KELLEY E. CURRIE
The CCP’s brutal 21st-century settler colonialism
On May 27, the Tk’emlups te Secwepemc First Nation announced that it had discovered the remains of 215 children in an unmarked mass grave on the grounds of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia, Canada. In early June, remains of an additional 715 people were found at another former residential school in Saskatchewan. Residential schools were among the most shameful and brutal aspects of Canadian forced-assimilation policies, and the First Nations had long contended that thousands of native children who were sent to these schools had disappeared — presumed dead from abuse and neglect.
These discoveries were met with shock and outrage not only across Canada but also in other countries where First Nations and indigenous populations had been subjected to similarly brutal “civilizing” policies. Chief Bobby Cameron of the Federation of Sovereign Indian Nations called the Kamloops discovery “a national tragedy,” and it was treated as such. The Canadian, British Columbian, and Saskatchewan governments expressed their deep sorrow, and Canadians of all backgrounds were again confronted with the grim legacy of how these forced-assimilation policies had prompted horrific abuses. The First Nations and Canadian authorities pledged to work together to continue investigating the fate of missing indigenous children, building on decades of work that has included a truth-and-reconciliation council and other officially backed efforts at recognition and restorative justice.
Interestingly, this Canadian story has received an extraordinary level of coverage in Chinese state-run media, including extensive official comment from Chinese foreign-ministry officials. In the pages of China Daily, Zhang Zhouxiang’s commentary struck a triumphant tone at odds with the subject matter: “Some Western countries, Canada included, like to preach to other countries about human rights affairs. They should review their pasts and correct their own wrongdoings, instead of pointing fingers at others.” On June 28, China’s permanent representative to the United Nations recorded a video on the subject, calling the abuse “shocking and horrific.” China’s propaganda wizards clearly believed that this was a great example of Western hypocrisy in criticizing China’s human-rights record and leapt at the opportunity to weaponize it.
Schadenfreude over the uncovering of evidence of historic abuse of indigenous children is, of course, an inappropriate reaction from anyone, let alone a government. But it is especially rich coming from a government that stands recently and credibly accused of committing genocide against ethnic and religious minorities, and directed at a country that has so honestly and openly acknowledged its shortcomings. It is precisely China’s own brutal treatment of ethnic and religious minorities that explains why both Chinese propaganda and official outlets have jumped on the tragedy of Canada’s First Nations. In their eagerness to accuse the West of hypocrisy, the Party’s propagandists have highlighted the equivalence between the Chinese Communist Party’s deeply racist, neocolonialist policies in Tibet and Xinjiang and Canada’s long-discredited and abandoned racist policies toward indigenous people. Yet many of the same Chinese propagandists condemning Canada for taking First Nations children from their homes are vigorous defenders of such practices in Xinjiang and Tibet today. If such policies were “shocking and horrific” when Canada carried them out against First Nations in the 1800s, are they any less so when the Chinese Communist Party deploys them against Uyghurs and Tibetans in the 21st century?
The disturbing truth is that the Chinese Communist Party does not fundamentally object to the policies that led to the abuses at the residential schools. Their own policies in Xinjiang and Tibet violate the rights of minorities and are rooted in an imperative to imprint Han Chinese culture onto resistant ethnic nationalities. Just as the stated objective of the residential schools in Canada — as well as that of counterparts in the United States and Australia — was to “civilize” native peoples and help them conform to the dominant culture, so too have the CCP’s “modernization” and “poverty alleviation” efforts in Tibetan, Uyghur, and other minority areas sought to fundamentally alter the local culture in the name of Han-defined progress.
