 The U.S. Naval War College is a Navy's home of thought. Established in 1884, NWC has become the center of Naval Sea Power, both strategically and intellectually. The following issues in national security lecture is specifically designed to offer scholarly lectures to all participants. We hope you enjoy this upcoming discussion and future lectures. Good afternoon and welcome to our 10th issues in national security lecture for academic year 2223. I'm Commander Gary Ross and I'll serve as your host for today's event. I'm looking forward to hosting you today. For anyone just joining us, this series was originally conceived as a way to share a portion of the Naval War College's academic experience with the spouses and significant others of our student body. Over the past five years, it has been restructured to include participation by the entire Naval War College extended family, to include members of the Naval War College Foundation, international sponsors, civilian employees, and colleagues throughout Naval Station Newport. We will be offering five additional lectures between now and May 22, spaced about two weeks apart on a wide variety of national security topics and issues. An announcement detailing the dates, topics, speakers of each lecture will be sent by me both on email and posted on our website. Our next lecture will be on Tuesday, March 21. We will feature an engaging discussion on women, peace, and security with Naval War College Professor Saira Yamin. For each lecture, speakers will provide remarks for about 45 minutes, and then for the remaining 15 minutes or so, we'll answer questions from you. Okay, on with the main event, please feel free to ask questions using the chat feature in Zoom or using your microphones on the back of your chairs. With that, I'm very pleased to introduce our guest speaker, Professor Andrew Wilson, who will speak today about the Uighur issue in China, where since 2017, the Uighurs have been subjected to a comprehensive campaign of ethno-religious repression by the Chinese government. Perhaps as many as 2 million Uighurs have been processed through re-education camps, while the rest of the Uighur population of 11 million has been subjected to intense surveillance, religious persecution, limits on travel, and wholesale destruction of their traditional way of life. Andrew Wilson is the Naval War College's John A. Van Buren, Chair of Asia-Pacific Studies. After majoring in East Asian Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, he earned his PhD from the History and East Asian Languages program at Harvard University. Before joining the Naval War College faculty in 1998, he taught introductory and advanced courses in Chinese history at Harvard and at Wellesley College. Professor Wilson lectures on Chinese history, Asian military affairs, and the classics of strategic theory at military colleges and civilian universities across the United States and around the world, and has worked on curriculum development with command and staff colleges in Latin America and Africa. He has written several pieces on Chinese military history, Chinese sea power, and the art of war, including a new introduction for Lionel Giles' classic translation of SunZoom. I am pleased to pass the microphone over to Professor Andrew Wilson. Thank you everyone for coming out this afternoon. Welcome to the audience at home as well. So I get to talk about a somewhat depressing issue today, having to do with the Uyghurs of Xinjiang Province in China. Hopefully, folks can have a clear image of some of the slides, but just a range of images here on the upper right hand, Chinese armed police patrolling the streets in Kashgar, in Xinjiang Province, below the old city of Alamy, also in Xinjiang Province, up in China's far northwest. Children in one of the new boarding schools that the Chinese state has set up to educate the young of Xinjiang Province. Some of the destruction wrought by the 2009 riots in the city of Rimchi, which kind of set off the latest phase of the crackdown on the Uyghur population, and an image of Xinjiang as a center pivot in Xi Jinping's grand ambitions of knitting the Eurasian land mass together through the Belt and Road Initiative and how that travels through the heart of Xinjiang Province. So what is Xinjiang? Well, technically, it's the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. There are several of these autonomous regions in China. Some are the size of a province like Xinjiang. Others are smaller, constituting about more the size of several counties in other provinces. What this means is that there is a majority ethnic population in the region, non-Han Chinese. In this case, it's the Uyghurs who are Turkic people related to the other communities of the Kaga, Kyrgyz, and Uzbeks of what is widely referred to as Turkistan, this vast stretch of Central Asia covers Xinjiang Province as well as those other countries, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and the like. But as with many things in China, it's quite often reality is the exact opposite of the expression. So it's claims that Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region is an autonomous region. It is anything but an autonomous region. Most of the autonomous regions in China with a few exceptions, but the major ones such as Tibet in particular, as well as Inner Mongolia are very, very much under the thumb of the regime in Beijing in large part because the fact that they occupy peripheries of the Chinese state and as such are viewed as potential areas of ethnic separatism, which is viewed as an existential threat to the regime in Beijing. It is the largest province, technically not a province, but Autonomous Region puts the size of a province. So it is the largest of China's major provinces, but it is the least populous. Only about 25 million people live there. When we talk about China to say only 25 million people live in a region, that's saying