(Letter written to a couple vice-provosts and deans of my acquaintance)

Dear

I write to you together, as the only friends I have at the decanal and provostal level, and thus involved in how universities respond to the current threats against us.

My reason for writing is summed up in this piece from The Crimson. US Universities need to respond to the current attacks strongly and, most important, collectively. Masha Gessen said the same thing in a New York Times conversation the other day: “The only thing that would work against Trump is a united front of higher education leaders who would both push back on him and articulate some new ideas about why their institutions are essential for our society’s future.”

I know you and your university administrations are facing pressures to keep your head down and hold your breath while others get attacked. I know this from my own experience as part of a group of scholars singled out and visa-banned by the PRC over two decades ago. At the time, we in the “Xinjiang Thirteen” tried in vain to get our institutions, which included Georgetown, MIT, Dartmouth, University of Kansas, Mt. Holyoke, Miami University of Ohio and others, to get together and respond collectively to the attacks on academic freedom from the People’s Republic of China. This proved impossible. Many institutions were worried that to do so would jeopardize their burgeoning initiatives with the PRC. As a result, the impediments to academic exchange stood. One colleague left the field; another was denied tenure; another lost a research fellowship. In my own case, I was not fired, and could carry on writing albeit on new topics, but I did feel thrown under the bus by both the PRC and Georgetown.

The bus careening wildly towards us now is bigger, faster and more dangerous. My experience last time led me to think about what academic freedom is. I wrote a paper arguing that it derives not from the First Amendment, or particular decisions of the US supreme court, or even the AAUP guidelines. Ultimately, academic freedom is rooted in the fact that in colleges, universities and academic-adjacent institutions like university presses, our work and professional advancement, from the time we first go to college through publishing books as senior scholars, is subject to expert peer review. That is the system we use in the modern world to ensure the quality of knowledge production. Any outside interference in curriculum, censoring of research topics, or personal attacks on scholars, strikes at the heart of that system, undermining its quality and ability to differentiate legitimate knowledge from the type of “research” you can find anywhere in social media or on the internet. Peer review, and thus academic freedom, makes the difference between vaccines and snake oil — in any field.

That experience also led me to conclude that academic institutions’ — and administrators’ — responsibility to academic freedom goes beyond just refraining from interfering in teaching and research on campus. To preserve academic freedom, it is also incumbent upon institutions, which are by definition more powerful than individual students and faculty, to actively defend their scholars from outside attacks as best they can. This means institutions must provide legal, financial, logistical, medical and most of all political support to scholars under assault. It means helping to find work-arounds if outside forces inhibit a scholar’s research or teaching.

Let me give you an example. A Uyghur-American student at a state university several years ago was among several students who won a scholarship through the campus Confucius Institute to study Chinese at a university in the PRC for a semester. Then, her visa alone among her classmates was denied, clearly because of her Uyghur family background. Her university’s initial response was simply to shrug and say there was nothing it could do. Having planned to be in China, she had not signed up for courses at her college here, nor was her local financial aid available, so she would have had to sit out the semester. After she contacted us, along with a few others I wrote on her behalf to the university president, and in the end convinced him that the right thing to do was to finance her study for a semester in Taiwan — which the university did. That work-around was an example of an institution actively and creatively supporting a scholar under outside attack, and thus fulfilling its responsibility to academic freedom even though they could not reasonably fight the PRC.

Timothy Snyder’s recent book On Freedom suggests a concise way to describe the full scope of academic freedom: the responsibility is not just to maintain “freedom from” (e.g. freedom from a dean telling me not to teach a certain controversial book). There is a broader institutional responsibility to do one’s best to provide “freedom to”: freedom to pursue the knowledge, even when some outside force is censoring it, undermining safe conditions or threatening the scholar trying to do produce or teach it.

Right now, we face unprecedented threats to both modes of academic freedom, both from and to. Universities must remember this responsibility to protect and support academic freedom of all their scholars as best they can. Right now, university administrations are far from doing the best they can — as far as I can tell, they are barely doing anything (though I assume they are quietly looking out for their own intramural interests without sticking their heads above the parapet).

What would doing our best in the current shitstorm mean? First and foremost, as Masha Gessen said, it means standing together, not alone where you can be picked off one by one. Presidents, provosts, deans and others steering the ships of scholarship should be talking not just intramurally, but pan-academically across the country, to optimize a common response and implement it with conviction, courage and panache. For starters, it would be great to see a couple dozen university presidents standing together before the cameras and denouncing the illegality and ill-advisability of cuts to federal grants, blacklists of supposedly antisemitic campuses, and especially the illegal measures being taken and threatened against holders of student visas and green-card scholars. Our university presidents need to collectively shout “No!” with the same tone and moral clarity displayed by Georgetown Law School’s dean William Treanor, when he responded to the outrageous and unconstitutional demands of the Interim US Attorney for the District of Columbia to censor the Law School’s curriculum in conformance with the racist whims of the Trump administration.

Here are a few other things US universities might do together:

· Issue an unequivocal call for the release and end to persecution of US permanent resident Mahmoud Khalil. You may not wish to speak up on this because of the Israeli third-rail in US politics, but having come for the Palestinians, they are already coming for the Chinese: a bill to ban all PRC students has been introduced to the House, ostensibly to prevent them (including high school students) from spying. Deporting or banning scholars on the basis of supposed speech crimes or vague racially-tinged insinuations, with no evidence, should be met with instant, universal and clamorous opposition from our university leaders.

· Announce a joint legal defense fund for scholars under attack, funded by all universities in the coalition according to their ability. Pool legal expertise from your several law schools and provide pro bono help where necessary.

· Define and announce collective procedures for how universities will handle incursions by DHS, ICE and other law enforcement: E.g. No police may come on campus without first liaising with campus security and university administration. No immigration-related searches or other activity without a proper judicial warrant signed by a judge, submitted to university general counsel in advance. Get your lawyers together and come up with these rules, promulgate them and defend them collectively. Fight violations in court. Private universities are private property: Defend them as such from illegal police entry.

· Regularly and consistently call out the lies and bullshit directed against universities. Great damage has been done by letting stand unsubstantiated claims of ubiquitous campus anti-semitism. Great damage has been done by quietly acquiescing to hallucinatory mis-characterizations about “DEI” on campus, from politicians and pundits on the right and left (all stemming not from empirical evidence, but from a deliberate campaign cooked up by Chris Ruffo, Georgetown SFS ‘06). We know that reality in our universities is nothing like those bizarre imaginings. When the government calls on a university to “eliminate DEI,” you should first ask, “what exactly do you mean by DEI? Do you mean the staff and programs we have created to ensure compliance with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Title IX, and other Equal Employment Opportunity laws that remain on the books?” And, otherwise, widely publicize any unconstitutional demands, refuse them, and actually make the case that area studies, legal studies, gender studies, foreign languages, and the history of all Americans (not just those of European descent) are all valid and necessary to a good education. Your faculty are available to help you make that point.

· There are fewer than ten trans athletes among the over 500,000 athletes competing in NCAA sports nationally. If none of them are on your campus, maybe you don’t need to write rules discriminating against them? And for those ten, here is a good opportunity to try to figure out individualized solutions and creative workarounds, rather than demonize and discriminate against an entire class of people.

· Publish joint op-eds by groups of university presidents. It would be great to hear something from them other than the current deathly silence. But more than that, start messaging, and messaging better, in other ways. Get snappy, sassy (and probably younger) comms people to present the case for academic freedom on social media. Address false accusations of elitism, the persistent rumor that college education is worthless, or that universities sneer at common folks (when in fact we are striving to reach out, recruit and offer free tuition to first generation and low-income students, veterans and other people less likely to go to college, as part of diversification efforts). Address misunderstandings about campus protest. Stop letting bad faith political actors and pundits falsely describe and define what we do. Again, if you do this collectively, say as an alt-uni account, the trolls will have no one in particular to flame, and your donors can’t be mobilized against you. But you can get a sharp message out when you need to.

In all of these matters, state institutions have less flexibility than private institutions, and rich private institutions enjoy the most power. It is thus important that elite schools hold the line and support other colleges and universities with less latitude to do so.

University administrators are highly incentivized to be risk-averse, and now more than ever, that really shows. But recent history tells us unmistakably that slavish acquiescence to illegal and unreasonable demands from government and other outside actors gets you not even a short-term reprieve. They just come back again a month or a week later with more censorious demands, more invasions of our campus, more extortionate threats. They will squeeze as much as they can from you by threatening to take away $400 million, and when you cave, they come right back to threaten to take it away again.

The brute has invaded the grove. He is trampling the vineyards, spit-roasting our gentle creatures, despoiling our fruits. He has thrust daggers between our ribs. The daggers may not yet have pierced our heart, and you might think you can hide in a shady corner of the garden and hope he just goes away. But you will bleed out before he leaves, because he is having too much fun, and he is likely to stab you again just for the hell of it. The only feasible course is to stand up and actively protect our scholarly freedoms, both from and to. All the colleges and universities must pull out those daggers, stand together as one, and with a thunderous cry of defiance, turn them against the assailant.

If I may milk this metaphor a bit more: you seem to feel that the “heart” now feeling the prick of those daggers is your endowment, your donations, your federal funding. But that is wrong. Those threats, as the Chinese say, are simply threats to the limbs, not to the trunk. The heart that you need to protect above all is your scholars and their academic freedom from, and freedom to. We will gladly freeze hiring, let in fewer Ph.D. students, teach more with fewer TAs, unplug the xerox machine, even let you suspend payments into our 401-k’s — all of that, as we did during the pandemic — if it is in aid of our core enterprise of honest knowledge production and dissemination. But we can and will do that willingly only if our administrations do their job, which is to do their best to defend scholars and scholarship.

Last time, you fought back against COVID as best you could and faculty and students all pitched in. This time, facing a different kind of force majeure, our administrations seem to cower, kowtow and curry favor while our colleagues are silenced, censored, and Shanghaied by thugs from campus to distant prisons. Why should we happily tighten our belts to protect the endowment if the top brass are sacrificing academic freedom, the beating heart of what we do, to satisfy corrupt authoritarians, presumptuous donors, corporate efficiency experts and all the other ignorant and bad faith bullies who won’t ever be satisfied anyway?

Please: you manage professors for a living — a task notoriously like herding cats. If you can do that, it shouldn’t be impossible to gather a bunch of university leaders. Organize. Stratigize. Put all our formidable minds together. Make noise. And really do your best, collectively, to protect academic freedom. If ever there was a “hang together or hang separately” moment, it is now.

Thanks,

Jim

17 March, 2025

Thirty-five years ago, in April 1989, Chinese students from Beijing’s elite universities began their occupation of Tiananmen Square. Their issues were different from those of American students today. Chinese demonstrators voiced concerns about corruption, inflation, the effects of on-going market reforms, and lack of free press and participatory governance. Today’s students at Columbia, NYU, Harvard, Yale, University of Minnesota, University of Texas, Brown, USC and other campuses are mounting an antiwar movement, calling on their institutions to divest from Israel in light of the unprecedented levels of civilian death in Gaza, and for the US government to stop supplying Israel’s offensive war machine. Another big difference: as it turned out, Chinese students faced far more serious and long-lasting repercussions than seems likely for American students, even those violently arrested by police. At least so far.

Despite the evident distinctions, however, there are thought-provoking similarities between the springtime student movements of China in 1989 and those in the US in 2024 — in particular, in the excessive rhetoric about and reactions to both movements. In 1989 as now, the students ask for a lot, right away. To many in powerful positions, they seem impetuous, unruly, irresponsible and unrealistic. But the issues they raise are weighty and can’t easily be denied. And the students speak with moral certainty borne of youth and the very fact that they are students: they have done everything we asked of them to gain admission to the most elite universities in the land. They have read the books we assigned them. And what they have learned leads them to conclude, with great clarity, that bad things are happening, and that these bad things must stop. But the students are persistently denied access to channels of influence; their organizations are suspended; their calls for justice are dismissed, censored or declared impractical or illegal. So they camp out in the Square, on the Common, or in the Yard, where their voices, chants and signs cannot be ignored.

To many, these student encampments are not just inconvenient, but amount to lese majesté, a challenge to rightful authority. Though the students are managing their new al fresco communities pretty well, under the circumstances (according to an “admirable code of conduct,” as reported by Howard French), many outsiders don’t see in them hope for a democratic, inclusive future. Rather, through narrowed eyes, such critics perceive only chaos — or at least pretend to perceive it. But efforts to discredit, intimidate and disperse the students through the usual accusatory labeling (Black Hands! Tools of hostile foreign forces! Terrorist sympathizers! Anti-Semites!) aren’t working. Suspending or threatening to expel the students isn’t stopping them either — they aren’t the pliant, careeristic drones you thought they were, but put principle higher than pragmatism, some even above their personal safety (parents are panicking about this). Still worse, the students’ outcry is opening rifts within the power structure itself. Professors turn out in support of their students. Administrations and political parties split over how to deal with the kids, revealing deeper fissures across the system. A growing faction clamors for violence to “restore order,” using the students for their own political purposes.