From the beginning of the People’s Republic, there has been an inherent tension between the minority policies espoused by the CCP and the reality of those policies as implemented by a vanguard party controlled by Han cadres. The CCP’s policy toward ethnic nationalities was initially modeled on those of the Soviet Union, which recognized both ethnic homelands and the right of self-determination. The five “major” minority nationalities — Tibetans, Hui, Uyghurs, Mongolians, and Manchurians — were granted “special administrative regions” instead of provinces and were initially promised that they could leave the PRC should they wish to do so. But just as Stalin found ethnic nationalities’ stubborn attachment to their identity a troublesome obstacle to the emergence of the New Soviet Man — not to mention their land too valuable to give away — Mao Zedong and his colleagues found that the Tibetans, Uyghurs, and Mongolians who previously had been lightly yoked (if at all) to Chinese rule were not especially interested in communism or in the CCP’s particular brand of modernization. This was especially true when it meant they could no longer practice their religion, speak their own language, follow their traditional pastoral lifestyles, and otherwise maintain their distinct non-Han culture.
Han chauvinism was deeply rooted in the colonizing project that the PRC perpetuated when it claimed these lands as intrinsic parts of China. Minority cadres were expected to learn Mandarin and conform to Chinese cultural expectations as part of their modernization. Meanwhile, members of the Han cadres that were sent to Tibetan, Uyghur, and other minority regions were charged with an explicitly civilizing mission rooted in tropes that painted ethnic minorities as indolent and backwards. This pervasive racism against non-Han peoples was such a problem that Mao regarded it as an existential threat to the CCP’s revolution. In a 1953 internal party document, he warned his colleagues against the dangers of “Han chauvinism”:
What has come to light in various places in the last two or three years shows that Han chauvinism exists almost everywhere. It will be very dangerous if we fail now to give timely education and resolutely overcome Han chauvinism in the Party and among the people. The problem in the relations between nationalities which reveals itself in the Party and among the people in many places is xthe existence of Han chauvinism to a serious degree and not just a matter of its vestiges.
Despite Mao’s caution, the CCP’s actual policies toward ethnic nationalities both ensured that they continued to face structural discrimination and inspired resistance to the party-state.
Prior to the Qing Dynasty, Tibetans and Uyghurs had not been directly ruled by any Chinese sovereign. Local warlords and traditional leaders held sway in a loose, at times nonexistent, confederation alongside whoever was sitting on the imperial throne. “The mountains are high and the emperor is far away” was not just a trite saying — it was the reality for Tibetans and Uyghurs, few of whom would have identified as belonging to any Chinese empire.
The Tibetans considered their relationships with the Mongol and Manchu empires as primarily religious, with the emperor a student of the Dalai Lamas. For the Uyghurs, however, the relationship was primarily trade-oriented and otherwise fairly limited. In the late Qing, the emperor sought to assert more-direct control over the “western frontier” and promoted Han migration to these areas. Nonetheless, local rule remained largely in the hands of local elites who were encouraged to conform to the Chinese imperial system, and there was otherwise little effort at changing local traditions or culture. While the Qing Dynasty was overthrown shortly after this effort was initiated, the new Republican government of Sun Yat-sen was equally intent on binding these territories to a greater China. The Republic of China claimed to include all the territories held at the height of the Qing Dynasty and set about incorporating them into a new nation. The weakness of the Nationalist government, the Japanese invasion, World War II, and the Chinese civil war thwarted these efforts, but after taking power, the CCP picked up where the Nationalists had left off.
Mao saw exerting control over these territories and bestowing the gift of communism on their inhabitants as an existential mission of the New China. Under its theory of ethnic autonomy, the CCP believed that non-Han areas would need additional time to be ready for the transformative power of communism. As with all things communist, it was necessary to send a vanguard to help prepare the way and facilitate this process. In the newly christened Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (Xinjiang means “New Territory” in Chinese), the CCP quickly established a purpose-built administrative and economic platform to facilitate Han migration, particularly in resource-rich northern Xinjiang. The Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, known colloquially as the “Bingtuan,” a term derived from the full Chinese name, was a state within a state. It provided the newly arrived migrants with jobs, housing, schools, medical care, and a ready-made Han ecosystem in which they could operate. Over time, the Bingtuan came to control all the major industries in Xinjiang — from farming to mining — and it remains the region’s largest employer. As the party-state apparatus grew in organizational power and became able to assert physical dominion over these spaces, the level of Han migration accelerated dramatically. From 1949, more than 10 million Han settlers eventually moved into Xinjiang — nearly equaling the indigenous Uyghur population, and outpacing it in urban areas.