something. But that makes it smaller than some of China's major urban areas. Chongqing, I believe, is 33 million people in one city in one urban area. So that gives you an idea of the very low population density out there. Now 100 years ago, the vast majority of the population would have been Uyghurs or other Turkic peoples with some Mongols and some Russians thrown in. But now the Uyghurs are down below half the population. And the biggest rise in the population in the region has been ethnic Chinese, what we call Han. Han is a sort of a catch-all term for the Chinese ethnicity. It's about as specific as saying someone is European. But it has become the defining ethnicity of the Chinese people. And it's become highly politicized as is all ethnicities. In terms of its economic viability, it's highly productive. It is a fairly wealthy province, although much of the population lives in, if not abject poverty, lives basically off the land. So subsistence, agriculture, pastoralism, and the like. So there's very, very poor populations in Xinjiang, very, very wealthy populations in Xinjiang, obviously primarily in the cities. It's got some of China's largest gold and natural gas and oil reserves. I think it's probably 20% of China's oil reserves are in Xinjiang province itself. There's major industries up in the region, particularly steel. The region, while it is much of it is desert, actually produces 84% of all cotton used in China. So check the labels next time you're shopping for cotton garments, because much of that cotton is produced on state-run farms, quite often employing forced labor. It is also famous for its fruit and vegetables, grapes in particular, but also the famous hami melon, hami guava. They are delicious, but it is a lot of very traditional agriculture. We'll see send it around the great Oasis that ring the terrum in Taklamankan basins. So it's a productive, valuable piece of real estate. Obviously, it's got pipelines running through it, both shipping materials out of Xinjiang province into China proper. Give you some sense of scales about twice the size of Texas. So a very, very big piece of real estate, but also increasingly rail lines and pipelines that connect western China into Central Asia. Obviously, this is probably of some significance these days with our discussion of Ukraine and China's relationship with Ukraine, being able to ship raw materials into China across these pipelines, but also potentially way of exporting manufactured goods out into Central Asia. One reason, however, for the relative insecurity of the Chinese when it comes to Xinjiang is the neighborhood. This one province orders, how many is that? Eight countries. And a couple of those are a little problematic. I won't say which, but you can imagine some of the anxieties here. Plus, it is very far away from the core regions of China. So if you look at a map of China down here, about if we draw a diagonal line from about there to there across China, 95% of the population of China lives on the eastern side of that line. So only 5% of the whole population lives on the western side of that line. Xinjiang is one of those provinces and it's the farthest from the core of China's demography, but also the Chinese economy. There's been an effort underway for several decades to better integrate Xinjiang province into the rest of the national economy, in part for the resources, but also to bring the prosperity level up there as well. You can also see that much of the Uyghur population occupies the southwestern part, whereas the primarily ethnic Chinese population is up in the northwest. So there's a very, very stark divide here. So the city of Urumqi up in the far northwest has a population that might be 80% or more Chinese, whereas the city of Kashgar, the city of Yarkand down in the southwest will have populations approaching 85% Uyghur, plus a mix of other Kazakhs and Kyrgyz in the lake. So very far away, very big. Also a nuclear testing facility there at Lapnur as well. So a lot of reasons that the province is important for Chinese national security and why it's also viewed as a potential threat to Chinese national security. So I'm not going to go through all the detail here, but a few milestones in Xinjiang history. One is the Zengar genocide in the 1750s. This is when the last Chinese dynasty actually was ethically Manchu, the last dynasty to rule China, conquered this region, wiped out the Mongol population of Zengars that lived there and then moved in the Turks from Central Asia, the Uyghurs, to populate the newly depopulated region. It was formally annexed. This was the first time this part of Central Asia had ever been formally part of a Chinese dynasty, especially of this scale. And the name of the region is quite literally the new frontier. So that gives you an idea of the relative newness of Xinjiang province to the Chinese body politic. It's actually even newer than Taiwan. Taiwan did not become part of the Chinese body politic until the 1680s. So here we have the slightly newer than Taiwan. So 1750s. So jumping ahead, after the fall of the Qing dynasty, this region spiraled out of the control of the central governments in eastern China and became for all intents and purposes a Soviet client state. It was brought back into the Chinese sphere late during the Second World War, but then there was a partition agreement with the Soviets, but then later Mao marched the Red Army in there and peacefully liberated the province in 1949-1950, much as the communists did with Tibet, the other huge ethnic minority region to the south of Xinjiang. When the Sino-Soviet split happened, essentially Xinjiang was completely cut off from Central Asia. The Silk Road was shut down and essentially the region languished for especially the western parts of the region languished for decades, where the eastern regions tended to develop more, but that was because of the input of Han migration and the