Chinathat this was necessarily the case or would
happen. It decided pre-emptively that it
would detain this number of people.
There had been violent incidents
prior to this. In October 2013 there was
an attack in Tiananmen Square when
a Uyghur family drove a vehicle into a
crowd of tourists in front of the portrait
of Mao Zedong. Then, in March 2014,
there was an attack in a train station: a
group of Uyghur young people, dressed
in black and carrying Islamic flags, cut
people with knives and killed over 30.
Those incidents made the Chinese public
aware of the tensions that were on the
rise in northwest China. And that is one of
the reasons why the state decided that it
wanted to respond. Initially it was a coun-
ter-insurgency-style crackdown, with the
state mostly trying to target the leaders
of what it saw as insurgent groups and
imams who were teaching without per-
mission. Then it moved into a larger-scale
mass re-education.Can you describe the relationship
between Beijing and the Uyghur people
since 1949, when the People’s Republic of
China was established?
Prior to 1949, the Uyghurs existed fairly
autonomously in their homeland, the
southern part of what is now called Xin-
jiang. They were 95 per cent or more of
the population. There was poverty and
lots of problems, but for the most part
what the Uyghurs saw as ‘foreign gov-
ernance’ was not a major issue in their
lives. It wasn’t until after 1949 that large
numbers of people were moved into the
region by the Chinese state, mostly into
garrisons and farming colonies along the
border. These people were kept separate
from the Uyghur population but brought
with them a new governance structure,
which began to change Uyghur lives.
In the late 1950s restrictions on reli-
gious practice were introduced; many
imams were arrested and mosques
closed. This continued throughout the1960s and 1970s, the time of the Cultural
Revolution. Uyghurs could still speak
their language, they just adopted social-
ist rhetoric and ideology into Uyghur
[the language]. There were many Uyghur
members of the Communist Party who
became part of the state apparatus, so
Uyghurs didn’t necessarily see their way
of life as threatened.
It wasn’t until the 1990s, when China
began to open up to the West and mar-
ketization began to drive the economy,
that there was a new push to extract
natural resources from the Uyghur
homeland. That had a dramatic effect
on the Uyghur sense of autonomy. Basi-
cally, the state was only interested in
oil, natural gas, cotton and tomatoes.
Xinjiang is now the major source for all
of these. Around 20 to 25 per cent of oil
and natural gas used in China comes
from this region; around 20 per cent of
the world’s tomatoes come from here, as
does 80 per cent of Chinese cotton.
Resource extraction brought lots
of [mostly Han migrants] into the
Uyghur homeland itself. They moved
into prefectures that had been 95 per
cent Uyghur and through that process
Uyghurs saw themselves being displaced
and dispossessed of their land. They
saw the cost of living begin to rise, but
they also felt themselves excluded from
the new economy because most of theUyghur men in Xinjiang pray during the
Corban festival (Eid) in 2016. Public displays of
religiosity are now considered signs of extremism.
KEVIN FRAYER/GETTY
NOVEMBER- DECEMBER 2019 27
We’re seeing a move towards
creating a population of workers
that can be paid less to do the
same work as Han workers in
other parts of the country
I