In Tibetan areas, for the first ten years of CCP rule (1949–59), Communist planners thought “reforms” would have to be gradually introduced because of what they termed the region’s “feudal” system, in which Tibetan Buddhist monasteries were the largest landowners. The CCP administratively divided the ethnic Tibetan population into a Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR) and a number of Tibetan autonomous prefectures and counties allocated across Gansu, Qinghai, Sichuan, and Yunnan Provinces. These divisions roughly approximated historic regions of Tibet: Ü-Tsang (which includes Lhasa) is now the TAR; Amdo, which is now much of Qinghai and a portion of Gansu; and Kham, which constitutes nearly half of Sichuan and a portion of Yunnan. Outside the TAR, reforms were implemented more quickly and met with stiff resistance. By 1959, there were tens of thousands of refugees in Lhasa who had fled the implementation of reforms, many of whom were camped around the grounds of the Dalai Lama’s Potala Palace. Rumors among these refugees that the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) garrison in Lhasa intended to kidnap the Dalai Lama precipitated the March 10 Uprising, in which the PLA fired anti-aircraft guns at the Potala. Faced with implacable Tibetan opposition across the plateau, the CCP ordered the PLA to “liberate” all Tibetan areas by force if necessary. This effectively marked the end of Tibetan autonomy and the beginning of direct CCP control.
In Xinjiang, Tibet, and Inner Mongolia, pastoral indigenous populations were forced to abandon their traditions. Their religious beliefs and institutions, nomadic or small-holder farming lifestyles, and social arrangements were attacked as primitive and contrary to socialism. Urban Chinese youth were “sent down” to these areas to civilize the local populations by teaching them Mandarin, modern hygiene, and modern agricultural- and industrial-production methods. That most of these “sent-down youth” had never farmed a day in their lives was immaterial. They carried with them the new gospel of modernizing socialism, and they were intent on liberating the “feudal” and “backwards” Tibetans, Uyghurs, and Mongolians, whether they wanted liberating or not.
While CCP policy in ethnic areas has always had settler-colonial elements, it is important to note the ways that the CCP’s ethnic policy and ideological framework have changed under Xi Jinping. These changes — from a policy nominally based on autonomy to one explicitly based on forced assimilation — drove a dramatic escalation in abuse of ethnic nationalities, to the point that China’s party-state now stands credibly accused of genocide.
The ultimate goal of CCP ethnic policies may have always been assimilationist, but the policies at least nominally emphasized autonomy for ethnic nationalities and transformation of the whole population through communism. Although the demands of CCP rule created massive abuse, death, and destruction for nearly everyone who lived under it, because the vanguard of the CCP was overwhelmingly Han Chinese, the vast majority of PRC residents were never subjected to the same scale or scope of cultural annihilation as the minority ethnic nationalities. The dominant culture remained so, and quickly reasserted itself after the madness of the Cultural Revolution and the end of Maoism. Even during the Cultural Revolution, the New Socialist Man whom Mao sought to create in China was, at the end of the day, Han.
From 1949 until 2008, the party-state’s policy framework ostensibly, and occasionally in practice, allowed ethnic nationalities a greater degree of variation from the main line within their historic territories, with additional policies aimed at helping them to “catch up” with their Han brethren. The CCP’s initial policy included longer timelines for accomplishing certain reforms, higher tolerance of certain cultural activities, preferences for admission to educational institutions, and quotas in government positions. In reality, autonomous areas were under greater scrutiny from Beijing than were regular provinces. “Positive discrimination” was delivered in a patronizing and condescending manner, reinforced with coercive elements of control, surveillance, and punishment — whether in the fore- or in the background. For example, CCP poverty-alleviation policies in Tibet resulted in the depopulation of monasteries and forced resettlement of nomadic herders. Whether or not these were the intended consequences, the foreseeable outcomes ensured that the poverty-alleviation policies were poorly received and deeply resented. It is, therefore, unsurprising that the CCP’s efforts to detach minorities from their distinct identities often had the adverse effect of reinforcing and strengthening them. While the overarching policy and ideological framework remained relatively consistent, the level of CCP control in ethnic areas was often cyclical: Periods of looseness would prompt a surge of cultural practices to a point that became intolerable to the party-state, resulting in crackdowns that triggered sometimes violent resistance.