development of some major industries out there. Interestingly enough, when it returned to China, there had been a nationalist, a Guomandong garrison stationed there in Xinjiang province as part of the deal that the nationalist government had made with the Soviet Union. Those guys have stuck around. That's called the bingtuan, which is the Xinjiang construction and production core, the bingtuan, and it's essentially a successor to this paramilitary organization of military colonists who essentially control about half of the whole region. So it's under paramilitary control of a sub-state actor. They operate under the leadership of the Central Party Commission, but are essentially a major, actually now a major multinational corporation. So for much of this period, Xinjiang was relatively quiet, but there was still a little bit of separatist feelings in the region, especially if it was cut off from Central Asia. But it remained relatively quiet. There was two suspected terrorist attacks in the 1990s. We're not sure exactly whether it was transnational terrorism or whether it was just local grievance against government policy. Essentially, the forced in migration of ethnic Chinese who get privileged physicians get access to the best jobs and the immiseration of the Indigenous population of Uyghurs. Those two attacks in the 1990s, then we pair that with the attacks of 9-11, gave China top cover to go hard at the Muslims of Central Asia. We also have, obviously, where does 9-11 come from? Afghanistan. And of course, Xinjiang shares a border with Afghanistan. So we see here the convergence of Chinese ethnic policy with the fears of transnational terrorism. Ever since then, there's been efforts to label the East Turkestan Independence Movement, a terrorist organization. This was part of the logic of the Great Western Development Strategy, which was the precursor to the Belt and Road, the idea that we can preempt Islamic radicalization by economic development. And then, obviously, the creation of, with the fall of Soviet Union, four new countries, five new countries in Central Asia, places that the Chinese state now is increasingly interacting with, sharing its development model. So a lot of reasons for the Chinese to want to reach out across Central Asia, a lot of opportunities to reach out across Central Asia, a lot of fears. So one scholar has basically said that Xinjiang is all about Chinese policy in Central Asia, and China's policy in Xinjiang is all about Chinese policy in Central Asia is all about Chinese policy in Xinjiang. They cannot be separated. So this is a matter of domestic security, but also shifting the economic center gravity of the Chinese state farther to the West to try to get the physical demography of the country to shift farther to the West to develop the inland regions, the Western regions to reduce China's dependency on the export economy, but also to create living room for the Chinese people. So a series of later attacks, most critically, was a spate of terrorist incidents in the early, sorry, in the mid teens. And the fact that some Uyghurs showed up in the ranks of ISIS in Iraq and Syria further accelerated these fears, or at least these justifications for a requirement to repress radical Islam in the Middle East. So this is when things get kicked up a notch. Chen Chuenguo here was the head of the XUAR for several years, was the face of the repressive movement, but this is also deeply tied in with Xinjiang with Xi Jinping's objectives for the Belt and Road. And of course, Xi Jinping comes into power in the mid-1910. So when you see this uptick, we also see the rollout of the Belt and Road Initiative in 2013, you see these upticks. And then of course, when ISIS is defeated and these fighters return to Xinjiang, this is where you see the beginning of the vocational reeducation program. Okay. So why? What's Beijing afraid of? I mentioned a few of these things. They're afraid of Uyghur nationalism, separatist movements. This is a fear that the Chinese have about Tibet. This is a fear they have about Taiwan, failing to understand that it's their actions more than anything that are driving these separatist movements. Uyghur nationalism is not a threat to Chinese national security. This is a relatively small population. They are highly dependent on the Chinese state. They are fully under the control of the Chinese state. They do not represent an existential threat, except it's something that Beijing is sincerely afraid of. Again, ethnic separatism. They're afraid of Pan-Turkism, the idea that there's this region called Turkestan, and we have other examples of these stands around the world that cross national boundaries. We've dealt with these issues in the Middle East as well. So Kurdistan, for example, this is another example of that, where you have an ethnic, ethno-religious group that spans several national territories. So the idea here is that there's a fear in Beijing of anything that's transnational. This is why there is a Chinese Catholic Church that obeys the orders of Beijing, not of Rome. Any of my Catholic friends out there, being one of myself, knows why that's a very strange definition, Chinese Catholic Church. But anyway, they're afraid as well of Sunni radicalism. Obviously, we have fighters returning from ISIS in Iraq and Syria, that the idea that this will infect the population, a population which is only partially humanized, quite literally. There's this conceit in China that only when they were liberated by the Communist Party did the Uyghurs start to become human beings. So this civilizational mission of the PRC. But the threat there is that that can be underdone, undercut by Sunni radicalism. Ethnic identity or religious identity that trumps national identity. So where you'd have Muslim Chinese thinking themselves first as Muslim, and only secondarily as Chinese, if at all, as Chinese. Whereas Xi Jinping would like all Chinese Muslims