China’s Hard-line Approach and Ethnic Unrest in Xinjiang: A Theoretical Understanding

Abstract

Ethnic conflicts issue has perturbed China for quite a long period, hence China is not a one-Unified nation, PRC is very clear that Xinjiang was and is part of China just like its other disputed territorial claims and it does not recognize the Uyghurs as the indigenous people of Xinjiang calling them settlers. In this paper, I have studied the PRC’s official history of Xinjiang and the historians’ history who are specialized in Xinjiang and the Silk Road history to understand the two different narratives that are fundamentally different and incompatible from each other. The framework used is the typology of qualitative studies as this is helpful to assess the situation theoretically and categorize accordingly. Beijing is very harsh towards the Uyghurs and has detained over one- million of the Uyghurs for ‘re-education’ to show its legitimacy and they are considered a threat to the state’s existence, post 9/11 China has been using this global Islamophobia wave justifying that all steps taken by the state are to combat radicalization. This paper is not about the Uyghurs trace being found connected to external non-state actors, whereas the study takes a dig in securitization discourse discussing that, the Uyghurs does not have a structured way of attacks like terrorists, its more of showing dissatisfaction against the authorities because neither they have the autonomy nor have any rights to exercise. The Chinese policies are countering them back in terms of attacks because the Uyghurs are relatively deprived and they are in a constant source of competition with the Han Chinese.