By 2008–09, it had become clear to the CCP leadership that the party-state’s “generosity” in both Tibet and Xinjiang had been bestowed on deeply ungrateful subjects. With violent and nonviolent protests against CCP rule rising across both areas — and occasionally breaking into the Han heartland — a long-running and largely hidden debate between academic advocates of autonomy and assimilation intensified. These events in Tibet and Xinjiang coincided with a period of increased Chinese nationalism and growing PRC confidence in the wake of the 2008 Beijing Olympics and the financial crisis that same year.
In 2012, newly installed CCP general secretary Xi Jinping came down decidedly on the side of the forced-assimilation camp and promoted those who felt it was time to take a harder line against ethnic separatism. James Leibold, an expert on China’s ethnic policy-making, has described the new approach as
seek[ing] to transform . . . the physical and social landscape of Xinjiang and other peripheral regions under the government’s control. They work to actively alter the thoughts and behaviors of what Chinese authorities perceive to be a “backward,” “deviant,” and innately “dangerous” sub-section of its population by uplifting their “bio-quality” (suzhi) and overseeing their rebirth as loyal, patriotic, and civilized Chinese citizens.
For a party-state that was long obsessed with improving the “quality” of China’s population, including through highly coercive means, it was a relatively short step from this mentality to the imposition of comprehensive surveillance, mass arbitrary detention in concentration camps, and enforced population controls that have been documented in Xinjiang. Once the party-state determined that these ethnic groups were innately dangerous, extreme measures seemed fully justified.
If some elements of this dynamic sound familiar to Americans, they should. Many of the same 18th- and 19th-century settler-colonial dynamics of America’s westward expansion have been at work in the PRC from Day One. Neither the PRC nor the CCP has ever acknowledged the settler-colonial aspects of its policies. Instead, they have deeply embedded within the party-state’s psyche that China is the victim of colonialism. In official party-state rhetoric, Imperial Japan’s colonization of China from 1931 to 1945 remains indelibly imprinted. That memory is constantly and diversely wielded by the CCP: as a moment of triumph (despite the fact that the Nationalists did most of the fighting against the Japanese); as a justification for China’s membership in the anti-colonial club; and as a cudgel against present-day Japan. In international fora, China continues to align itself with the anti-colonial movement and the Group of 77, frequently speaking out against the evils of colonialism and demanding the completion of the decolonization process. It is not lost on Uyghur and Tibetan activists that the Chinese party-state is presently employing the very same policies that CCP diplomats decry in propaganda efforts to highlight Western treatment of indigenous peoples.
Which brings us back to the bizarre, tone-deaf spectacle of Chinese officials gloating about the tragic deaths of First Nations children in Canada. As mentioned, we know about these atrocities in Canada because there is an official ongoing effort to investigate them. There are similar challenges in the United States and Australia. Most Americans are conscious of the debt we owe to the original inhabitants of our nation, and how we can never really hope to repay it. That does not stop us from trying, and from having open, often difficult, dialogues on these subjects. We learn about these issues in school, through popular culture, and in our policy-making spaces. Our democratic institutions are working to both protect the rights of indigenous peoples and establish some measure of restorative justice. As with the efforts to deal with our country’s birth defect of slavery, redressing the wrongs committed against Native Americans has been a difficult process of reckoning, recognition, and reconciliation that likely will continue as long as our nation does. But we continue to confront it openly and transparently, making progress a part of our efforts to form a more perfect union.