to think of themselves as Chinese Muslims. Three evils, this is separatism, radicalism. And there's also this fear of foreign meddling in China's internal affairs. This goes across the spectrum in China. If we look at Hong Kong, for example, the idea there is that the Hong Kong demonstrations were not spontaneous. This was not the spontaneous disaffection of young people in Hong Kong. This was an act, this was a color revolution. This was foreign meddling. This was the CIA and other foreign governments pumping these things up. The idea that many people in Taiwan now, the majority of the population, think of themselves as Taiwanese, not as Chinese. That's not spontaneous. That is a product of American and Japanese meddling in Taiwanese affairs. That's not true, but it's the perception from Beijing. So the idea here is that the porous borders and the multi-ethnic character of Xinjiang makes it ripe for these sorts of color revolutions of outside actors trying to undermine China's territorial integrity and undermine the party rule. So a lot to be afraid of. Another reason why, Xi Jinping's ambition, the Belt and Road Initiative. Well, the Belt and Road is part of an even larger scheme called the China Dream to transform China by the middle of the 21st century, by 2049, into a prosperous, harmonious society with a essentially fully developed economy, a world-class military, domestic peace, security, development across the range where we have much less difference between the rich and the poor. So this is developing Central Asia, developing Xinjiang is part and parcel of that. Also the belief, Marxist-Leninist belief that if you improve people's material conditions, you'll drain all the revolution out of them. So the idea that people in Xinjiang are up in arms, strike back violently against the government is not because of any innate religious beliefs or what have you, it's just the fact that they're poor. So the idea, if you can develop the economy, if you can alleviate poverty, and that's the glosses on a lot of these movements, that you can then create a more harmonious society. Again, spurring Western development, this is again trying to shift the economic and demographic centers of the Chinese, centers of gravity in China, further west, away from the coastline. Remember, as I said, you draw that diagonal line, 95% of the population lives on the right side of the line, which means, if one wants to imagine a billion people living between the Mississippi River and the East Coast, that gives you some idea of that density of population. So obviously China's got all this empty, empty terrain out to the West. Let's move folks out there. Moreover, the more we move out there, the less we become dependent on the maritime economy, right? The more secure we can become, the more we can sort of connect across Central Asia, sort of recreate these mythical silk roads to refer to, come back to a more balanced and secure China, a more harmonious China, as it were. So the new face of this under Xi Jinping is the Belt and Road Initiative. The belt refers to the continental silk belt that used to be the old silk road, whereas the maritime track that runs south into Southeast Asia and then across the Indian Ocean to the West Coast of Africa and many ways around the world is the maritime silk road. So we have the belt, the continental line, and the silk road along the south. But of course, it's also about achieving redundancy in key supplies for China, resource supplies. If you think about pipelines across Central Asia or the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, which runs south from Kashgar down to Guadar. So this is hopefully getting pipelines and supply lines and rail lines to allow China to bypass the Straits of Malacca, that particular choke point that concerns them, and even some of the other narrow choke points in the Indian Ocean. So again, redundancy in the economy, big grand ambitions of reorganizing Chinese economy and reintegrating East and Central Asia all the way to Europe in the far West. Moreover, it's about the preemptive domestication of the new frontier. What's going on there is because if you're going to open up the Western region, if you're opening up Xinjiang Province to all this interconnectivity, you have to inoculate it against Islamic radicalism. The idea that these forces that come along with globalization will flow back, this is your backflow preventer, and the way you do it is preemptively inoculate the population. So how do you do that? Well, if you want to deal with, you want to achieve de-extremification, you take a few pages out of the U.S. playbook. Talking to Chinese counterterrorism experts, I raised this question about how much they had studied the surge, and they said they studied the surge extensively. The surge was the efforts in, particularly in Iraq, to create area security, to tamp down on the violence in the 2007-2008, to give the government operating room to push forward. So they see a lot of success in the surge, but just one Chinese analyst said to me, he said, but in the U.S. surge, you focused on the mechanics, you focused on material aspects of it. You focused on the hardware of security. You didn't do enough about the software of security. You didn't do enough about the spiritual elements of security. I'll come back to that in a bit. So in terms of the material elements of the security plan is checkpoints. If you're ethnic Chinese, you fly right through checkpoints. If you are any sort of Central Asian, you will get queued up in lines and lines and lines. Introduction of facial recognition software, major police presence on the street, obviously extensive use of informers. It is obviously all the tracking software that you might see the FBI using today. The Chinese are employing that throughout. It is not, however, that much big data going on. This is not, in fact, what we might call artificial intelligence. I refer