It was when things had come to this point that Deng Xiaoping declared martial law and sent troops to clear Tiananmen Square with lethal force. University presidents, do not imitate Deng Xiaoping’s example! (Some in New York, Minnesota, Texas, California and elsewhere already have, unleashing police on peaceful protesters in public spaces on the campuses they pay tuition to attend. How do those videos look to you?)

Universities should ignore the callous and disingenuous calls of pundits and right-wing senators and congressmen to deploy the military (which is what the National Guard is) against non-violent student antiwar protesters in their sleeping bags. That kind of “corrective action” will only make things worse. If nothing else, think of the lawsuits from these students’ parents when a bunch of them get hurt or killed. Deng was willing to shoot students and crush them under tanks to clear them away. Are you?

So what is to be done? Here is a solution. It requires compromise, but also offers benefits to both university administrations and student protesters: Form a committee.

Include elected representatives of activist student groups on that committee. This will require lifting those suspensions and campus bans you ineffectually imposed on some students before — but they are not ill-behaved children: they are the thought leaders you need to be talking to. Also include representatives of alumni, faculty, staff, administration and trustees on this committee. Bring in the development officers and university lawyers, too. And let this committee, in transparent and deliberative fashion, consider ways in which you can reduce your institution’s contribution to the on-going lethality.

As you go through the portfolio, activist students and faculty will learn the many constraints under which a university functions. They will learn that divestiture can’t be done overnight, nor can it easily be complete. But you will find some low-hanging fruit: investments in firms directly connected to things you’d rather not be responsible for or see splashed across the front page of the campus paper. Start the process of reinvesting in a manner that better reflects your values and kills fewer people. (You could even think about climate change at the same time.) Would such divesting from war stocks really cost the university more than the cost of lawsuits, extra security, and bad PR?

Meanwhile, don’t worry about the campers on your lawn. In fact, help them out: stop flying police helicopters over their heads all night, in return for negotiated quiet times with fewer songs and chants and a clear camp perimeter. Maybe bring in porta-potties and help out with trash pick-up. Make sure that no one harasses anyone on either side. Final papers are coming due; exams aren’t far off. If students feel there’s a process underway in which they are involved, they will start to strike camp on their own.

This may seem like giving into pressure — but you truckle to rich donors and grandstanding politicians all the time, so why not work with actual members of your own community, whom large majorities of your student body agree with? They, not cynical provocateurs and performative politicians, comprise your future alumni donor base, and they will be more inclined to give later if you refrain from cracking their heads now. By inviting passionate students into substantive discussions, you will drop the control rods into a reaction that’s getting too hot. It is a truth as old as bureaucracy itself that there’s no better way to slow things down than to commend it to a committee.

Students, you don’t want to slow things down, and may fear being co-opted by such a process. That is a valid fear, and you should resist committee stalling. Had Chinese leaders not panicked in 1989 that the Communist Party itself would split, they might have coopted Beijing students into the system, just as past emperors sometimes granted rebel leaders official posts to bring them into the fold. After 1989, the PRC party-state essentially did that, by offering economic growth to garner the enthusiastic support of China’s intellectuals and middle class for nearly three decades without political liberalization (though that liberalization was needed, and China is now suffering from that delay).

But, students, the main impact of divestiture, at least from your one institution, will be at first symbolic, not economic. Just starting a process to consider how your university can divest from the most egregious war stocks will send a powerful message and encourage similar processes on other campuses and in other institutions around the US and the world.

University presidents, confrontation may be your first impulse amidst all the outsiders goading you to violence, but no good will come of it. Compromise — and a committee — will serve everyone better than a bloodbath in the quad.

1981年，我第一次去中国住在武汉，当时我在华中工学院(现华中理工大学)教英文并学习中文。我去中国是机缘巧合，由于之前有位教授本该去教英文，结果由于种种原因没有去成，当时是波士顿大学英文教授的我母亲临危受命来到武汉，我随她同往。两周之后，我们到达武汉，当时春节刚过。我不认识一个中国人，对中国也几乎是一无所知。

我很快知道了武汉著名的热干面有多好吃。在校园里有个小卖部的地下室有个热干面摊，每天早上五六点外面就排起长队，大家手拿大锅大碗来买面回家当早饭。如果我没记错，面摊老板有个小流水线：他将定量的熟面放入碗中，撒上芝麻酱，淋上酱汁，撒上剁碎的辅料。在美国，所谓的“芝麻面”很普遍，越来越多的美国人也听说过担担面。热干面是同一类面食，却与无处不在的“芝麻面”截然不同。自从我离开武汉之后，我在中国和美国都吃过热干面，不过和我当时在武汉吃的热干面味道相比总是差了些什么。我在武汉吃的热干面辛辣开胃，我边吃边出汗，尤其在武汉春夏之交，拂晓清晨温度已经有摄氏30多度。

虽然在华中工学院时我才是一名大学三年级的学生，但我已经算是“外国专家”，我丰厚的月收入是250元人民币，用外汇券支付。我的工资高于当时华中工学院的全职教授。我可以不假思索的去买任何我想要的东西：自行车、钢笔、棉袄、月琴、高级茉莉花茶，甚至是巧克力。我在友谊商店买东西，并很快发现这里只收外汇券，一般的武汉市民无法在这里购物。大学的管理者希望校园里为数不多的外国人仅在专为外国人开设的食堂用餐，外国人和中国的教职工住宿也是分开的。我们有不少现金，但是大学没有给我们一般教职工使用的来购买粮食等主食的粮票。我模糊的知道有两种货币在流通，分别是外国人使用的外汇券和一般市民使用的人民币，但我起初根本不知道粮票是什么。

我每天很早就加入了买热干面的队伍，不过那时候我并不知道粮票的用途。我站在小卖部的地下室等待，轮到我时我就递过去几毛钱现金。接下来面摊老板总会和我后面的排队的人有一小段湖北话的讨论。我听不懂。后面排队的人就会站出来一个，上前一步给面摊老板一张很小很旧的印花纸 ，也就是一张粮票。面摊老板就会应了一声在我的碗里盛面拌面。当我意识到武汉人所给予我的一切已经为时已晚。我当时是一个月收入在250元的美国男孩，武汉人愿意给我他们全家吃饭依靠的粮票。我开始向给我买热干面的人还钱，他们从不接受。毋庸置疑我在校园中是为数不多的老外，每个人都大概知道我是谁。所以大家可能都知道一个爱吃热干面的美国男孩，所以他们集体决定每天将每家的粮票给我几两。

如今我成了中国历史的教授，于美国华盛顿特区的乔治城大学，教授未来的美国外交专家。39年前我在武汉生活，39年后，美中关系更为复杂。我经常评论中美关系和美国对华政策。现在新型冠状病毒在武汉蔓延，武汉人民在春节之际被隔离无法出城。我想起我在华中的朋友和同事，尤其是那些我不认识但贡献了他们的粮票只为让我吃上热干面的好心人们。他们矜持的友好、不求回报，对于一个陌生外国人的好意让我久久不能忘怀。武汉加油!多保重! 新春快乐!谢谢你的热干面!

美国乔治城大学教授 米华健

The following are the signatories of the open letter written by an international community of scholars of the Uyghur region, its peoples, and related issues in China studies, regarding Michelle Bachelet’s visit to Xinjiang and her statement that followed it. The text of the letter is published in French here and in English here. The text in English also follows the list of signatories in this Medium post.

Björn Alpermann, Chair of Contemporary Chinese Studies, University of Würzburg

Ildiko Beller-Hann, Associate Professor Emerita, University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Gardner Bovingdon, Associate Professor, Indiana University

Darren Byler, Assistant Professor, Simon Fraser University

Kevin Carrico, Senior Lecturer, Monash University

Sandrine Catris, Assistant Professor, Augusta University

William Clark, Adjunct Professor, Northwest University

Michael Clarke, Senior Fellow, Australian Defence College, and Adjunct Professor, Australia-China Relations Institute, University of Technology Sydney

Tom Cliff, Senior Lecturer, College of Asia and the Pacific, The Australian National University

Michael Dillon, Professor of History, Affiliate, Lau China Institute, King’s College, London

June Teufel Dreyer, Professor of Political Science, University of Miami, Florida

Arienne Dwyer, Professor, University of Kansas/University of Washington

Vanessa Frangville, Senior Lecturer, Université libre de Bruxelles

Timothy Grose, Associate Professor of China Studies, Rose Hulman Institute of Technology

Chris Hann, Professor Emeritus, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology Halle, Germany, and Fellow, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, UK

Rachel A. Harris, Professor of Ethnomusicology, SOAS University of London

Aziz Isa Elkun, Researcher, SOAS University of London

Magnus Fiskesjö, Associate Professor, Cornell University

Justin Jacobs, Professor, American University

Thierry Kellner, Lecturer, Université libre de Bruxelles

Ondrej Klimes, Research Fellow, Czech Academy of Sciences

Martin Lavička, Assistant Professor, Palacký University Olomouc, Czech Republic

James Leibold, Professor, La Trobe University

Jonathan Lipman, Professor Emeritus, Mount Holyoke College

Victor H. Mair, Professor of Chinese Language and Literature, University of Pennsylvania

James McMurray, Lecturer, University of Sussex

Mukaddas Mijit, Postdoctoral Fellow, Université libre de Bruxelles

James Millward, Professor, Georgetown University

Laura T. Murphy, Professor, Sheffield Hallam University

Chiara Olivieri, Post-doctoral Fellow, Universidad de Granada (Spain)

Alexandre Papas, Chargé de recherche, CNRS (France)

Dilnur Reyhan, French National Institute for Oriental Studies/European Uyghur Institute

Sean R. Roberts, Professor of International Affairs, The George Washington University

Eric Schluessel, Assistant Professor, The George Washington University

Guldana Salimjan, Postdoctoral Fellow, Simon Fraser University

Joanne Smith Finley, Reader in Chinese Studies, Newcastle University

Rian Thum, Senior Lecturer, University of Manchester

David Tobin, Lecturer in East Asian Studies, University of Sheffield

Sabine Trebinjac, Directrice de recherche, Centre National de la recherche scientifique, France

Adrian Zenz, Senior Fellow in China Studies, Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation

Open letter from international community of scholars of Xinjiang and the Uyghurs, regarding UH High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet’s visit to the Xinjiang Uyghur Region and her public statement

3 June 2022

In the spring of 2017, hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs and other Indigenous peoples began quietly disappearing into prisons and internment camps in China’s “Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.” By the end of that year, this secretive internment program had become obvious to the small community of international scholars who specialize in the study of the region, and in 2018 we wrote to United Nations officials urging an investigation.

Four years on, we are still awaiting a report from the UN’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) on this issue. In the intervening years, we have conducted rigorous studies of China’s policies in Xinjiang (or Eastern Turkistan, as it is known to much of its indigenous population) and found that China is committing crimes against humanity at a scale that extends far beyond the mass internment program.

We are grateful that the OHCHR, under the direction of Michelle Bachelet, consulted with some members of our community of academic experts on the region before her visit to China and Xinjiang last month. However, we were deeply disturbed by her official statement of May 28, which ignored and even contradicted the academic findings that our colleagues, including two signatories to this letter, provided.

It is rare that an academic field arrives at the level of consensus that specialists in the study of Xinjiang have reached. While we disagree on some questions of why Beijing is enacting its atrocities in Xinjiang, we are unanimous in our understanding of what it is that the Chinese state is doing on the ground.

This extraordinary consensus is a result of the unprecedented quantity of evidence that the Chinese state has provided in its own documents, some of them leaked but most of them publicly released on the Chinese internet. This evidence, complemented by survivor testimonies and satellite imagery, offers a detailed picture of what can be credibly called a genocidal program.

The evidence clearly shows that Beijing has indiscriminately placed an estimated one million or more indigenous inhabitants of Xinjiang into various forms of extra-legal confinement, not just in the internment camps, but also in pre-trial detention centers and formal prisons. Many of the internment and indoctrination camps have recently been closed, though there is no evidence that the system has been shut down entirely. More importantly, a substantial portion of internees from now-closed camps have been transferred to formal prisons after sham trials, while others have been placed in forced labor programs. Torture, rape, and other mistreatment are rife within the prisons, detention centers, and camps.

