‘The atmosphere has become abnormal’: Han Chinese views from Xinjiang
Illustration by Alex Santafé
Around 9.5 million Han Chinese live in Xinjiang, making up about 40% of the region's population. How do they view Beijing's policies of surveillance and Uyghur reeducation?
In 2019, when Meng You, an international student from China who is currently in North America, went back to see her family in Xinjiang, one incident really stood out to her. While shopping with her mother in a town near a division of the Xinjiang People’s Production and Construction Corps, or “the Corps” (兵团 bīngtuán) — where her grandparents had settled after moving from central China decades before — they had an encounter with a Uyghur man and the police. They were looking for parking in a crowded part of the market area when suddenly she heard a scraping sound on the side of their car. What happened over the next few moments made her reconsider her position as a Han citizen.
A Uyghur fruit seller who was trying to avoid pedestrians had run into their car with his motorized cart. “Even though it was his fault, he was really angry,” Meng You recalled. “In Mandarin he said, ‘You hit my cart, pay me!’ He looked so ‘extreme’ (激动 jīdòng). My mom said, ‘No, you hit my car.’”
The “extremism” of the Uyghur man made Meng’s mom upset, too. To Meng, it seemed like her mom was more upset that he was trying to push her around. She wanted him to admit fault and accept responsibility. She whipped out her phone and dialed 110 to summon the police from the nearby People’s Convenience Police Station, one of more than 7,700 rapid-response surveillance stations that have been built across Xinjiang since 2017.
“The police came in less than a minute. The first thing they said was ‘Why are you arguing in public?’” This is a serious charge in Xinjiang, because it can be construed as “disturbing the social order,” which has resulted in many detentions for Uyghurs.
Meng said that the police presence produced an immediate response in the Uyghur man. “It was amazing. Just seconds before, you could see on his face that he looked like he wanted to punch someone. Then, suddenly, his attitude changed. He appeared completely calm. Now he just wanted to talk in a very reasonable way.”
In his halting Mandarin, he said, “OK, how much do you want?”
“My mom said, ‘50 yuan is enough,’” Meng recalled. “But he insisted on giving her 25 yuan. He probably only made 100 or 150 yuan in a day, so it was a lot of money for him.”
It is unclear why the man responded the way he did. Perhaps he thought he could intimidate two Han women, who were clearly wealthier than he, into paying him — or to let him go by yelling at them. But from Meng’s perspective, it was clear that her mom was not actually interested in compensation. She had insurance, and 25 or even 50 yuan was not nearly enough to replace the fender of her car. There was something patronizing in the way she treated him. She wanted him to learn a lesson. The money that was exchanged symbolized something much deeper about social order, moral instruction, and the function of the police in contemporary Xinjiang.
“It was his attitude that made my mom mad,” Meng said. “She didn’t want him to think he could get away with yelling and blaming others. And it was clear that he was really afraid of the police.”
For Meng You, this incident sticks out in her mind as an example of what Xinjiang has become since the March 1, 2014 Kunming suicide attack. “I can feel the tension when I go back to Xinjiang. People are just not really nice. They are always busy. It feels like no one wants to go to Xinjiang to travel anymore, so the economy in our town has suffered a lot. Lots of people wanted to go there to travel before. So now a lot of tour guides have lost their jobs.”
Her mother told her that for now, “stability (稳定 wěndìng) is No. 1, and then the economy.” The worst part of this is that there does not seem to be any end in sight. The mentality of maintaining social order, of living in a police state, has become normalized. Turning to the police, thinking from the perspective of sweeping counter-terrorism laws, is now the natural response to any conflict.
“There has been six years of this already,” Meng said. “So it feels like it might continue on for a long time, even though it is not sustainable to keep it this way. Everyone is unhappy. The police have to work long hours away from their family. And the Uyghurs are being sent for training. We don’t know who has actually been the cause of violence in the years before. Back then we feared ISIS was coming, but now that threat doesn’t seem real, either. I don’t think we can blame the Uyghurs, I can only assume that the government is responsible for what is happening in Xinjiang.”
Another Han Chinese citizen who left the southern Xinjiang city of Aksu in 2019 told me that he had seen a dramatic shift over the past five years as well. Kong Yuanfeng, a migrant originally from Henan, said that when grid policing was initiated in 2016, Uyghur movement was sharply curtailed. “The police treat the Uyghurs very differently than they do people like me — even though I have been arrested before,” Kong said. “They might just glance at my ID or not even that. But since 2016, Uyghurs can’t leave Xinjiang. They can’t even leave their own communities.
“I have a Uyghur friend whose friend was having a wedding in Aksu that he wanted to attend. He used to be able to go downtown easily, but now it is so difficult. There is a checkpoint at the boundary between the different jurisdictions. They would definitely check his ID and also check if he has approval to travel from his neighborhood watch unit (社区 shèqū). Even if he has this, they would still call the neighborhood committee to verify the information.
“He has to go through all this if he wants to go downtown. If anyone wanted to leave the city, there would be even more things to do. Then they have to get approval from both the Public Security Bureau and the neighborhood watch unit. This only applies to Uyghurs. Han can go wherever they want. I lived in Aksu for five, six years, and I know this for sure. Uyghurs can’t leave.”
The mentality of maintaining social order, of living in a police state, has become normalized.
Kong was sent to Xinjiang by the government. In the early 2000s, when he first set out from his village to find work as a migrant, he had gotten into a fight with another migrant worker in Guangzhou. After a criminal conviction resulting from the incident, he was transferred to a Xinjiang workhouse to begin a process of “reform through hard labor” by picking cotton for another division of the Corps in a county near Kashgar. After his release, he decided to stay in Xinjiang, working odd jobs as a construction worker. But eventually, in a moment of desperation in 2016, he stole an iPhone — something he thought he could sell to give himself enough to survive. Once again he was detained, this time for six months. What he saw during that period of detention — and a subsequent detention for criticizing the Xi administration on WeChat — pushed him to leave the region entirely.
During his last periods of detention, he met many Uyghurs who had been detained as part of the reeducation campaign. They were held with him in the detention center (看守所 kānshǒusuǒ) because there was not enough room for them in the new camps. He said, “Anyone who had a beard, prayed, studied the Quran, didn’t follow orders, argued with the cadres, had a knife in their homes — or if they just looked unstable — was detained during this time.”
Echoing the testimonies of other former detainees such as Erbaqyt Otarbai, Kong said that while they were in the detention center, awaiting transfer to the camp, they had to wear shackles. Because the shackles were heavy and rough, “Sometimes the skin of their ankles was rubbed to the point of having their bone exposed in places,” Kong remembered seeing. “Before their meals, detainees had to march for a while. While they were walking, they had to sing several songs or repeat, ‘One, two, three.’ Sometimes there was blood streaming down on their feet.”