to this as arbitrary ignorance. So what a lot of this revolves around, the high tech part of it is called the IJOP, the Intermediated Joint Operations Platform. It's essentially an app, and that app helps track behaviors that might make a Uyghur or other Central Asian living in Xinjiang suspect. But look at that. So you sign up. They don't get all this. Basically, you go by the police station to fill out paper forms and all this stuff. But the suspicious behavior, okay, one suspicious behavior is to move out of your locale. Another suspicious behavior is to move into a locale. You have family abroad. You don't have family abroad. All these things are suspicious. And actually, the system is incredibly arbitrary. The state is just collecting huge amounts of data but is not making any decisions based on that data. It's just collecting data. Most of the decisions are made by individuals, picking and choosing which Uyghurs will come under scrutiny. And what has basically happened is that it's not fine tune. It is not finding criminal Uyghurs. It is criminalizing being a Uyghur. That's what the system does. So it is not high tech. It's not high intelligence. It's just collecting data, any of which for any range of reasons, mostly arbitrary, can be used against you. Okay. Another huge shift that took place when those ISIS fighters started coming back, and that wasn't the only reason, but of many was the construction of the concentration camps, these mass de-extraternification through vocational training. So you see the speed with which these facilities are constructed. And the fact that a German scholar basically goes on Google Earth and just finds this stuff. It is not hidden by any stressed imagination. And remember, again, that this group called the Bingtuan, the Xinjiang Construction and Production Brigade Core, sorry, Production Core, is a huge construction company and owns much of the land. They were very rapidly able to turn around a massive provincial wide network of these concentration camps. Else how to do it? Going after the elites and the diaspora, silencing or intimidating the elites in Xinjiang itself. This is show trials. This is disappearance. Sometimes it's pressuring people to make self-incriminating statements. Sometimes it's pressuring people to go along with Beijing's talking points. But it's also going after the high-profile expatriates, Uyghur expatriates who live around the world. A lot of them in Turkey, a lot of them in Australia, a lot of them in Southeast Asia. So essentially saying to them who are advocating for, for example, for human rights to take a closer look, the UN Human Rights Commission to take a look closer look at this, their families back in Xinjiang are threatened. And quite often Chinese intelligence agents will threaten these people overseas as well. So you try to silence the diasporas, try to silence the elites in country. How do we know all of this? Again, this gives you a sense of how fast this program is developing. These are, you can see the construction phase over here. You can see some of the completed construction areas, obviously huge dormitories going up. Again, this is all being watched on Google Earth. And the math is about one, probably close to two million Uyghurs have gone through these reeducation camps. It involves these are, these are, they are forcibly incarcerated, they are there ostensibly to do vocational training. Then they are, when they are released, they are set up with a job, quite often a job far from their, their native place, far from where their family lives. So it's a jobs program to increase the productivity of the province, but also to break apart traditional family structures to undercut the traditional economy. A lot of indoctrination, learning to recite communist propaganda, sing patriotic songs, learn some Chinese, but it's not a program to assimilate these people. It's not to turn them into Chinese, it's to turn them into an underclass of subordinate weekend culturally broken Uyghurs. How do we know all of this? It's done in, done in plain sight. And when Chinese were initially kind of coy about it, but when confronted with numbers and images like this, they said, yep, that's exactly what it is, but it's not concentration camps. It's concentrated locations for vocational training. So that's what goes on. Apparently, in addition to physical and sexual abuse, there's evidence of forced sterilizations and increasing amounts of evidence that organ harvesting is part of the program as well. Okay, so this is giving an idea of the numbers of the facilities around. Obviously they're heavily concentrated in the primarily Uyghur portions of the province to the Southwest. Here's some imagery from one of the camps. A lot of these images got out. A lot of the police files from Xinjiang were leaked. A lot of hard copy stuff as well, all scans. So tremendous amount of detail on what's going on in there. Once you can't find out from the documents, you can find out from the satellite imagery. You can find out when this picture was released, the families of Uyghur expatriates went into the image very closely and managed to identify a whole bunch of the people, a whole bunch of the men sitting there. Now it's primarily men, primarily men, working-age men. So between the ages of 18 and 54, probably 10 to 20% of the population of the re-education camps was women. But primarily men, essentially men, as we learned in the search, you incarcerate most of the male population of military age in Anbar province, for example, and the violence rate goes down. Problem was there was actually a violence rate in Anbar province. There's not a particularly high violence rate in Xinjiang. So this means this is preemptive de-extraternification. These are not radical people. They have the potential, because they're Uyghurs, becoming radicalized. So it's not that they're evil doers, per se. There are some criminals involved in the