At the same time, Uyghur children have been separated from their parents in increasing numbers, moved to boarding schools where they are raised to speak and act as Han Chinese. By 2018, the Chinese government reported that they had achieved a boarding rate of roughly 50% in Xinjiang’s middle-school population. Uyghur women have been subjected to systematic forced sterilization, birth control, and abortion to achieve what Beijing calls “population optimization,” while Han Chinese citizens have been encouraged to have more children.

Han Chinese settlers have been moved into the region by the thousands, while the state has expropriated Uyghur land and destroyed Uyghur towns, often moving inhabitants to non-voluntary labor in factories outside of Uyghur-majority areas. Religious practices as simple as owning the Qur’an or avoiding pork and alcohol have been criminalized. Authorities have bulldozed key historical monuments, pilgrimage sites, mosques, and Uyghur graveyards.

In her statement, High Commissioner Bachelet not only failed to condemn these policies, but she declined to mention any of them beyond the mass internment program, which she referred to using Beijing’s latest euphemism, “vocational training education centers.” Instead, Bachelet asked Beijing to “undertake a review of all counter terrorism and deradicalization policies to ensure they fully comply with international human rights standards.”

High Commissioner Bachelet’s words echo the Chinese state’s claim that their atrocities in Xinjiang are all are part of a “counter-terrorism” effort, a claim that our research and the Chinese state’s own documents show to be false. Beijing’s state media has, predictably, presented her comments as vindication.

The information that our profession has provided to the OHCHR is not the result of just one or two researchers’ work. It is the unanimous consensus of the entire community of scholars who are independent of the Chinese state and have devoted their lives to the study of the region. We urge the OHCHR to fully incorporate this knowledge into its long-delayed report on China’s actions in Xinjiang, and we urge the OHCHR to release the report without political interference or further delay.

Here is an intentionally short list of key readings, evidence and resources regarding the crisis in Xinjiang / East Turkestan. See the link to the UHRP bibliography at the end for a more complete list of news and academic references.

SHORT OVERVIEW, FIRST PERSON ACCOUNT:

Raffi Kachidourian, “Surviving the Crackdown in Xinjiang,” The New Yorker 5 April 2021.

KEY BOOKS:

General overview edited volume, articles by top specialists emphasize colonialism and global connections. This book, many of whose authors write from the left, answers concerns voiced by some others on the left that the crisis in Xinjiang is made up or manipulated by the US government or other western forces aiming to undermine the PRC.

Darren Byler, Ivan Franceschini, and Nicholas Loubere, eds. Xinjiang Year Zero. Canberra: Australian National University Press, 2022. (Free download)

On security, the terrorism issue and relationship to Global War on Terror (short):

Sean Roberts, The War on the Uyghurs: China’s Internal Campaign against a Muslim Minority. Princeton University Press, 2020.

On digital surveillance, the camps (short):

Darren Byler, In the Camps: China’s High-tech Penal Colony. Columbia Global Reports, 2022.

History of the region since ancient times, though most coverage is of modern period. The last chapter covers 2005 to 2020 and offers my interpretation of why this is happening):

James Millward, Eurasian Crossroads: A History of Xinjiang. Revised and Expanded edition. London: Hurst, Co.; New York: Columbia University Press, 2021.

EVIDENCE AND SOURCES:

The Xinjiang Documentation Project (University of British Columbia) (on-going repository of important materials)

The Uyghur Tribunal (includes links to documents and testimony by experts worldwide, up to Dec. 2021)

KEY REPORTS:

Articles on the camps, labor and birth suppression:

Zenz, Adrian. ‘Thoroughly reforming them towards a healthy heart attitude’: China’s political re-education campaign in Xinjiang Central Asian Survey 38 (1), 102–128

Zenz, Adrian. “Sterilizations, IUDs, and Coercive Birth Prevention: The CCP’s Campaign to Suppress Uyghur Birth Rates in Xinjiang.” China Brief 20 (12)

Zenz, Adrian. “Beyond the Camps: Beijing’s Long-Term Scheme of Coercive Labor, Poverty Alleviation and Social Control in Xinjiang.” Journal of Political Risk 7 (12)

On forced labor and involvement of Chinese and international firms:

Xu, Vicky Xiuzhong, et al. “Uyghurs for Sale: ‘Re-education,’ Surveillance and Forced Labor beyond Xinjiang.” Australian Strategic Policy Institute, 1 March 2020.

On forced labor and cotton supply chains:

Murphy, Laura T. et al. “Laundering Cotton: How Xinjiang Cotton is Obscured in International Supply Chains.” Sheffield, United Kingdom: Sheffield Hallam University Helena Kennedy Centre, November 2021.

On forced labor and solar equipment supply chains:

Murphy, Laura. and Nyrola Elimä. “In Broad Daylight: Uyghur Forced Labour and Global Solar Supply Chains.” Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Hallam University Helena Kennedy Centre for International Justice, May 2021.

On forced labor and PVC production (used in vinyl flooring):

Murphy, Laura T., Jim Vallette and Nyrola Elimä. “Built on Repression: PVC Building Materials’ Reliance on Labor and Environmental Abuses in the Uyghur Region.” Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Hallam University Helena Kennedy Centre for International Justice, June 2022.

On destruction of mosques, cemeteries and other Uyghur cultural patrimony:

Ruser, Nathan, et al. ‘Cultural erasure Tracing the destruction of Uyghur and Islamic spaces in Xinjiang.” Autstralian Strategic Policy Institute, Policy Brief Report 38, 2020.

UPDATES, BIBLIOGRAPHY AND FREQUENT DETAILED REPORTS:

The Uyghur Human Rights Project

See the frequently updated UHRP bibliography of news and reports

In a New York Times op-ed, Mitt Romney has proposed a kind of boycott lite of the 2022 Beijing Olympics. This is in response to the PRC party-state’s repression which, Romney writes, “is exacting genocide against Uighurs and other ethnic minorities.” Romney is concerned about depriving American athletes of an opportunity to compete in this global event, maybe even to win medals and to stand “atop the medals podium, hand to their hearts, as ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ plays on Chinese soil.” But he is scrupulously avoiding — and perhaps intentionally steering us away from? — the much more effective way to oppose holding genocide Olympics in Beijing in 2022.

Romney says, don’t forbid athletes from taking part in the Olympics. Instead, we should institute “an economic and diplomatic boycott of the Beijing Olympics.” This consists of a couple things: 1) snubbing China by sending only a few diplomats to the Olympics, and instead inviting “dissidents, religious leaders and ethnic minorities to represent us.” 2) telling those spectators planning to fly to China for the Olympics to stay away, thus delivering what Romney considers a grievous economic blow to hoteliers, restauranteurs and ticket scalpers; 3) convincing NBC to “refrain from showing any jingoistic elements of the opening and closing ceremonies and instead broadcast documented reports of China’s abuses.”

While I understand and share Romney’s sympathy for the athletes, what he proposes is completely unrealistic and carefully avoids doing anything that might actually demonstrate a level of international opprobrium commensurate with the crimes against humanity in Xinjiang.

First of all, for the US to “invite” dissidents, religious leaders and ethnic minorities to represent the US at the Olympics would a) get them in big trouble and b) delegitimize their causes, since the PRC will eagerly point to them — where Romney apparently envisions them, sitting in US section of the stands, in a forest of US flags — and call them American stooges. That’s a horrible idea.

Second, for the relatively few rich Americans who might have gone to the Beijing Olympics to instead decide not to go will make no noticeable difference on hotel occupancy, ticket sales and the like. Domestic Chinese demand is more than sufficient to pack Beijing venues and keep the restaurants busy. People in China have the money and desire to pay top-dollar, or rather top-yuan, for an Olympic experience. Romney’s proposed spectator boycott is pure virtue-signaling: “Well, sure, I was going to go to the Olympics, but you know, what with the genocide and all . . . . ”

Third, how on earth is NBC going to pick and choose which bits of the opening and closing ceremonies to air? There will certainly be a pool feed, for one thing, and NBC won’t be directing it. And the ceremonies will likely include sprawling historical pageants and parades of happy ethnic peoples. These will implicitly assert PRC sovereignty and CCP rule over Hong Kong, Tibet and the Uyghur Region and all non-Han peoples. Which camera angles will NBC not take? Such spectacles are not delivered a la carte. Glittering technology, high-speed trains and the Belt and Road Initiative may well feature in the Beijing Olympic ceremonies. Boastful? Certainly. Jingoistic? Arguably. But not in a way that can be surgically censored as Romney suggests a compliant NBC will do. (Note the irony: in a response to PRC state-controlled media, Romney is suggesting the US government “collaborate” with NBC to determine how the network will cover the event.) Sure, NBC can prepare pieces about what else is going on in China, and air them in the rare interstices between sports events and up-close-and-personal profiles of athletes. But of course, the PRC has kicked most western journalists out of China, so it’s not clear how NBC would report on the Xinjiang internment camps or forced Uyghur labor, for example.

It’s a tough call, I agree. I not only sympathize with the athletes but also with the Chinese people. I don’t want to rain on their parade either. I’m not even sure what I think about a US official boycott as a matter of policy; it’s probably inevitable and necessary, but sad. But regardless of the US government decision, I would view as truly heroic any athlete, particularly a famous one, who chose on their own accord to sacrifice their shot at a medal this time, given the mass imprisonment, birth suppression, and cultural erasure being inflicted on the non-Han natives of Xinjiang.

However, there is a better way of opposing the CCP and protesting the IOC’s decision to hold the Olympics as usual, as if millions of Uyghurs were not in camps, their language and culture not under assault, their families not being wrenched apart to “optimize” the population in Xinjiang. This approach may even give the IOC pause the next time it is tempted to accept a bid from an authoritarian country to host the Olympics. Romney says it’s enough if people simply stay away. I have one answer to that:

“Corporations are people too, my friend.”

The big money in the Olympics is not in hotel rooms or bowls of noodles. It’s in corporate sponsorships and global advertising. And we have a very convenient list of the most prominent sponsors of the Olympics at our fingertips: The Olympic Partner Programme (TOP) gathers and showcases the 13 [sic] multinationals who “through their support . . . provide the foundation for the staging of the Olympic Games and help athletes from over 200 nations participate on the world’s biggest sporting stage.” We hate to tell a young skater or snow-boarder that their winter Olympic dreams have melted thanks to a government’s crimes against humanity. But are we so hesitant to tell the multinationals to just stay home? Here are the proud thirteen multinationals, plus a couple others, still leading the pack to sponsor the genocide Olympics:

Coca-cola

Airbnb

Alibaba Group

Allianz

Atos

Bridgestone

Dow

GE

Intel

Mengniu 蒙牛

Omega

Panasonic

P & G

Samsung

Toyota

Visa

Rather than try to get NBC to tweak its coverage, as Romney wants, if the US wants to take a public-private partnership approach, it could express its displeasure to these companies for still proudly sponsoring the 2022 Olympics.

But it will perhaps be even more effective if people all over the world make that point. We should tell these companies and the IOC that we are not happy they are financing a shindig in Beijing that the CCP will treat as a victory lap. The PRC will throw money at the Olympics to glitz it up anyway. But these corporations should be made painfully aware of their complicity, if they agree to be TOP sponsors of what will surely go down in history as a genocide Olympics.

Resolution regarding the use of Zoom (Nov. 20, 2020)

We propose that the Executive Faculty adopt and promulgate the following resolution (resolution text in plain text; explanatory material in footnotes):

In light of repeated cases of the Zoom Corporation violating freedom of speech and academic freedom by unilaterally shutting down meetings, including campus meetings sponsored by university faculty and approved by universities as campus events, the Main Campus Executive Faculty should call on Georgetown University to:

1. Develop and publicize alternatives to Zoom so that it no longer enjoys a monopoly as on-line classroom platform at Georgetown. These alternatives should be available in time for use by the spring semester 2021.

2. Convene a committee of faculty (MCEF can solicit volunteers) to look at the text of Georgetown’s contracts with Zoom.

The charge of the committee shall be:

· To work with University counsel and representatives of the CIO’s office and CNDLS, to determine whether, to what extent, and in what way the contract allows Zoom to block or censor Georgetown affiliated meetings, classes, conferences, webinars and so on. The committee should discuss language to prohibit, limit and / or penalize Zoom’s ability to curtail on academic freedom in violation of AAUP guidelines and university norms.[1]

· If the committee determines that Georgetown University’s contract with Zoom indeed allows Zoom to censor academic content, then recommendations should be made to preserve academic freedom. If Georgetown University contracts with a third party in such a way that compromises the academic freedoms of the university community, especially when that third party controls the virtual space in which we now conduct all our classes and meetings, that is a violation of the 1940 AAUP principles of academic freedom and of the Georgetown Faculty Handbook.[2]

· Recommend prompt steps to resolve any unsustainable conflict between principles of academic freedom and the contract with the Zoom Corporation.

