The Once and Future China: Reflecting on Xinjiang and Chinese Regimes

“Why would you come here to study Chinese?” So said almost any Chinese language tutor that I had when I lived in Xinjiang. The Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region was a place of minorities and development, not the heart, or neidi, of modern China. Han Chinese tourists were coming and buying cowboy hats to tour their countries “wild West” as they went from one oases to another in the province. Like other Western provinces, Xinjiang had not yet enjoyed the modernization and development as the Eastern provinces. In 2007, traveling outside the handful of “cities” quickly would take one back a hundred years (or more) in time. Dress, tradition, agriculture, and travel would adhere more to centuries of tradition than the last decades of economic growth and expansion.

This time travel also covered politics as well. One would find in Xinjiang varying “power players,” pushed on by the Emperor far away, to maintain ethnic and religious pacification, at the same time using their tensions to keep anyone group from formulating significant dissent. These political “players” would also enjoy more leeway, as long as the prescribed needs were fulfilled, because of the distance. Many times, however, when the local politicians would fail to maintain that peace, the eyes of the emperor far away would turn, with great displeasure, onto the region. Tough purges and repression of locals would be swiftly mediated out. Education and religious practices would be highly regulated, and the Chinese Communist Emperor, would put into practice campaigns more akin to pre-Reform Era China: Strict political propaganda, mandatory Socialist meetings in businesses and governmental offices, and antiquated social and residential registration. Either Xinjiang was a region stuck a couple centuries in the past or relegated to relive the CCP’s early decades.

And, after 2009, when the local officials failed to avoid the massive ethnic disruption of the Urumqi riots, the emperor far away, turn its face to Xinjiang. And cameras began to appear. Eventually, as tensions continued, so did more draconian restrictions and security. Community offices began to house police officers who had greater power over residents. And, there were the rumors of camps for “re-education” coming from the South. If one travelled too often between towns, the local officials would know (because of the myriad of check points). If you were a minority in these travels, you were suspect. Suspicion of any kind might mean some of those community police officers coming to your door and taking you away to a camp for weeks or months at a time.

From 2013 to 2016, pressures grew. Most busy intersections would find new police offices built on the sidewalk. Strobe flashes from the mounted traffic light cameras would go all day and night. Multi-screened security displays would be installed in every apartment complex guard shack, entrances to stores, and gates of parks. Incessant alarms would go off at every freshly installed security gate in grocery stores. Community and district police would confiscate locals’ passports, come to your home if you failed to register after returning from out of town, and require one to plug their phones into police computers and other devices for unexplained reasons. And people would hear about large buildings being built outside of town.

Then people would disappear. Others would be called in for questioning about posts and contacts on their WeChat accounts. Others would be harassed about what their relatives outside of the province or China were doing. One friend commented, “Its like our whole province is a prison.”

Outside of Xinjiang these things slowly appeared more and more. Cameras everywhere, use of WeChat to monitor, fine, and prosecute. Even the ability to build large “pop up” buildings in a matter of weeks has occurred (in governmental response to Covid-19 and the need for more facilities). Time also fails to mention the facial recognition utilization in Xinjiang and the rest of China.

The comparisons of Xinjiang to China’s past and future is not without significant differences, but the similarities are multitudinous. What the Chinese Communist Emperor did when it needed to focus on problems of great consternation in Xinjiang is also seen in its the methods in the rest of China. If one wants to know what the CCP might do in realms of education, security, minority tensions, and religion in the heart of China, one could do far worse than Xinjiang for a case study.

How this history and understanding relates to World Christianity and mission is that for many events which will transpire in China and Xinjiang among Christians, and those to which they minister, there are many precedents. Regimes might drastically change and utilize changing methods of regulation and repression of religion but there is still history to reveal why it is there. One final example of this is the Sinicization campaign currently being implemented by the PRC on Christians. From forcing down crosses to changing translations of Scripture, what is occurring in greater China has precedent in Xinjiang. The emphasis of the PRC on Muslim worship, dress, and scripture is reflected in their current actions in Christian churches and meetings.

See below for interesting reads:

Yongnian, Zheng. The Chinese Communist Party as Organizational Emperor: Culture, Reproduction, and Transformation (China Policy Series). 1 ed. Routledge, 2010.

Jacobs, Justin M. Xinjiang and the Modern Chinese State (Studies on Ethnic Groups in China). University of Washington Press, 2016.

Kindopp, Jason, and Carol Lee Hamrin. God and Caesar in China: Policy Implications of Church-State Tensions. Brookings Institution Press, 2004.

Yang, Fenggang. Religion in China : Survival and Revival Under Communist Rule. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.