system, but the vast majority have just been arbitrarily selected and sent out there. Again, what you can't learn from the satellite imagery and the leaked documents, you can learn from the Chinese propaganda itself. The Chinese advertise this program all the time. So lots of images of these happy young people learning to be pastry chefs. So they can go off and work in the new tourist hotels that are going to populate the Xinjiang region, because that's one of the agendas as well, to turn it into a major tourist destination for Xi Jinping. So de-extraternification through vocational training. But as I said, this is also a way to break up families. This is also a way to break up the traditional economy. This is also a way to get the rural population forced migration into the cities of Xinjiang. Because a lot of them are subsistence agriculture or pastoralists, so they're essentially off the grid. So this is a way to control the whole population. Move them into cities where they become dependent on jobs provided by the government. Okay. Again, the GIAPs add. So this is the surveillance app application of it, right? How do you keep track on these people? Basically, as I said, it's not a particularly intelligent way of doing things. It's simply developing a huge database on pretty much every Uighur. So rather than figuring out who the bad Uighurs are, the good Uighurs are, it's just generating data. Okay. So essentially, it's a way to basically make sure that anybody who does, might do anything even remotely threatening has been through a hefty dose of reeducation. And again, this would be essentially at 2 million people. That would be I'm going to say 30 to 40 percent of the adult male population of Uighurs in the region. Okay. How else? Well, you can erase Central Asian culture. I mentioned Kashgar, the city down here in the far Southwest. This is the most Uighur of all places. And it's the closest to Central Asia. This is where the old Silk Route went across through Central Asian, sort of landed in Kashmir. So it's the most Uighur of Xinjiang. And here is the four or 500 year old, old city of Kashgar. That is all gone now. So this was where the Uighur population of the city of Kashgar, this was sort of ground central of their cultural identity right there. So also these are Uighur cemeteries here, the vast Uighur cemetery. That's what's happened to it now, converted into a decorative series of lakes, the tennis courts and the like. So racing, cultural heritage, public education. So while mom and dad are either working in factories or in the re-education camps, the kids get sent away to boarding schools. And one can only imagine what these kids get taught in these boarding schools. Pretty much nothing about Uighur culture, the Uighur languages, pretty much nothing about Islam, all about Beijing's party line. Okay. Again, forced labor, this is in the province itself, but also tens of thousands of Uighur workers go off to Eastern China. And in fact, the Arumchi riots back in 2009 were in part kickstarted by some violence at a factory in Southeast China, where several Uighur men were murdered during an ethnic clash with some of the ethnic Chinese who worked at the same factory. So that was kind of the George Floyd moment for this movement. That was followed by revolts in Arumchi, which led to crackdown, which led to further revolts, which led to more crackdowns, led to this vicious spiral, this intense crackdown. So it's not just forced labor in Xinjiang, it's forced labor across China. Remember, China's confronting a problem where pay rates are on the rise, especially among Han Chinese in the Eastern parts of China. So how best to do that than have shipping workers and house them in dormitories, including Foxconn. So think about that when you're shopping for an Apple phone. Also incentives for Han migration into Xinjiang. So this is to get more and more and more ethnic Chinese to move into the province to create an entire industries around these same migration, give them privileged position, and potentially even make them the majority population of the province, which might then impact its status as an autonomous region. If the population becomes majority Han, then you can then compartmentalize the province into smaller autonomous regions. So you can have the cash car autonomous zone, whereas the rest of the province can become more formally integrated. True bizarreness here, this is the becoming family program. So this is where Communist Party cadres move into your house with you, share the meals, sit down and read the writings of General Secretary Xi Jinping. And one thing you have to know about a lot of traditional Uyghur homes, a lot of homes in Central Asia, there's communal beds. The beds are built on hypocosts, essentially your local, your stove pumps heat under the floor and under the flus that make up your bed. So the whole family beds down at night in a single bed. And this involves these Communist cadres bedding down with Uyghur families as part of this indoctrination and surveillance campaign. And then as I said, the boarding schools are a big part of it. Again, the rapid construction of these places. You saw during COVID how quickly the Chinese built these emergency wards. So they clearly have the construction capability and they have the bingtuan in the province that can produce these places pretty much overnight. And the goal here, as I said, is not the assimilation of the Uyghurs, it's not to turn them into Chinese between the breaking up the families, the forced sterilization programs, an effort to decrease the number of Uyghurs. The current generation of Uyghurs will be that free labor, forced labor supply. The kids who go through the schools, fewer and fewer, fewer numbers of them, they will be the local Uyghurs who will man the amusement parks and the tourist venues. They will speak perfect Chinese, but they will be your fun-loving hosts in Uyghur