[1] In the recent case at State University of San Francisco, SUSF President Lynn Mahoney stated that “we also recognize that Zoom is a private company that has the right to set its own terms of service in its contracts with users.” The committee should determine whether Georgetown’s contract with Zoom similarly allows Zoom to cite “terms of service” as a reason to censor academic content on our campus and consider ways to prevent Zoom using it’s own unilateral determination of what is legal or not to censor campus speech. In its censorship of events related to Tiananmen and Hong Kong, Zoom claimed “local laws” in the PRC as a reason to block meetings in the USA, without stipulating which laws. In the Sept. 2020 blocking of meetings regarding Palestine at SUSF, Zoom claimed US laws as a reason, though SUSF itself found that no laws would be broken. Zoom assures universities that it honors academic freedom, but if it can, whenever faced with third party political pressure, unilaterally assert that this law or that law necessitates its censorship, then such assurances are meaningless. Contracts must have teeth to assure proper service from Zoom, just as they would from any other contractor.

[2] Note: The AAUP Principles state, in part, “teachers are entitled to freedom in the classroom in discussing their subject” (and of course, Zoom now is our classroom). The Georgetown Faculty Handbook section III.C.I states:

Free inquiry and unconstrained publication of the results of inquiry are at the heart of a university. Our University commitment to academic freedom supports all faculty (and professional librarians) in research, teaching, and professional service in and beyond the University by protecting free inquiry and free expression. Faculty enjoy academic freedom in the classroom, the laboratory, the studio, the library, and all the domains of their academic activity.

A review of Klaus Mühlhahn, Making China Modern: From the Great Qing to Xi Jinping. Harvard University Press, 736 pp, £31.95, January 2019, ISBN 9780674737358.

Note: I was commissioned to write this review for a well-known general audience book review publication, who then spiked it (after paying me a kill fee). I took a long time and submitted an over-long, over-specialized draft, so I don’t think their decision not to run it was ideological. In any case, after mulling it over, I realized I wanted to write this for the China studies audience and not a general audience anyway, so I’m making my review essay available here for those who might be interested. I may treat Dr. Mühlhahn’s textbook too harshly — it’s not easy writing textbooks — but mainly because I see it repeating a problematic general approach that seems to me endlessly reiterated in textbooks, popular accounts and possibly survey classes. The field as a field has long known better, however. I criticize my own role in this, too. General recommendations for the field start in section V below, after the review itself.

I.

Over the past 60 years, a handful of scholarly doorstops–massive, one-volume survey texts — have profoundly shaped how we think about China. John King Fairbank (1907–1991), considered the father of modern Chinese historical studies in the West in the post-war period, produced East Asia: The Great Tradition in 1958 with his Harvard colleagues Edwin Reischauer and Albert Craig. This textbook (which also covered the histories of Japan, Korea and Vietnam) organized the history of the East Asian mainland as a continuous series of Chinese “dynasties” (rather than distinct empires or kingdoms) and promulgated the idea that foreign affairs in traditional East Asia was conducted through the Sinocentric “tribute system.” As red guards during the Cultural Revolution wreaked havoc on that great tradition, the new edition of the textbook came out under the expanded title East Asia: Tradition and Transformation (1973–1989), thereby helping entrench a dialectical approach to tradition and modernity into the study of China’s recent past. Fairbank maintained his general paradigm while incorporating more recent research in his China: A New History (1992), issued in new editions until 2006 — Merle Goldman adding post-Mao era material after Fairbank’s death.[1] While specialists in Chinese history have mostly moved on, for baby-boomers and many millennials who took a China survey class in university — a group including many of today’s senior policy-makers, journalists and political scientists — Fairbank’s imprint runs deep.

Since it is unwieldy to squeeze all of the Chinese past, let alone all of East Asia’s, between two covers, the one-volume history of “modern China” emerged. Of course, locating the advent of “modern” (a concept usually derived from European experience) in China is problematic. Japanese sinologists of the Kyoto School believed the Asian modern started in the early Song Dynasty (960–1279); for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), modern China begins with the Opium War (1839–42), with the arrival of Western imperialist gunboats. Fairbank himself adopted a similar periodization in his 1986 survey, The Great Chinese Revolution, 1800–1985. Many “modern China” history courses followed suit, although to periodize from the nineteenth century stacks the deck: it prioritizes European contacts over indigenous developments and opens the story at the nadir of the Qing Empire’s fortunes — ignoring its economic floruit and its vast expansion during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

It has now common to cover the all or most of the Qing empire as part of the story of “modern China,” and to treat the Qing as a last imperial “Chinese” dynasty. For Immanuel Hsu, The Rise of Modern China (1970–1999) began with the Qing; Jonathan Spence started his Search for Modern China (1990) just a bit earlier in the late Ming (1368–1644), on the eve of the Qing. Klaus Mühlhahn’s new entry into the scholarly doorstop category, similarly entitled Making China Modern, similarly begins with the Qing conquest of Beijing (1644, eight years after the empire’s founding in 1636). Mühlhahn then takes us up to the 2010s.

All these textbooks employ an implicit definition of “modern” that entails post-Westphalian concepts of the state, nationalism, industrialization and globalization, accompanied by upwelling challenges to old socio-cultural hierarchies. Besides the Eurocentrism of many of these markers, scholars speaking the language of cultural theory might easily call out the very concept of “modern.” Nevertheless, for the quotidian purposes of a survey history, few readers will be bothered by the appearance of “modern” in the title of a book of this sort. Mühlhahn doesn’t explain precisely why the China of Xi Jinping has been made modern while that of Great Qing was not so, but few readers will care.

More troublingly, however, these “modern China” textbooks — like most China histories aimed at general readerships — also embed an unexamined yet problematic conception of “China” itself. The political history of continental East Asia involves a multiplicity of kingdoms, some but not all now considered part of “Chinese” history. Their rulers were of various ethnicities and spoke different languages. Their states occupied many different areas of what is now the People’s Republic of China (PRC), often concurrently and inimically with other states. This drama is not so different from that of the past 2500 years of monarchies and empires in Europe, yet because in the twentieth century the Chinese Communist Party managed to assemble a territory of imperial scale, while Europe consists presently of distinct polities, we now discuss “China” as if it were a single continuous political entity with “five thousand years of history,” and see “modern China” as immanent in the parade of “Chinese” dynasties: an imperial chrysalis from which the People’s Republic of China, the CCP party-state, unfolded like a butterfly after milleniums of moltings.

Mühlhahn does not deviate from this implicit understanding of modern China as reiteration and culmination of previous avatars, and again, it might be too much to ask that a survey challenge the conventional nationalistic narrative. There is much to admire in this book. Though hefty, it reads briskly. Mühlhahn lingers in chapter summaries and conclusions to stress his unifying arguments, but otherwise marches us at pace through the Qing, the revolutionary era, the Maoist period, and “reform and opening” since the late 1970s. The coverage stops just before Xi Jinping’s drastic recentralization and personalization of power in 2018. Near the end, Mühlhahn states that Deng Xiaoping through “formal rules and informal norms” had institutionalized term limits for China’s highest leaders (pp. 501–502), and that “‘strongman’ politics were brought to a close” (p. 611) with the death of Deng. Most China scholars would have said the same. Of course, all were proven wrong when Xi waived those term limits for himself in 2018, prompting concerns that he hopes to rule as president-for-life. It is unfortunate but understandable that the book ends just shy of that drastic return to authoritarian one-man rule.

Mühlhahn chooses “institutions” as his recurring theme. The choice, while not original, suits his purpose, allowing him to link past China-based states and the PRC as, for example, when he compares today’s gaokao nation-wide college entrance exam to the civil service exams that staffed the upper echelons of the imperial bureaucracy. (A cynic might note another continuity: just as past elites subverted the traditional exam system by purchasing official ranks, the rich in China today opt out of the gaokao altogether by sending their children to private schools and foreign colleges.) The institutional focus also helps tie together the self-strengthening efforts of the 19th century to the New Policies at the end of the Qing, to the Guomindang (Nationalist, GMD) developmental state, and to the more revolutionary PRC transformation of state and society into one, long continuum. Mühlhahn thus transcends the political boundaries of the revolutions 1912 and 1949, which have too often been treated as absolute fault-lines. He argues powerfully that under both Leninist parties, the GMD and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), ruling institutions and national identity have become increasingly militarized, an insight I recalled as I observed the PRC party-state’s fetishistic display of weapons of mass destruction during the military parade celebrating the 70th anniversary of its founding in October 2019. Mühlhahn also highlights such PRC institutions as the hukou (household registration, controlling internal migration) and danwei (workplace, residence, and lowest administrative unit in PRC cities). These administrative devices are easily neglected in a general survey of this kind, but have profoundly shaped individual lives and the Chinese economy.

The book has other noteworthy strengths. Mühlhahn is a professor at the Free University of Berlin, and he pays welcome attention to German activity in 19th century China — a topic neglected in Anglophone China histories, which stress British imperialism. He accounts for environment more than previous surveys have, both in regard to past interactions of man and nature and in noting China’s looming crisis of sustainability. Mühlhahn’s reading of recent specialist research, especially on the 20th and 21st centuries, informs his clear-eyed denunciations of Maoist atrocities during the land reform, anti-rightist movement of the 1950s, the Great Leap Forward (1958–62) and the Cultural Revolution 1966–76) — events which Western accounts once shrouded in revolutionary romanticism.

[1] Paul Cohen, in Discovering History in China (Columbia University Press, 1984), influentially critiqued this tradition / modernity binary, with the result that recent generations of China historians use those terms more carefully.

II.

There are, however, mistakes and omissions here. These are not so much failings of this book per se, but ultimately arise from how the field a whole approaches Chinese history, especially as reflected in trade books aimed at general readership.

First, perhaps it is Mühlhahn’s institutional focus, or perhaps because he is following the template of earlier doorstop surveys, but one must ask: were no women involved in Making China Modern? Issues impacting women show up occasionally in Mühlhahn’s coverage of PRC era (for example, marriage reform and the one-child policy) but except for a brief mention in the context of the late Qing New Policies, not before then. Qiu Jin (1875–1907), the revolutionary “woman knight” never rides onstage here. Between the Dowager empress Cixi launching the New Policies in 1901 (p. 201) and Jiang Qing launching the Cultural Revolution in 1965 (p. 460), few if any women appear. The prominent intellectual Ding Ling merits a mention for her 1928 romantic story, “The Diary of Miss Sophie” (p. 255), not for her feminist denunciation of patriarchal norms perpetuated by the Chinese Communists in their Yan’an base area. By publishing her “Thoughts on March 8” in the Liberation Daily in 1942, Ding Ling earned “rectification” from Mao Zedong, and despite her effusive expressions of loyalty thereafter, she was punished for the rest of her life for the mistake of thinking the Party would tolerate constructive criticism.

Women in China were not simply the stuff of social history; they figured in the political and economic developments that are central to Mühlhahn’s narrative. Gender and women’s history has comprised one of the most prolific research areas within the China field since the 1980s, and work by Tani Barlow, Dorothy Ko, Gail Hershatter, Emily Honig, Hu Ying, Joan Judge, Susan Mann and others has shown us how women perpetuated Chinese scholarly and commercial elites and sustained domestic, agrarian and proto-industrial economies; their labor disproportionately drove China’s industrialization and debates over “modernity” and the health of the “Chinese nation” revolved around the image of Woman.

III.

Another issue is Mühlhahn’s relative neglect of the Qing as an imperial and the PRC as post-imperial state. I myself have worked mainly on the Qing period, which makes me predictably if perhaps unfairly picky about Mühlhahn’s coverage of that Manchu-centered empire. Nevertheless, I critique Mühlhahn’s treatment of the Qing empire and its legacy here, precisely because he is not alone in his interpretation, but reflexively repeats conventions in the field going back to Fairbank and nationalistic Chinese narratives before him.

Consider this sentence about the eighteenth century: “The High Qing period was a time of peace and social order, material splendor, cultural refinement, technological progress, and continued territorial expansion” (pp. 55–58). Most of the items in this list are true, and encapsulate the more positive view of the Qing which has emerged since its archives were first opened to researchers in the 1980s. But note the glaring contradiction: How could the High Qing be both a “time of peace” and one of “continued territorial expansion”? That a scholar could write such a thing displays something else: an apologetics for or simply neglect of Qing and PRC imperialism that infects, or has infected, most China scholars inside and outside of China (myself included).

