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This paper intends to tackle some of the gradual and systematic changes that have led to massive arbitrary arrests and detentions of up to a million Uyghurs in Northwest China.

I draw from an intensive (and still on-going) 3-month field among the Uyghur community recently settled in Belgium to map out the continuous violations of privacy, close surveillance and repeated intimidation (including insistent attempts to recruit agents among the Uyghurs) they faced while still in China. I argue that these daily experiences for the Uyghur business and intellectual elites, often silenced for fear of retaliation, can be linked to the “depoliticization” process of the Uyghurs the Chinese State gradually engaged in after the 2009 confrontations (Ramachandran, 2017).

Although not officially endorsed by the Chinese State, the “second generation” ethnic policies advised by scholars and policymakers like Ma Rong or Hu Lianhe and Hu Angang have been largely implemented, targeting Uyghurs in and outside China. Aiming at ethnic ronghe or “fusion, assimilation”, such measures to “de-politicize” the Uyghurs have gradually shifted into severe violations of human rights through arbitrary detentions and massive internments in camps, affecting in particular officials, educators and other influential figures.

The outcome of my fieldwork largely contradicts China’s claim that the situation is a “national struggle against religious extremism and separatism” and shows that Beijing is implementing a radical “harmonization” of Chinese society by “manufacturing stability” (Leibold , 2018) at the expense of Uyghurs’ basic rights and China’s own Constitution.

Speaker biography

Vanessa Frangville is Senior Lecturer and Chair holder in Chinese studies at the Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB), Belgium; and Director of the ULB’s Research Centre on East Asia (EASt). She was previously a Lecturer in Chinese studies at the Victoria Wellington University of Wellington, New Zealand. Her research deals with discourses on ethnicity and nation building in modern and contemporary China, with a previous focus on cinema and “ethnic minority” film. She recently started a new project on the Uyghur diaspora in Belgium.

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