world. And ultimately, the cultural genocide, which is the erasure of the traditional ways of life in Xinjiang, will, in Xi Jinping's mind, be complete. Okay. Thank you very much and happy to answer any questions. Apologies, I ran a minute short. Thank you, Professor Wilson, for that really very insightful lecture. I definitely learned quite a lot tonight. Do we have any questions in the audience? Yes, please. Hi, I'm Yurgy Rondale, Belgium. Since this information is ready available, how do Middle Eastern countries, Muslim countries, react on that when they have trade relationships with China? I can imagine that somehow the relationship between the PRC and those countries is not very successful. There has been, unfortunately, deafening silence from most of the Muslim world about what's going on there. The most forward-leaning of the governments would be Turkey, partly because of the, these are fellow Turks, fellow Turk peoples. So there's a large diasporic community in Turkey and probably one of the most active of the diasporic communities. But even their trade and good relations with China have a lot of power over these conversations. When it comes to the near abroad, as it were, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, you hear a lot out of them when their ethnic nationals get caught up in the re-education camps, but not a lot of complaints in general about what's happening to the Uyghurs. So if a Kazakh ends up in one of these, you might hear something from the state, but Kyrgyzstan is another example of one of these countries that fears colored revolutions and is sort of in the same boat as the People's Republic of China. So they are much less likely to make a lot of noise about what's going on with the Uyghurs. They will complain if something happens to a Kyrgyz, but not so much the Uyghurs. So tragically and ironically, that completely undercuts this fear of Pan-Turkism, the idea that there's this independent identity movement out there that is a threat or that the regimes around China are not, most of them are not, fairly on board with a fairly high scrutiny surveillance state operating right across the border. And of course, the investments from the Belt and Road go a long way to sort of tamping this down. So even from Saudi Arabia, you would think as the leader of the Sunni world that would be more forthcoming with critiques, but even there, not so much. So if you look at the way the vote went recently on the UN Human Rights Council vote, not just the countries that voted against the hearing about Xinjiang, but the countries that abstained, you can go in there and figure out why the very good reasons that a lot of these countries do abstain from it. So there's been very little hue and cry in the Muslim world about this, if anything, more in Europe, a tricky and noble example, but Australia and the United States and the like. So, yeah. But again, if anything, the Chinese are making themselves less secure, because there is a limit to sort of cynical state policy, especially when you have these actual populations sort of pushing their governments for more action on this. But I think the the overt excesses of the program are on the way out. The infrastructure is still there, but most of the infrastructure, the reeducation camps has been transformed into either actual prisons or factories. So the most egregious aspects of it, it looks like Xi Jinping was whether the foreign policy crisis that this might have brought about. Any other questions? Thanks, Dr. Wilson. With the deficit of young girls to marry in China, they're going outside the country to Vietnam for brides. If they're reeducating young kids, do you foresee any kind of intermarriage happening in the future? That is part of the strategy. That is to get young Uyghur women to marry at the Khan Chinese. So that's that's part of it. So that is that's one way to erase the culture, but also to try to fill the bridal gap in China, which is particularly acute in our Western China, because it's a it's a development, it's a development economy promoted by the state. So you don't get as many families migrating out there. You get a lot more bachelors migrating out there. I did have a question myself. Are the Uyghurs able to practice their religion? Or is it some is it a state controlled form of their traditional religion? It's it's highly state controlled. If anything to be a practicing Muslim would almost guarantee you'd get knocked around or were sent to one of these reeducation camps. Active measures of trying to get Uyghurs not just to renounce the religion, but also drink alcohol and eat pork and the like to sort of ostentatiously do that. There are some mosques left, but those are an extraordinarily high scrutiny surveillance. So you know, unless you're practicing Islam, very much on the down low, you'll be come in for for attention. And these mosques have some in the past been removed and destroyed? Yeah, many many in downtown Kashgar and Amaliyah, Almachi have just been, you know, and this was this was part of to earthquake proof these 400 year old cities. Cities that had survived 400 years of earthquakes needed to be earthquake proofed. So many of the grand mosques have been destroyed and others have been turned into heritage sites. So they become more tourist destinations than actual houses of worship. Any other questions either on zoom or in the audience? Any other questions? Yeah, Chris. Thank you, Dex. Do you see is there is there a red line to be crossed where whether it's the Western nations or the international community will potentially intervene or has that been crossed already and we have seen no real international intervention to to change this policy? Or do you just foresee the Uyghurs and continued, you know, China to continue, you know, it's ways and no one's going to really Yeah, yeah, I mean, it's it's a huge province, but it's a relatively small population. And because of