Han workers in other parts of
the country.
State authorities saw the attack in
Beijing and several others in Ürümqi
as related directly to the Islamic State...
They call what they’re doing ‘community-
policing with Chinese characteristics’.
They would say they’re doing a much
better job than Western countries because
they’re not killing people on a mass scale
[as in the US-led ‘war on terror’] and
through the process of teaching real skills
in the camps they think they will turn the
Uyghurs into a population that will work
and be functional in the economy.
They identify two major problems in
the Uyghur population: their standard
of living is too low (they talk about what
they’re doing as ‘poverty alleviation’) and
the religious problem, which they say is
psychological. They first want to ‘treat’ the
problem of believing in Islam and then
teach them how to work and have indus-
trial-style quality as a worker, or suzhi,
which means ‘quality’ in Chinese. They’re
bringing the factory to the Uyghurs.What is it like to live as a Uyghur today in
Xinjiang?
What Uyghurs tell me is that their com-
munities have been turned into open-air
prisons. They say the camps are horrible
and everyone should pay attention to
the camps. But that’s just one symptom,
one element of the system. They say that
the larger problem is that the future of
Uyghur identity is under threat: Uyghur
language itself is being eliminated, it
is not taught in schools, people are not
encouraged to speak it in public, and reli-
gious practice has [effectively] stopped
throughout the region.
Then they talk about the restrictions
on their movement. One man told me
that he feels like they’re living in a ‘ghost
world’, where they’re alive but isolated
from the rest of the world.Some Uyghur homes have QR codes
affixed to the doors, which police can
scan with their phones. How is the state
using technology?
When I lived in Xinjiang between 2014
and 2015 that process began as part of
what they called the People’s War on
Terror. So they put a QR code on the
door of my apartment in Ürümqi; the
local police officer who was responsi-
ble for [our building] would come on a
regular basis and knock on the door or
scan that code. Her smartphone would
pull up our pictures, as they were reg-
istered to that apartment. Because my
partner and I are American they didn’t
view us with suspicion, but my Uyghur
friends told me that often during visits
the authorities would look under their
beds, search computers, search smart-
phones. If a person wasn’t home, they
would put a note on their door saying
‘you need to come down to the police
station’ within a period of time and have
an interview.
In many apartment buildings there
are now security guards at the entrance
who scan a person’s card [to let them in].
Often there are face-scanning machines.
In future they want to automate the
system of surveillance so they’ll be able
to track people and to look for patterns of
movement and predict whether a person
is planning something or turning towards
a religious practice. Is any sign of religiosity enough to set off
alarm bells – for example, simply owning
the Qur’an?
Absolutely. A Qur’an is not something
you can own at this point. Learning
Arabic is also a sign of being interested
in foreign forms of Islam. Saying As-
salamu alaykum, which was the most
common greeting, is also now banned
as a sign of extremism. Praying after a
meal is a sign of extremism, going to the
mosque is a sign of extremism, fasting
during Ramadan is a sign of extremism.
I think that people are able to say that
they are Muslim and, in most cases, are
not forced to violate forms of Halal food
practice. But at the same time Uyghur
restaurants are not allowed to advertise
themselves as Halal, at least not with
Arabic script.
Some Uyghurs I’ve spoken to say
they’ve found ways of, say, praying sitting
up, or without making it obvious. But it
means it’s difficult for them to pass [their
culture] on to the next generation. NOVEMBER- DECEMBER 2019 29
I
(Left top) Waiting in the salon: a Uyghur woman
is about to have her hair done before a religious
festival in 2013. Taken in Turpan County,
Xinjiang.
KEVIN FRAYER / GETTY
(Left bottom) Police officers stand guard near
a bazaar in Ürümqi, Xinjiang in 2013.
BJ WARNICK / ALAMY