Many China historians writing in English employ a euphemistic vocabulary that obscures the fact that the Qing empire and PRC state after it were built by military force or the threat thereof. In territories newly acquired by the Qing, Han settler colonialism followed wherever farming was environmentally feasible (and sometimes where it was not), a pattern repeated under the PRC. Referring to these territories, historians often use the word “unification” (54) instead of “conquest,” and speak of “reunification” of places that were never previously part of the state wanting to “reunify” it (539). Mühlhahn even slips and refers to the “recapture of Taiwan in 1683” (87), though no China-based state — not even an imperial dynasty — had ever ruled the island before. I am guilty of similar euphemism: in 1996 I suggested the field adopt “frontier studies” as a rubric to study newly-conquered Qing imperial territories around the periphery of Ming China. In suggesting “frontiers” and avoiding such terms as “colony,” I was adopting the outlook and the vocabulary of a research center in the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences with which I had collaborated.[1]

Besides adopting PRC terminology, the field sanitizes Qing imperial expansion in other ways. In a manner reminiscent of how historians once depicted European expansion into the American west, Mühlhahn writes of Chinese “homesteaders” and “settlers” who cleared and farmed “regions along the borders” of Sichuan, Yunnan, Guizhou, Taiwan, Manchuria, Tibet and Central Asia (33). What we might call settler colonists in another context, here are engaged in “internal migration” to “open borderlands.” First of all, how are these places “internal” if they were not yet or only recently under control of the state? Implicit in this slippage is the normalization of the CCP party-state’s ahistorical claim that all territory currently under its control has always been “China.” Second, these places were not “open,” nor were they “wilderness” (49) any more than the pre-Colombian Americas were. There were already people there before Qing conquest and Chinese settlement, obviously so in the cities of Tibet and southern Xinjiang, but also in the valleys and mountains of Sichuan, Taiwan, Yunnan and Guizhou and plains of Mongolia, northern Xinjiang, Tibet and Manchuria. In many cases, Han settlers displaced non-Chinese then clear-cut forests and plowed pastures to plant crops. This early modern expansion of Chinese settlers backed by Qing military force was similar to the expansion of Europeans across the Americas or that of Russians across Siberia. This displacement should not be glossed over. Indeed, that Chinese, like Europeans, participated in mass continental migration, with similar impacts on ecosystems and indigenous cultures, should be a key insight of early modern world history.

After its formation in 1636 (not 1644, as Mühlhahn writes), the Qing embarked upon over a century of imperial expansion through both military and diplomatic means. Qing armies comprised of Manchus, Mongols and other Inner Asian cavalry, along with growing numbers of Chinese progressively took over north China, south China, Taiwan, Mongolia, Xinjiang and Tibet. Their main adversaries to the south were rump elements of the Ming, whom Qing dispatched from China and Taiwan in under forty years. To the west, Qing struggled for twice as long with the Junghar Mongol confederation, vying for supremacy in Mongolia, Xinjiang and Tibet. The Qing rivalry with the Junghars was an epic, eight-decade hot and cold war, a geo-political competition for the legacy of Genghis Khan and role as patron of Tibetan Buddhism, a faith both Mongols and Tibetans followed. It was in the course of these Junghar wars that the Qing fiscal-military state matured, while conquering territory that now comprises a full third of the PRC. This is the primary reason twentieth-century Chinese republics have claimed sovereignty over Tibet, Xinjiang and outer as well as inner Mongolia. Yet the name “Junghar” does not appear once in Mühlhahn’s book, and he alludes only indirectly to Qing expansion in Inner Asia.

[1]James A. Millward, “New Perspectives on the Qing Frontier,” in Gail Hershatter, Emily Honig, Jonathan N. Lipman and Randall Stross, eds. Remapping China. Stanford University Press, 1996.

IV.

Instead, Mühlhahn rehashes the myth of Confucian peace. “In the eighteenth century,” he writes, “large regions of East Asia, with China at its center, experienced a long epoch of peace and prosperity, on the foundations of a tributary-trade order, at a time when Europe was more or less continuously engulfed by war and turmoil” (p. 80, see also p. 25). In the 1960s, when John King Fairbank first proposed his model of “traditional Chinese foreign relations” based on the “tributary system,” he did not have a large body of archive-sourced secondary literature on Qing empire in Inner Asia to draw on. Today, however, there is no reason to trot out the thoroughly debunked notion of a “tribute system.”[1] “Tributary” status was generally a fiction; it did not require a “tributary” status to trade with the Qing; it was not Sinocentric “China” but the culturally pluralist Manchu ruling elite that occupied the empire’s ideological center. And most important, the eighteenth century was a time of war, not of peace, in East Asia: besides the Inner Asian conquests, the Qianlong emperor (unsuccessfully) invaded Vietnam and Burma, repressed a major rebellion in Taiwan, and fought two wars to repel Nepali invasions of Tibet — and those are just a few of the “Ten Great Campaigns” the emperor boasted about.

The falsehoods of the “tribute system” model infiltrate the maps in Making China Modern, which appallingly label Kazakhstan, Nepal, Bhutan, all of mainland Southeast Asia and Korea as “Chinese vassals” (102–103). This is worse than DreamWorks promoting China’s false claims on Southeast Asian seas by sneaking an Asia map into its film Abomidable that shows the PRC “nine-dash line” claiming most of the South China Sea.

Fairbank recognized that official Qing rhetoric denigrating its neighbors was self-aggrandizing propaganda to which those involved in diplomatic exchanges simply paid lip-service. He noted that participants in the charade didn’t actually believe in it. Sources in languages other than Chinese confirm that neighbors knew their “tributary” status was a fiction and Qing didn’t actually dominate them. Since Fairbank wrote, however, popularizers have repeatedly mistaken his proposed Sino-centric worldview for a factual description of the late imperial world order — as does the map-maker here.

Equally telling is another cartographic curiosity: many of the maps in the later parts of Mühlhahn’s book simply chop off the western half of the PRC (Xinjiang and Tibet) all together. It is admittedly hard to fit the breadth of China on a single page (the two page spread maps do include the west), but this convenience is not historically neutral. A text on the map “China under Guomindang, 1928–37” (266) mentions independence of the Mongolian People’s Republic in 1921, and the near Soviet take-over of Xinjiang, but nowhere in the text or maps does Mühlhahn mention that indigenous elites of both Mongolia and Tibet declared independence in 1912 upon the fall of the Qing empire. One might reasonably leave much of Xinjiang and Tibet out of the narrative of Chinese history for the first half of the 20th century, since no power based in China then controlled former Qing Inner Asia. But one should honestly represent the independent status of Tibet and Xinjiang, and not let anachronistic boundary lines run off the edge of the page as these maps do, implying sovereignty by Chinese warlords or the Republic of China where there was none. Nor does the text explain how the PRC ultimately did gain control over Inner Asia: for Xinjiang, this involved a Soviet and Guomindang hand-over and death of the indigenous leadership of the 1945–1949 Eastern Turkestan Republic in a dubious plane crash; in the case of Tibet, it required a bloody military invasion in 1959. A later, similarly truncated, map (469) suggests that the Cultural Revolution’s depredations did not extend to Xinjiang or Tibet. But numbers of Red Guards found their way west to raze monasteries, pen pigs in mosques, and attack non-Chinese ethnic customs as “feudal,” and tens of thousands of “sent-down youth” from eastern Chinese cities accelerated Han migration to Xinjiang.

[1] Questioning of the “tributary system” model began in the 1990s. More recent critiques by historians and political scientists include Peter C. Perdue, “The Tenacious Tributary System,” Journal of Contemporary China 24 (96): 1002–1014; and Victoria Hui, “Cultural Order in Historical Asia: Confucian Peace or Liberal Peace?” in Christian Reus-Smit and Andrew Phillips, eds., Diversity and its Discontents: Culture and Order in World Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2019); and Zhao Suisheng, “Rethinking the Chinese World Order: the Imperial Cycle and the Rise of China,” Journal of Contemporary China 24 (96): 961–982.

V.

I am faulting Mühlhahn for failings that are not so much his own, but are rather paradigmatic to the China field — or at least to its public face. Specialized academic publications, especially those examining gender history or the Qing empire and ethnicity, have been revising these old perspectives for decades. Yet these revisions have seldom percolated up to works written for a broader readership, and the old tropes, such as the tribute system, still infuse journalistic accounts of China. What, then, would a more accurate historical approach to “modern China” look like?

First, it would stop treating China as a politically continuous entity thousands of years old. Rather, bear in mind that PRC just had its seventieth birthday — that makes it 173 years younger than the United States, for example. The exceptionalist and nationalistic narrative of Chinese political continuity is not a new one: it derives from the practice of many states in China writing an official history of their predecessors to legitimate themselves, and in particular from the foundational Records of History by Sima Qian (c. 145–86 BCE), who locked in a historiographic model that represents China as a linear succession of legitimate dynasties, each comprised of a succession of legitimate emperors, each state writing its predecessor (and enemy) into its own origin story. This is a powerful conceit, and the best proof that the historian’s brush can be mightier than the sword. But we should recognize it as rhetorical rather than empirical.

Of course, let’s not ignore the great cultural continuity of the Sinic sphere, rooted in classical Chinese written language and early Chinese literary, historical and philosophical texts. The Chinese classical tradition served as cultural foundation not just for China-based states, but for Chinese-character using societies in Vietnam, Korea and Japan and to lesser extent other places in Southeast, Northeast and Inner Asia. The role of Chinese classical civilization in East Asia is in fact strikingly reminiscent of the Greco-Roman linguistic and cultural tradition in the Mediterranean and Europe, and of the Arabic- and Persian-language Islamic tradition of much of Asia and north Africa. Thus, just as we discuss the commonalities of Christendom and the Islamicate, which linked cultures over space and time in the absence of continuous political unity, we might similarly talk about a Sinicate, or Chinese cultural ecumene, rather than an uninterrupted unitary “China.”

Second, a new paradigm for modern Chinese history would recognize that the PRC came to power by acquiring (not “inheriting”) the bulk of the ethnically diverse Qing empire. Qing included, but was not confined to, the peoples and territories formerly under Ming rule. Though Qing imperial discourse and institutions owed much to Chinese culture and the Ming, it was not limited to these but included Inner Asian elements as well. Writers should not use “Qing” and “China” interchangeably (as Mülhhahn and many others do) any more than we would use “Ottoman” as a synonym for “Turkey.” And if written at all, the term “Qing China” would mean not the whole empire, but rather the ethnographically Chinese former Ming territories that Qing incorporated, in distinction from Qing Inner Asia or Qing Taiwan.

Third, get rid of the ahistorical “tributary system” notion. Drop it from textbooks. Resist the temptation to evoke it in news pieces with such Orientalist clichés as “kowtowing to Beijing.” Instead, historians should clearly define the varied institutions and arrangements employed by the Qing empire in domestic administration and foreign affairs. The Qing administered former Ming territories and new Han settler colonies with the junxian system, whose county magistrates and yamen offices are familiar to readers of Chinese history. But besides this, in Manchuria, Mongolia, Xinjiang and Taiwan the Qing put local non-Chinese elites in charge of indigenous non-Chinese administrative systems, under military governance by the Qing eight-banner system, its officials predominantly Manchu and Mongol, not Han. Chinese-style administration expanded later in tandem with Han settlement, but remembering that Qing in fact employed “one country, many systems” in successfully governing its empire, without endeavoring to Sinicize administration or culture of Inner Asia, provides useful perspective on the PRC struggles with Hong Kongers, Uyghurs, Tibetans and other peoples of its peripheries. Qing Korea and Qing Tibet were special cases: in both, the Qing stationed small garrisons of troops, but did not implement military rule as it did in Mongolia or Xinjiang. The Qing exerted claims on Tibet and Korea, tried to manage lama selection in Tibet and intervened militarily in both places upon occasion, but generally remained more aloof from local affairs than it did in territory it directly administered.

Nor was late imperial foreign policy conducted according to a one-size-fits-all “tributary system.” Asian international relations did not fit the Westphalian model, to be sure, but rather involved a variety of flexible, porous, overlapping and nested hierarchical relationships.[1] “Tributary trade” was not the rule; it also took place in border enclaves or via transnational merchant networks. “Tribute” (a mis-translation of the Chinese word gong) should be understood simply as diplomatic gift exchange. Asian inter-polity relations were not in fact so different from those early modern Europe, since the idealized Westphalian understanding of orderly international relations among a community of equal, independent states did not really emerge until after Napoleon, if ever. And there is certainly no historical precedent for a future East Asia caught up in a neo-tributary system centered on the Chinese Communist Party.

