The “Xinjiang Papers”: How Xi Jinping commands policy in the PRC

The “Xinjiang Papers”: How Xi Jinping commands policy in the People’s Republic of China

By David Tobin

Open Access Download (March 2022)

Abstract

Under Xi Jinping’s rule of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), at least one million Turkic-speaking Muslims in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) have been extralegally detained in camps, subjected to invasive surveillance, sexual violence, child-separation, and psychological trauma. Nearly 10 million Uyghurs and Kazakhs outside the camps navigate networks of checkpoints, interpersonal monitoring, hi-tech surveillance, and forced labour. This report reveals the centralised decision-making processes behind mass mobilisation, mass detention, and dispersal of Uyghur and other Turkic-speaking Muslim communities in Xinjiang. This report explains the thinking and mechanisms behind Xi Jinping’s Xinjiang policy, which targets signs of everyday Uyghur identity as security threats. It provides new evidence of centrally directed local implementation of mass detention (section 4.2) and arbitrary dispersal of Uyghur communities (4.3). The report shows how Xi is transforming the PRC’s political system towards a totalitarian model based on personalised rule, mass mobilisation and surveillance, ideological education, and transformation of thought. Xi’s micro-managed policy implementation prevents any opposition to genocidal practices, including cultural destruction (section 3: “Sinicisation” policy), arbitrary mass detention, and community dispersal. Mass human surveillance links party institutions, security services, and neighbourhoods in the “People’s war on terror” (4.1).

Keywords: authoritarianism, human rights, security, China, Xinjiang, Uyghurs, ethnicity, policy, politics.