the unique nature of it, the fact that it has been a military colony under the Bingtuan system for so long, that all the pieces are in place there. I can't imagine China trying to replicate this in other other parts of the other parts of the empire that were just because the unique nature of it and they seem for all intents and purposes to have gotten away with it, even in even in full view. And it's also become part of the narrative of of China's approach, particularly to international, international governing bodies and the United Nations, that we need to get back to the much more conservative Westphalian approach of not actively intervening in the internal affairs of other countries. So if you look at the joint statement from Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping for the Olympics, it was all about how great the United Nations is, but the original United Nations, not rather than the United Nations that the United States use this kind of top cover to dictate values to the rest of the world. So again, that's intertwined with what's going on there as well. And China just has so many resources that it can pour into this relatively lately populated region. And given given the environment around it, either the security threats to justify it or the passivity of the neighbors that are not standing in the way, it's it's the perfect storm for this sort of cultural genocide. And I say cultural genocide because there have been murders, there have been extra judicial killings, there have been a lot of executions, but this is not primarily trying to kill off them, the Uyghurs, to induce them to kind of to kind of eventually have them bred out of existence, except as you know, hosts at Uyghur world. And it seems that the Chinese have largely succeeded. That's very pessimistic. Professor Wilson, related to that, we had a question come in on Zoom. And one of our Zoom viewers asked the question, well, what's the best way for Western governments or governments throughout the world to approach this in a renewed fashion, so to speak, and tend to bring up this issue and to try to promote change? Yeah. Well, I think I think keep coming back to it. Keep pointing to it as often as possible. And there will probably be even more evidence coming out over the longer term to reveal some of the some more detail of what goes on in Xinjiang. I mean, obviously, the satellite imagery is still there, but, you know, leaked documents and the like. So there's a lot more clarity, support those scholarly communities that know something about the region, support the Uyghur diaspora. And I think, I think most importantly, you know, point to it, but live up to the values you're advocating at home. And the values that you advocate for others to follow, University human rights, just make sure you follow that your own guidance at home. All right. And another question came in. So, so what's the end game for the Chinese official government? Do they is the is their goal essentially to just to remove any any cultural, you know, aspects of the Uyghurs and to integrate them into a Chinese culture? That's that's ostensibly what's going on. The idea there and there's been a change in Chinese policy towards the ethnic minorities. Back in 19, early 1950s, China launched a basically an ethnic categorization project where they decided that there were 56 ethnic minorities in China. There were the Han, who were going to be like, at that point, I think they were like 92%. And then there was these 55 other ethnic minorities. And usually they were very, it was the project was very sloppily done. And as I mentioned earlier, Han is not a very specific ethnicity. But it used to be that you would celebrate the ethnic diversity of China. Because this demonstrated that China was a multi ethnic, multicultural state that people like to live in China and that ethnicities could thrive there. There's actually a huge sort of park museum in Beijing, this huge, you know, ethnicities museum actually was one time labeled the Museum of Racism. But that was just that was bad translation. But it was about racial harmony and average like in the same way that Soviet Union needed all these sort of SSRs who joined spontaneously to demonstrate the sort of gravitational pull and appeal of the center. And in many places in China, this has become basis of tourism, right? You go to Inner Mongolia to sleep in a yurt and ride a pony and drink fermented marriage milk, right? You go, so you have these ethnicity tourist destinations. So that's part of the economy. But it looks like in Xinjiang that the patients ran out with that and that this population was just too different. Most of those other populations, the Tibetans are another matter that are equally as vexing to the Chinese. But they're the balance, the mechanics are a lot more difficult. But because in large part because very potent Tibetan government in exile. And it's international profile. The Uyghurs don't have that. But has become kind of impatient with that, especially this is so far away and the region is just so core to the Belt and Road and to Xi Jinping's personal legacy and his anxieties about the clock ticking and the existential threats that don't exist. That is driving this now to be, if you're going to be a Uyghur, you're going to be Chinese. So you can be a Chinese. So anything that even remotely smacks of Central Asia is is prohibited, whether or not that will taper off in the next few decades and the that Beijing will find some way to allow a certain amount of cultural freedom, if only for the purposes of tourism, that might be the best case scenario. Thank you. Well, thank you for Professor Wilson. We've reached our end of our time. That was a really very insightful lecture. Thank you all for attending both in person and on Zoom. We hope to see you in two weeks when the lecture will be on women, peace and security. Well, we'll see you then. Good night, everyone.