Fourth, a new paradigm would view the aftermath of the Qing fall (1912) more in line with how we treat the that of the Tsarist (1917), Hapsburg (1918), Ottoman (1922) empires, albeit with different ultimate results. As with the other contemporaneous imperial disintegrations, the Qing collapse occasioned multiple declarations of independence from its former imperial territories: the Ming lands, Tibet, Mongolia and, somewhat later, from two Eastern Turkestan Republics in southern and northern Xinjiang. Hong Kong and Taiwan had already been removed from the Qing ambit by other imperial powers. Japan had likewise effectively ended the Qing protectorate in Korea in 1895. For four decades after 1912, Chinese and Chinese-Muslim warlords, two militarized political parties (GMD and CCP), Japanese-sponsored Chinese regimes, and Japan itself vied for power in respective pieces of the former-Qing East Asian mainland. Ultimately, and, to many, surprisingly, the PRC party-state gained a military victory in the former Ming lands. The Soviet Union then relinquished to PRC the Eastern Turkestan Republic in northern Xinjiang (which Stalin had turned into a satellite), but not the Mongolian People’s Republic. The PRC took control of Tibet in two stages, the first (1951) mainly through diplomatic means, the second (1959) by main force. Britain handed the Hong Kong colony it had seized from the Qing empire over to the Chinese Communist Party in 1997. Taiwan, a Qing imperial territory, then a Japanese colony, was governed by a Chinese republic based on the Chinese mainland only from 1945–49, before the full GMD military occupation in 1949. It threw off its Leninist single-party system in the 1990s and has now become a democratic republic in its own right.

Such an approach highlights the pluralism of the Qing empire, a diverse legacy that remains despite efforts by the current CCP regime to snuff out its non-Chinese aspects — through internment of Xinjiang’s indigenous Central Asian peoples in concentration camps, forced proletarianization of Uyghurs and Tibetans, attacks on the native languages of Mongolians, Tibetans, Uyghurs, Cantonese and Hong Kongers. Such a new approach to modern Chinese history would also challenge arguments that the CCP automatically inherited sovereignty over former Qing territories whose people remain, seventy years after the establishment of the PRC, stubbornly unwilling to accept CCP domination as pre-destined. It is patently not true that the entire territory of the PRC today has been politically “Chinese” since ancient times, since there has not been a politically continuous “China” since ancient times. By the CCP logic, if it points to Qing experience to claim that Tibet is “Chinese,” it should do the same with regard to Korea. Nor does it follow that Taiwan should be “reunited” to a China-based republic that never ruled the island, if one does not extend the same dubious claim to the Republic of Mongolia. (The GMD-led Republic of China did in fact continue to claim until the 1990s that the territory of the Mongolian People’s Republic was rightfully “Chinese,” an argument that was at least logically consistent, if problematic and ultimately futile.) No country or international body in the world today challenges PRC claims to sovereignty over any of its contiguous territory, and the international community subscribes to various “one China” work-around phrasings to avoid precisely defining the relationship between Taiwan and the PRC. I don’t suggest politicians should revise these practical political positions. They are not based on ancient historical sovereignty, however. So historians should write it as we see it.

Such a new paradigm might seem too political. It might well make authors and publishers nervous. It certainly fits the definition of “historical nihilism” by which the CCP’s infamous “Document Number Nine” anathematizes non-Party-approved historiography.

But it is just as political to ignore the political and cultural diversity of today’s China. By parroting for generations the euphemistic terminology, historiographic exceptionalism, and cartographic legerdemain that obscures its colonial past, we tacitly accept the PRC’s assimilationism and expansive claims. Rather than talking about “making modern China” as fait accompli, we might recognize that it has been and is still being militarily and ideologically constructed, and that construction in the hands of the CCP party-state entails cultural and physical violence to millions of non-Chinese as well as Chinese people.

[1] James Hevia outlined a non-Fairbankian understanding of Asian inter-domainal relations in his Cherishing Men from Afar (Duke University Press, 1995); Tibetan, Mongolian and Sinic legitimation systems are systematically analyzed in Timothy Brook, et al., Sacred Mandates: Asian International Relations since Chinggis Khan (Chicago University Press, 2018), a book which should replace Fairbank’s The Chinese World Order for those looking to understand East Asian historical international relations.

James Millward

These are my quick notes on reading General Secretary / Chairman Xi’s most recent speech about XUAR. Comments and corrections encouraged (here or on Twitter: @JimMillward )

For convenience, I pasted the Xinhua read-out of the speech below my notes.

1. Separatism? Extremism? Terrorism?

Though that might not ever be highlighted in a speech of this nature, it is interesting that Xi never mentions the large network of facilities which PRC calls vocational schools (and outside observers note are in fact massive internment facilities). More than that, he barely mentions security, beyond the usual mentions of “stability.” There is no mention of “the three evils” or the phrase’s components (separatism, extremism, terrorism). I haven’t read his previous speeches of this nature — it would be useful to compare this to what he said at the first and second Central Xinjiang Work Forums. Certainly compared other with past rhetoric about Xinjiang, the absence of discussion of the “three evils” is noteworthy.

2. Vast deficits — and questions about the beneficiaries of outside subsidies

The primary substance of the speech is the listing of economic statistics regarding on gross regional product, employment, people and villages lifted from poverty, provision of healthcare and so on. I’m not really qualified to analyze these statistics, as I haven’t worked a lot with PRC reported economic statistics and am not an economist. But a couple things jump out at me.

XJP notes that the region’s general budgetary revenue grew from 128 billion to 158 billion yuan from 2014–2019 (he seems to be using a six-year period for all these figures; of course, stopping before COVID19 hit in early 2020). This amounts to an increase of 23% over the period. [There seems to be some problem with the average annual figure given for Xinjiang revenue increase: the speech says 一般公共预算收入由1282.3亿元增长到1577.6亿元，年均增长5.7%. But the total increase of 295.3亿元amounts to an increase of 23%, which divided over 6 years amounts to an average annual increase of 3.8%; if here he’s using a 5 year period, the average would amount to only 4.6% annually. I might be doing something wrong, but I don’t see how you get 5.7% annual increase from these figures.]

During the same period, central government financial transfer subsidies to XUAR and the Bingtuan (note XUAR and Bingtuan are mentioned separately, but the subsidy figure is aggregate) rose from 263 to 422 billion yuan, a 60% increase). There were also the transfers / investments from 19 provinces and cities of eastern China under the “Counterpart Assistance Program” (Aid Xinjiang) to both XUAR and the Bingtuan (again, mentioned separately, but the total is aggregated) amounting to 96.4 billion yuan over 6 years. Xi doesn’t give the yearly amounts, so we can’t add them up ourselves, but he says that overall central subsidies to XUAR and Bingtuan amounted to over 2 trillion yuan, to which we can add the roughly 100 billion from the Counterpart Assistance program to approximate that from 2014–19, PRC central government and 19 provinces and cities in eastern China poured at least 2.1 trillion yuan into XUAR and the Bingtuan, while XUAR’s own revenue increased by only 30 billion. Between 2014 and 2019, outside finances coming into Xinjiang from the center and eastern Chinese provinces and cities increased by over 60%, compared to 23% increase of XUAR’s own revenue. (This XUAR revenue doesn’t seem to include the Bingtuan’s revenue, if any. I don’t know what a province or region’s revenue derives from: I presume taxation of some sort. Someone more qualified than I might try to figure out if so many people as Xi claims were lifted from poverty, how much should that have increased provincial revenue? Is this 23% increase over 6 years measuring more XUAR population in gainful employment?)

Here’s the bottom line: Not only is the CCP still ruling Xinjiang at a huge deficit, but the size of that deficit has ballooned over the past 6 years. The difference between outside subsidy and XUAR’s own revenue has grown from 135 billion in 2014 to 264 billion in 2019, a 48% increase. Though Xi doesn’t mention this, the figures suggest the huge size of expenditure on the camps, new prisons, orphanages and other infrastructure related to the assimilationist campaign of the past few years, as well as that related to hiring security personnel. The figures in this speech thus also corroborate the earlier research by Adrian Zenz and others regarding the cost of the building and running the camps system. It was in part these huge budget spikes that tipped researchers off that something big was going on in Xinjiang.

And, it’s critical to ask, how much of this more than 2.1 trillion yuan went to the Bingtuan (XPCC), which is over 80% Han in membership, and has been recruiting more people from eastern China to move to Xinjiang, and building new cities for Han people, as well as prisons, camps, and factories for poor Uyghurs during this period? The Bingtuan is also supporting a couple million non-productive personnel on pensions, and continues to pay for free education and healthcare for all its members — services just beginning to be extended (according to Xi’s speech) to poor Uyghurs in the southern part of the region.

This is a key distinction, one that Xi’s figures carefully conceal. We need to see the breakdown of central government / Counterpart Assistance subsidies to the Bingtuan as opposed to the XUAR. And it would be great to see that as a per capita figure. My guess is that the per capita payments to the Bingtuan (80+% Han) is a good deal higher than to Uyghur and other native Xinjiang population outside the Bingtuan — even before taking into account that some large percentage of the XUAR subsidy is being spent on security as opposed to real schools, clinics, and so forth.

Local govt. administrations in XUAR are also building internment camps and security infrastructure, of course, and factories built by the Counterpart Assistance Program in partnership with XUAR local administrations have also employed Uyghur workers from the camps system and broader “educational transformation” system. Some were built adjacent to the camps. So subsidies to XUAR government are also supporting the gulag. But the Bingtuan is the leading institution promoting the settler colonization of the Uyghur region by Han Chinese. This is obliquely referred to in Xi’s call to “Ceaselessly strengthen the Bingtuan’s organizational advantage and mobilization ability so that it may better achieve its special function.” 不断增强兵团的组织优势和动员能力，更好发挥特殊作用. It would be good to learn more about that “special function.”

All these figures, including the increase in annual gross regional product from 920 billion to 1.36 billion reflect the vast investment of outside funds into the region to build the high tech, internment, and coerced labor systems.

3. Ideological language about ethnicity

There is no talk here about Xinjiang’s minzu being like seeds of a pomegranate (i.e. a composite of separate entities), though that has been part of the ideological vocabulary used regarding Xinjiang ethnicities in recent years. Instead, another catchphrase enjoys pride of place: 铸牢中华民族共同体意识为主线. “Take firmly casting Zhonghua collective consciousness as the main line.” Zhonghua is the politico-ethnic identity that in theory incorporates all the 56 minzu within it. Note the metaphorical term choulao, which none of my dictionaries (or Google translate) inclue as a word: is it a neologism? Chou 铸 means to cast, as in casting iron or bronze. So it is a melting pot analogy for ethnicity, not a composite one, promoted here. Likewise, everything in this ethnicity paragraph of the speech is about the “Zhonghua” national identity, not individual ethnic identities of Uyghur, Kazakh, Kyrghyz, Han, Hui or others. Most telling is the phrase 新疆各民族是中华民族血脉相连的家庭成员, “Every minzu (nationality, ethnic group) of Xinjiang is a family-member linked to Chinese (zhonghua) bloodlines.” This phrase referencing blood (hence genetic descent) is not brand new; it’s been around since at least 2018 according to my quick Google search. But then, notably, it was used by the Urumchi Mayor Yasin Sidiq (Ya-sheng Si-di-ke 牙生·司地克 ) an August 2018 editorial that infamously and falsely claimed that Uyghurs are unrelated to the Turkic peoples from the time of the medieval Turkic Khaghate. The argument that all non-Han groups in the former Qing empire were originally racially Chinese was promoted by Chiang Kai-shek in his China’s Destiny (1943), but later abandoned after 1949, when the CCP embraced Fei Xiaotong’s 多元一体格局 “many origins, one body framework” and implemented a multi-national nation system similar to that of the USSR. “Many origins, one body” is still the official formulation regarding ethnicity in PRC, as far as I know, and Xi quotes it again here. Fei also talked about melding and fusion of nationalities. But I don’t think Fei argued that all 56 minzu were originally linked to Chinese bloodlines. The General Secretary’s evocation of bloodlines in comments about minzu in Xinjiang (and here may not be the first time; I haven’t researched all his speeches on the subject) marks the transition to racial vocabulary, an official endorsement of the argument that Uyghurs and other native peoples in Xinjiang are genetically Chinese (and thereby Zhonghua becomes a racial term, not just a political one). In the previous official formulation regarding ethnicity in China, Zhonghua was seen as a culmination of national processes under the leadership of the Party, a merging of diverse elements into one (a kind of e pluribus unum), a historical capstone rather than a racial foundation. Now Xi’s language flips that on its head: all the diverse minzu are biologically linked in the past to “Zhonghua,” which is very hard to distinguish from Han. This “consciousness” is to be inculcated through education to all levels and groups in society, the paragraph continues, and it is explicitly linked to the campaign to Sinicize (here the country name is used: 中国化) the Islamic religion — which we know means in practice razing mosques, flattening shrines and ripping down domes.