The opposite is true in China. The CCP asserts that China cannot possibly be guilty of a settler-colonial mentality because China was a victim of colonialism — as if a victim could not become a perpetrator. There is no scope for self-reflection and questioning of the current assimilationist-policy approach and its brutal implementation. There is only one version of Chinese history, and the CCP’s only permissible role in it is that of infallible savior moving the nation along its inexorable path. In this story, Tibet, Xinjiang, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau are inalienable parts of China and have been since time immemorial. Expressions of Uyghur and Tibetan identity that are outside the limits prescribed by the party-state are, therefore, grounds for detention and reeducation. Han scholars and others who previously argued for a more accommodating approach to ethnic nationalities have either gone quiet or changed their tune. Uyghur and Tibetan scholars who advocated genuine autonomy are sent to prison or reeducation.
More recently, the CCP has also ramped up nationalist fervor and rewarded efforts to implement and defend China’s policies in Xinjiang. Under Xi, the CCP is taking an aggressively authoritarian approach to external critics across the board. From unleashing “wolf warrior” diplomats to leveraging Belt and Road projects, China’s leadership is unapologetically working to make the world safe for Xi’s form of Chinese autocracy. In response to criticism about abuses in Xinjiang and Tibet, China has used a wide range of weapons against the accusations and the accusers. They have sanctioned members of foreign parliaments, government officials, and even scholars and think tanks that research Uyghur issues; taken foreign nationals as hostages; and threatened countries and companies with political and economic retribution. The recent attempt to “flip the narrative” on Canada — painting it and other Western countries as gross violators of human rights — is a classic Marxist technique updated to the social-media age. The pushback has been particularly shrill and hostile in regard to allegations of Uyghur forced labor in Chinese supply chains. Foreign companies that have expressed concerns about forced labor — or those that have attempted to eradicate it from their supply chains — are attacked as being anti-Chinese and removed from Chinese social media. In order to regain market access, Western companies are forced to engage in self-criticisms featuring self-abasing apologies and assurances that they will continue sourcing from Xinjiang.
So far, the U.S. and other countries that have spoken out on these abuses have stood strong and are taking meaningful action to ensure that their supply chains are not tainted with Uyghur forced labor. The imposition of sanctions by multiple governments, joint statements in the United Nations Human Rights Council (HRC), and official declarations that China is committing genocide or crimes against humanity in Xinjiang have raised the pressure on not only the Chinese party-state but also the rest of the international community. To date, members of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation have been conspicuous in their silence or have even provided cover for China, including by backing statements in the HRC that extol China’s Xinjiang policies. The U.N. secretary general has taken pains to avoid commenting on the situation, and the high commissioner for human rights spiked a critical report on Xinjiang prepared by her office. China regularly trumpets this “see no evil” behavior as evidence that its policies in Xinjiang are acceptable.
If the Biden administration wants to build out the international coalition against human-rights abuses in Xinjiang and Tibet, a good place to start is those developing countries that feel the heaviest weight of China’s neocolonialism. From Burma to the Pacific Islands, Beijing’s victim act is wearing thin. These countries may not be ready to speak up for the Uyghurs or Tibetans, but China’s increasingly undiplomatic behavior should discourage them from defending Beijing’s abuses. Another argument that should resonate with developing countries struggling to combat and recover from COVID is how the use of Uyghur forced labor creates an unfair advantage for Chinese producers.
More important, however, the United States and other democracies must find ways to positively contrast how our open, democratic societies are dealing with the legacies of colonialism, racism, and other social and political challenges, with China’s authoritarian approach of denial and repression. It is profoundly unhelpful, for instance, when American diplomats use multilateral fora to self-flagellate over our problems without emphasizing that liberal-democratic values are ultimately the key to equitable and durable solutions. Authoritarian leaders know they cannot afford to admit failures, lest their fallibility undermine their hold on power. As democracies, we need to have more confidence in the strengths of our own systems — including how we learn from our mistakes.
Ultimately, China cannot escape the costs of racism and repression any more than any other country. As a great power, the United States should set the standard for dealing with the shameful aspects of our history in an honest and open manner. We should do so without defensiveness and with an emphasis on the self-correcting and redemptive aspects of democracy. The higher we set our own standards as democratic and open societies, the more obvious it will be that China’s current leadership and political system fall short and fail China’s people.
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