Xi Jinping speech at Third Xinjiang Central Work Conference (Xinhua read-out / write-up of the speech)

习近平：坚持依法治疆团结稳疆文化润疆富民兴疆长期建疆 努力建设新时代中国特色社会主义新疆

2020–09–26 18:40:54 来源： 新华网

习近平在第三次中央新疆工作座谈会上强调

坚持依法治疆团结稳疆文化润疆富民兴疆长期建疆

努力建设新时代中国特色社会主义新疆

李克强主持 栗战书王沪宁赵乐际韩正出席 汪洋讲话

新华社北京9月26日电 第三次中央新疆工作座谈会9月25日至26日在北京召开。中共中央总书记、国家主席、中央军委主席习近平出席会议并发表重要讲话。习近平强调，当前和今后一个时期，做好新疆工作，要完整准确贯彻新时代党的治疆方略，牢牢扭住新疆工作总目标，依法治疆、团结稳疆、文化润疆、富民兴疆、长期建疆，以推进治理体系和治理能力现代化为保障，多谋长远之策，多行固本之举，努力建设团结和谐、繁荣富裕、文明进步、安居乐业、生态良好的新时代中国特色社会主义新疆。

9月25日至26日，第三次中央新疆工作座谈会在北京召开。中共中央总书记、国家主席、中央军委主席习近平出席会议并发表重要讲话。 新华社记者 鞠鹏 摄

李克强主持会议。栗战书、王沪宁、赵乐际、韩正出席会议。汪洋作总结讲话。

习近平在讲话中指出，第二次中央新疆工作座谈会以来，经过各方面艰辛努力，新疆工作取得了重大成效。新疆经济社会发展和民生改善取得了前所未有的成就，各族群众的获得感、幸福感、安全感不断增强。一是经济发展持续向好。2014年至2019年，新疆地区生产总值由9195.9亿元增长到13597.1亿元，年均增长7.2%。一般公共预算收入由1282.3亿元增长到1577.6亿元，年均增长5.7%。基础设施不断完善，所有地州市迈入高速公路时代。二是人民生活明显改善。2014年至2019年，新疆居民人均可支配收入年均增长9.1%。建成农村安居工程169万余套、城镇保障性安居工程156万余套，1000多万群众喜迁新居。城乡基本公共服务水平不断提升，社会保障体系日趋完善，实施全民免费健康体检，农牧区医疗设施条件明显改善，乡镇卫生院和村卫生室标准化率均达100%，居民基本医疗保险参保率达到99.7%。三是脱贫攻坚取得决定性成就。2014年，新疆共有建档立卡贫困人口77.9万户、308.9万人，贫困村3666个，贫困县32个。截至2019年，全疆累计脱贫292.32万人、退出3107个贫困村、摘帽22个贫困县，贫困发生率由2014年的19.4%降至1.24%。其中，南疆4地州累计脱贫251.16万人、退出2683个贫困村、摘帽16个贫困县，贫困发生率由2014年的29.1%降至2.21%。“两不愁三保障”突出问题基本解决，贫困家庭义务教育阶段孩子因贫失学辍学实现动态清零，贫困人口基本医疗保险、大病保险参保率均达100%，易地扶贫搬迁任务全面完成，贫困群众生产生活条件得到大幅改善。四是中央支持和全国对口援疆力度不断加大。2014年至2019年，中央财政对新疆自治区和兵团转移支付从2636.9亿元增长到4224.8亿元，年均增长10.4%，6年合计支持新疆2万多亿元。19个援疆省市全面加强全方位对口支援，累计投入援疆资金（含兵团）964亿元，实施援疆项目1万余个，引进援疆省市企业到位资金16840亿元，中央企业投资超过7000亿元。总的看，新疆呈现出社会稳定、人民安居乐业的良好局面，为迈向长治久安奠定了坚实基础。事实充分证明，我国民族工作做得是成功的。这些成绩的取得，是党中央坚强领导的结果，是全党全国人民共同奋斗的结果，也凝聚着新疆2500多万各族儿女的智慧和汗水。习近平代表党中央，向参与和支持新疆工作各条战线的同志们，向新疆各族群众，向在基层一线辛勤工作的广大干部职工，表示诚挚的慰问。

9月25日至26日，第三次中央新疆工作座谈会在北京召开。中共中央总书记、国家主席、中央军委主席习近平出席会议并发表重要讲话。 新华社记者 王晔 摄

习近平强调，党的十八大以来，党中央深化对治疆规律的认识和把握，形成了新时代党的治疆方略，坚持从战略上审视和谋划新疆工作，坚持把社会稳定和长治久安作为新疆工作总目标，坚持以凝聚人心为根本，坚持铸牢中华民族共同体意识，坚持我国宗教中国化方向，坚持弘扬和培育社会主义核心价值观，坚持紧贴民生推动高质量发展，坚持加强党对新疆工作的领导。实践证明，新时代党的治疆方略完全正确，必须长期坚持。全党要把贯彻新时代党的治疆方略作为一项政治任务，在完整准确贯彻上下功夫，确保新疆工作始终保持正确政治方向。

习近平指出，保持新疆社会大局持续稳定长期稳定，要高举社会主义法治旗帜，弘扬法治精神，把全面依法治国的要求落实到新疆工作各个领域。要全面形成党委领导、政府负责、社会协同、公众参与、法治保障的社会治理体制，打造共建共治共享的社会治理格局。

习近平强调，要以铸牢中华民族共同体意识为主线，不断巩固各民族大团结。新疆自古以来就是多民族聚居地区，新疆各民族是中华民族血脉相连的家庭成员。要加强中华民族共同体历史、中华民族多元一体格局的研究，将中华民族共同体意识教育纳入新疆干部教育、青少年教育、社会教育，教育引导各族干部群众树立正确的国家观、历史观、民族观、文化观、宗教观，让中华民族共同体意识根植心灵深处。要促进各民族广泛交往、全面交流、深度交融。要坚持新疆伊斯兰教中国化方向，实现宗教健康发展。要深入做好意识形态领域工作，深入开展文化润疆工程。

习近平指出，发展是新疆长治久安的重要基础。要发挥新疆区位优势，以推进丝绸之路经济带核心区建设为驱动，把新疆自身的区域性开放战略纳入国家向西开放的总体布局中，丰富对外开放载体，提升对外开放层次，创新开放型经济体制，打造内陆开放和沿边开放的高地。要推动工业强基增效和转型升级，培育壮大新疆特色优势产业，带动当地群众增收致富。要科学规划建设，全面提升城镇化质量。要坚持绿水青山就是金山银山的理念，坚决守住生态保护红线，统筹开展治沙治水和森林草原保护工作，让大美新疆天更蓝、山更绿、水更清。

习近平强调，要统筹疫情防控和经济社会发展，做好“六稳”工作、落实“六保”任务，持之以恒抓好脱贫攻坚和促进就业两件大事。要健全完善防止返贫监测和帮扶制度机制，接续推进全面脱贫与乡村振兴有机衔接，着重增强内生发展动力和发展活力，确保脱贫后能发展、可持续。要加大政策支持力度，创新体制机制，坚持就近就地就业和有序转移输出就业有机结合。要大力推动南疆经济社会发展和民生改善。要多层次、全方位、立体式讲好新疆故事，理直气壮宣传新疆社会稳定的大好局势、人民安居乐业的幸福生活。

习近平指出，我们党的初心使命就是为包括新疆各族人民在内的中国人民谋幸福，为包括新疆各民族在内的中华民族谋复兴。各级党委要对标新时代党的治疆方略，自觉在思想上政治上行动上同党中央保持高度一致。要坚持不懈强化理想信念教育，突出政治训练，常态化识别干部政治素质，确保各级领导权始终牢牢掌握在忠诚干净担当的干部手中。要加大培养培训力度，研究制定新疆干部队伍培养培训规划，着力培养一支理论功底扎实、政策把握到位、实践能力强的干部队伍。要把建设一支对党忠诚、德才兼备的高素质少数民族干部队伍作为重要任务常抓不懈。要树立鲜明用人导向，对政治过硬、敢于担当的优秀少数民族干部，要充分信任、坚定团结、大胆选拔、放手使用，表现突出的可以直接破格提拔使用。

习近平强调，新疆各族干部是值得信任、有战斗力的。对他们要政治上激励、工作上支持、待遇上保障、生活上关心、心理上关怀，研究采取有效措施，稳定新疆干部人才队伍。要弘扬民族精神和时代精神，践行胡杨精神和兵团精神，激励各级干部在新时代扎根边疆、奉献边疆。

习近平指出，做好新疆工作是全党全国的大事，必须牢固树立全国一盘棋思想，完善党中央统一领导、中央部门支持指导、各省市支援配合、新疆发挥主体作用的工作机制。中央新疆工作协调小组要在党中央领导下，加强对新疆工作的形势研判、政策研究、协调指导、督促检查，对重大问题及时提出工作意见。中央有关部门要各司其职，密切配合，深入调研督导，及时发现问题，帮助解决困难。新疆自治区党委站在一线，要履行好主体责任，抓好工作落实。内地各省区市要切实做好涉疆工作，支持新疆稳定和发展。各援疆省市要加强同新疆协调配合，长期坚持对口援疆，提升对口援疆综合效益。要持续深化改革，加强维稳能力建设，不断增强兵团的组织优势和动员能力，更好发挥特殊作用。

李克强在主持会议时指出，习近平总书记的重要讲话全面总结了第二次中央新疆工作座谈会以来新疆工作取得的重大成效，深入分析了当前新疆工作面临的形势，阐释了新时代党的治疆方略，明确了当前和今后一个时期新疆工作的指导思想、目标任务、方针政策、战略举措，全面部署了推动新疆社会稳定和长治久安的重点工作，具有很强的政治性、思想性、理论性，是指导新时代新疆工作的纲领性文献。要认真学习领会，结合工作实际深入思考，研究贯彻落实措施。要切实把思想和行动统一到党中央关于新疆工作的决策部署上来，以习近平新时代中国特色社会主义思想为指导，增强“四个意识”、坚定“四个自信”、做到“两个维护”，坚定不移抓好各项任务落实，推动新疆社会稳定和长治久安。

汪洋在总结讲话中指出，习近平总书记重要讲话立意高远、思想深邃、内涵丰富，是指导新时代新疆工作的纲领性文献，是引领新疆工作守正创新、胜利前进的强大思想武器。要把学深悟透习近平总书记重要讲话精神作为重要政治任务，真正掌握核心要义和精神实质，把学习的过程变成提高认识、改进工作的过程。要完整准确理解和长期坚持新时代党的治疆方略，结合实际抓好贯彻落实，确保新疆工作始终沿着正确方向前进。要牢牢把握新疆工作总目标，谋长久之策，行固本之举，在事关长治久安的深层次问题上聚焦发力。新疆和中央各部门要制定贯彻落实会议精神的实施意见，对重点任务逐条逐项细化分解，把党中央的决策部署变为实际工作成效。要加强组织领导和协调配合，压实工作责任，强化督促检查。要组织开展丰富多彩的宣传宣讲活动，推动会议精神深入基层、深入人心。

在京中共中央政治局委员、中央书记处书记，全国人大常委会有关领导同志，国务委员，最高人民法院院长，最高人民检察院检察长，全国政协有关领导同志等出席会议。

新疆维吾尔自治区党政负责同志和各地州市党政主要负责同志，新疆生产建设兵团党政负责同志和各师党政主要负责同志，其他各省区市负责同志，中央和国家机关有关部门负责同志，有关人民团体、金融机构、中央企业负责同志，军队有关单位负责同志等出席会议。

By Merdan Ghappar (Mai-er-dan A-ba 麦尔丹∙ 阿巴)

Translated by James Millward. Reporting from BBC and Toronto Globe and Mail.

The text translated below was provided to the BBC and Toronto Globe and Mail as a series of overlapping screenshots taken from a single long text message (I’ve included the original screenshots at the end of this post.) The message describes the captivity of a young Uyghur man, Merdan Ghappar, in a police station in Kucha, Xinjiang. Ghappar, an artist and former dancer, worked as a model for the on-line retail company Taobao and lived in Guangdong in southern China. In 2018 he was arrested on a marijuana charge and served 16 months in prison. In January 2020, a little more than a month after his release from prison, agents from Xinjiang came to Ghappar’s home. They had been dispatched from Kucha, where Ghappar is registered in the PRC household registry system, to bring him back to Xinjiang, supposedly for re-registration and “study.” PRC authorities quite commonly force people to return to the place where their hukou 户口 is registered, and such demands have been commonly used to force non-Han people such as Uyghurs or Tibetans to leave eastern China.

After his arrival in Kucha, Ghappar was taken to the police station, where he was hooded, shackled, and thrown in a crowded cell. During his detention, authorities publicly announced the spread of the novel coronavirus to Xinjiang. Ghappar’s account gives an indication of how authorities treated detainees even after epidemic prevention procedures had supposedly been instituted in the city, and suggests how such conditions and treatment might have spread the virus. Later, the police, perhaps fearing that having recently arrived from eastern China Ghappar might himself be sick with COVID19, moved him to solitary quarantine in a bare room in an “epidemic prevention station” in a neighborhood compound 社区防疫站 . There, although handcuffed to a steel bed, he was able to retrieve his phone from belongings he brought from Guangzhou and write the following account which he sent to a relative in Europe. He also recorded video clips of his surroundings, as reported by the BBC and Toronto Globe and Mail.

This account was provided to the BBC as a series of overlapping screenshots taken from a single long text message. In the style of Chinese language texting, it is largely unpunctuated, but in places phrases and sentences are divided by blank spaces. The original has no line breaks; I have added some paragraph breaks in the translation to highlight changes in topic. Merdan’s written Chinese is chatty and colloquial, but in places he uses more sophisticated phrases, such as 稚嫩 “fresh-faced, tender, youthful” and 雪上加霜 “adding frost on top the snow” (i.e. making things even worse). Despite official PRC claims that its mass detention of Uyghurs and other non-Han people is meant to steer uneducated farmers away from extremist thinking by teaching them Chinese, Merdan clearly enjoys native fluency in Chinese and was successfully employed in Guangzhou before being taken back to detention in Xinjiang. This account begins in mid-January 2020; Merdan makes reference to the alarm about the coronavirus being raised in Xinjiang on 22 January (Western news media reported the spread of the novel coronavirus to Xinjiang on 24 January). Merdan was held in the police station for some 18 days, then quarantined in February. He sent another text message on 29 February 2020. His family abroad has not heard from him since. They sought out news media to publicize Merdan’s plight following his disappearance.

Merdan’s account is consistent with, though more detailed than, other reports by Uyghurs and Kazakhs who have been arbitrarily detained in the PRC gulag in Xinjiang. Before being moved to prisons or the “concentrated educational transformation” camps, internees have often been held in such detention centers (kanshousuo 看守所) in crowded, unhygienic and brutal conditions. Merdan’s testimony corroborates previous accounts of beatings and torture from Uyghurs and Kazakhs who have managed to get out of China after their confinement. His account also shows that the practice of “rounding up everyone who should be rounded up” — a mandate under which Xinjiang authorities have especially targeted professionals and Uyghurs with contacts abroad — was still going on in 2020, despite the coronavirus pandemic and despite PRC claims that internees have “graduated” to work in labor gangs assigned to Xinjiang and eastern Chinese factories.

Merdan’s account:

The people here really have some problem in their head. When I was taken away, I was wearing a Uniqlo down jacket, really good quality, very warm. When I got to this police station, I saw 50–60 people were locked in a small room not 50 meters square in area — I was shocked. A third of the room was taken up by chairs for the duty cops. The rest was men on the right, women on the left, divided up and locked in cages. And from head to toe, they were all wearing four-piece suits. This so-called four-piece suit was a black cloth bag over the head; handcuffs; shackles; and a steel chain between the handcuffs and the shackles. No one was allowed to open the hood to look at each other or at the police. Otherwise they’d get shouted at really viciously.

The first day I was taken there I was screamed at. I was taken there at night. At night when it was time to sleep, because there were too many people and the space so small, not every person could sleep lying down. Some had to sit with their legs curled up. That night I was one of the ones who had to sleep sitting up. Others slept on their sides squeezed together really tightly. At night before sleeping they [the guards] would arrange us in sleeping positions. That night my handcuffs were locked too tightly — it was really painful for my wrists. Because that was the first night I was taken there I didn’t know the rules. I raised my hood to ask the cop who was arranging our sleeping positions, I said my cuffs were too tight, my wrists were aching, could you please loosen them a little bit for me? Then he just shouted fiercely at me: “if you lift that hood again I beat you to death!” I saw he was carrying a rifle on his back so I didn’t dare say anything else. I don’t want to die.

Here the cloth hood on its own is very thick — it’s very stuffy underneath. On top of that, given how many people there were, with few windows, no air circulating, there was little oxygen. Moreover, there was just one fan in a small window. Originally there’d been two, but the other fan was sealed up and wouldn’t run.

Every two police officers and one police assistant (that is, the guards who weren’t wearing police uniforms but a just a camouflage jacket),[1] would do a shift of about 3–6 hours together. While working a shift, smoking or whatever, their personalities were different. Some loved to scream at people, some were okay. The person wearing my hood before me had poked several holes in it. I could see everything in the room. I saw that a lot of police in uniform had a badge on their right arm that said “police assistant” (xieling 协警). Although those police were wearing uniforms, nearly all of them were assistants. If you didn’t see that badge, it was really hard to tell them apart. I saw that a lot of the assistants were kids — from their dewy youthful faces they looked about 17, 18, 20? Maybe. Anyway, they looked like kids dressed in a cop’s uniform. Some had no education — listening to how they talked I got the sense that their cultural level is pretty low.

After I’d been there for a while, I could often hear other interrogation rooms in that underground area? The sounds of horrible screams came through, from men and women. It was awful whatever it was, just terrifying. It scared the hell out of the people in the cages.

Some of the duty cops when they arrived in the morning or the evening would open the window to let some air in. Some wouldn’t. Although there was a fan in the window, if it was turned on it got really cold. It was winter, after all. And maybe it was because we were always sitting and couldn’t move around, so it was easy to get cold. If the window wasn’t open, it was really stuffy.

Some people had different kinds of infectious diseases. There was nothing we could do — we could only all breathe the same air together. For eating, there were only 7–8 plastic bowls and spoons — the spoons were one-time use, disposable ones. But everybody everyday would have to take turns using these 7 or 8 one-time-use spoons. Both the men and the women prisoners shared these bowls and spoons. The police washed the bowls and spoons, but they never washed them clean. Before meals, they would have anyone with an infectious disease raise their hand, and [the police] would say, “those with a disease eat last” or something like that. If you wanted to eat sooner, you could just keep your mouth shut. You understand what I’m saying? But this was a moral problem.

Our food was the leftovers after the cops had eaten, made into rice-soup. I mean that the cooked dishes and rice in the dining hall were clean. The leftovers were then thrown together with rice or noodles, with a bit of water dumped in and mixed up into a soup. In any case every meal always was mixed up with water. Because we normally couldn’t drink water — we were afraid if we drank water we’d need to go to the bathroom, and have to trouble someone to take us to the toilet, and we were afraid of getting yelled at. Of course, there were some who would ask to drink some water. That would depend on whether the duty cop agreed or not.

And the carpet was incredibly dirty, with lots of garbage and lice. On the 22nd [of January, 2020] when the news of the epidemic broke, the cops told us to wear masks underneath our cloth hoods. A hood + a mask. There was even less air. And that day they hadn’t opened the window. The room was really hot because there was a radiator in the room. Later a cop used an epidemic infrared forehead thermometer to check all of our temperatures. But I don’t think that thing is as accurate as an underarm thermometer. Body temperature is not the same when wearing clothes. Because of the various factors I mentioned above, my temperature and those of several people reached more than 37 or 38 degrees. Then they probably thought I was running a temperature, and I was also from eastern China.[2]

After a few days they took me to another room upstairs, pretty big, like a questioning room. There were lots of small cubicles inside, the kind with stainless steel bars. They had me stay alone in one of those rooms, with two people to guard me. I was still wearing the four-piece suit and a facemask. In this room the radiator wasn’t very effective, maybe was because the room was larger. The temperature varied greatly from morning to night. At night it was incredibly cold, there was no way to sleep, all I could do was curl up in a ball. Some of the duty cops, so as not to get sleepy, would open the window. That was like adding frost on top of the snow. And they wouldn’t let me sleep during the day, but made me sit up. This room was on the first floor — I could hear the screams more clearly. There was also an interrogation room on the first floor. One time I heard a man screaming from morning until evening. This was psychological torture to me — I was afraid, would the next one be me?

Two or three days after coming into this room I couldn’t handle the cold and really came down with something, but wasn’t feverish, just a runny nose. They took my temperature every day. Later they decided that that infrared thermometer thing wasn’t accurate and used an under-arm thermometer to take my temperature. Then I got clever. When they were going to take my temperature, I opened the zipper on my clothes. That way, my body temperature went down. This was because I was afraid they would misdiagnose me as having coronavirus and take me to a hospital and put me together with other people who really had coronavirus to observe or treat, and so on…that way the infection rate would be much higher….

By the 4th or 5th day — I forget — when they saw that my temperature always held at 35–36 they took me back down to that 50-meter square cage in the underground room. A few more days passed. Maybe it was the beginning of February, everyone in the cage was packed onto some kind of minibus and taken away. At the time I was also pressed onto the bus, but before it drove off, some official, I guess, told the bus to stop. Then I was taken back underground to the cage. I was the only one left.

Within a few hours, an old man whom they’d tortured before came back from the hospital or clinic. There were gauze bandages on his hands and feet, because in the place where the cuffs were on both his hands, his wrists, had been dragged, the skin was broken, oozing blood and pus. Besides torturing him in the interrogation room, this old man always wanted to go to the bathroom at midday. Only the police who were guarding us could take us to go to the bathroom upstairs. Every prisoner was assigned to the supervision of a different officer, so another prisoner’s cop wouldn’t be willing to take a prisoner who wasn’t his personal charge to go to the toilet. Moreover, these police usually weren’t in the underground room waiting around. They were probably working in an office, or interrogating someone else? For someone like this old man who wanted to go to the bathroom in the middle of the day, he’d have to request the duty cop to call his supervising cop on the intercom and ask him to come down and take him to the toilet. It would take them a long time to come down, and they probably found it a lot of trouble to come to the underground room. They’d be ticked off, so they’d yell at whoever wanted to go to the bathroom. The old man seemed to have high blood pressure, gout and such diseases. Both his feet swelled up.

In the evening, another four people came in, the youngest 16 and the oldest 20. The facts of their case were that during the epidemic period, they were outside playing a kind of game like baseball.[3] In the evening they were brought to the police station and beaten until they screamed like babies. The skin on their buttocks split open, they couldn’t sit down.

That same evening an ambulance came with a male and a female nurse to take me to the hospital to examine my lungs. The examination revealed that my lungs had no abnormalities, and then they took me here [i.e. to quarantine room in the neighborhood compound from which Merdan shot the video]. When I got here, they handcuffed me to the bed. My whole body is covered with lice — I catch a lot of them every day. It itches terribly. Here, too, I get to go to the bathroom just two times a day, morning and evening. Of course, the environment is a bit better than the police station with all those people. Here I live alone. But there are two people guarding me.

[1] Merdan usually refers to police with an incongruously cute policeman emoji. Here he draws a distinction between regular police officers and the auxiliary or assistant police (xiejing 协警) who were hired in great numbers after Chen Quanguo took over as party secretary in Xinjiang. These are poorly paid, poorly trained deputies, many hired from the ranks of unemployed Uyghurs, many of whom were unemployed because Chen drove them from larger cities back to their registered homes in small towns and villages with few opportunities. Merdan notes that some assistants are wearing uniforms similar to those of the police, marked with the words xieling on a shoulder patch. It is noteworthy how many police and assistants seem to be involved in handling these 50–60 people detained in the precinct holding cell: each officer has their own prisoners for whom they are responsible. Each time he was separated from the group, two guards were assigned to watch Merdan.

[2] I.e. Merdan had recently come from eastern China, where the coronavirus first broke out, so the guards were particularly concerned about him as a possible carrier.

[3] Baseball is relatively popular in Xinjiang. See “How to Grow Big, Beautiful Papayas: On the Baseball Film in Asia.”