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COLONIALISM MEETS COUNTERTERRORISM, 2002–2012

4 A Uyghur man sells ‘knick-knacks’ in front of a newly built apartment complex, Korla 2007. © Joshua Kuchera.

During the summer of 2000, I took my last fieldwork trip to the Uyghur homeland. The region had an ominous feeling to it that seemed to foretell its future direction. I had returned to Ghulja for the first time in about three years; the city, which was one of the few Uyghur urban centers in the north, felt as if it had lost its Uyghur characteristics and become much more of a generic small Chinese urban space. Urumqi was a mass of construction, as the PRC was already aspiring to make it a commercial hub for Central Asia, and the Uyghur neighborhood of the city seemed to be gradually shrinking into a sea of Han residents. However, informal Uyghur networks were still operating there, and an academic I met in a book store quickly ensured that I had a contact in my next destination, Khotan. That evening, I took a new sleeper bus that drove directly through the center of the Taklamakan desert from Urumqi in the north to Keriya in the south and then westward towards Khotan, watching gas flares glow in the middle of the desert through the night.

Once in Khotan, it was clear that the south was still overwhelmingly Uyghur, both culturally and demographically. While the city center was surrounded by lit billboards extolling propaganda about the friendship of nationalities in China, the streets were still filled with Uyghur faces. When I visited a neighboring village that was hosting its weekly bazaar day, it seemed as if the sea of Uyghurs bustling through the narrow rural road were not in the PRC at all, with no state propaganda, Chinese language, or ethnic Han in sight. In Kashgar, I spent the day with two young students of the official state madrassa who, after meeting in a local eatery, had volunteered to talk my ears off about state restrictions on religion and the ways these regulations filtered into their religious education. As I bid goodnight to my newly befriended religious students near the Id Kah Mosque, I thought I saw some plainclothes policemen approach them as they disappeared into the night, leaving me worried that I may have caused them great harm. When I left the next morning via bus to climb the Karakorum highway into Pakistan, I saw a foreboding sign of the future: a new raised four-lane highway in a state of partial construction on the deserted outskirts of Kashgar. I couldn’t help but wonder if this was an omen that Kashgar, with its monuments of Central Asian architecture and winding alleyways of traditional Uyghur homes, was on a fast-track to soon look much more like the generic second-tier Chinese city that Urumqi had become.

This was the state of the region on the eve of its introduction to GWOT. It seemed as if the Chinese government had taken control of the region more than at any point in its history and was rapidly rebuilding it to prepare it for a new role as an international commercial hub. While in the south of the region it was clear that Uyghur culture remained vibrant and resilient, it seemed that the landscape was rapidly changing and the signs of future development were already apparent. The dualist strategy laid out in the infamous 1996 ‘Document No. 7’ of intensive development and aggressive suppression of dissent and religion had been somewhat successful in pacifying the region and its population while introducing a new stage of colonization by Han settlers. In this context, the PRC would double-down on this strategy over the next decade with a new twist. Now, instead of claiming to combat ‘separatism’ and ‘illegal religious activities,’ the PRC would be suppressing dissent in the name of ‘counterterrorism’ and the struggle against alleged ‘extremism,’ efforts that had essentially been sanctioned by the international community as justifying the suspension of human rights.

STATE PROPAGANDA’S TRANSITION FROM ‘SEPARATISTS’ TO ‘TERRORISTS’ AND THE EARLY YEARS OF CHINA’S ‘WAR ON TERROR’

Initially, the international recognition of ETIM as a ‘terrorist threat’ had little impact on Uyghurs inside their homeland. As suggested above, the state’s primary ‘security concern’ in the Uyghur homeland after 2001, like during the 1990s, remained indigenous calls for self-determination, which the state defined broadly as any expression of nationalism or of non-state-approved religiosity. Furthermore, its strategy for dealing with this concern had also changed little, combining development and aggressive suppression of dissent. What did change was the discourse used to justify state attempts to suppress these aspirations for self-determination. Now, instead of justifying its suppression of Uyghur political voices and religious practices as combating ‘separatism,’ the PRC framed such efforts as ‘counter-terrorism,’ a security position essentially endorsed by the western democracies of the world. Furthermore, there was a noticeable increase in authorities’ use of the term ‘extremism,’ which was also a part of the GWOT discourse, as a means of signaling the ideological support of dissent, especially when it involved religious activities not sponsored by the state. For Chinese officials, these discursive shifts did not require much of a policy recalibration because PRC ideology posited that the perceived threats of ‘separatism,’ ‘terrorism,’ and ‘religious extremism’ were one and the same, manifestations of the ‘three evils.’

However, this discursive shift, which began almost immediately after the declaration of GWOT and even before the designation of ETIM as a ‘terrorist organization,’ did provide a convenient justification for the intensification of the PRC’s policies in the Uyghur region. The most immediate sign of such intensification was the passing of amendments to China’s criminal legal code in December of 2001, three months after 9/11 and just as the PRC was ramping up its campaign for international recognition of a ‘terrorist threat’ from Uyghurs. While these amendments mostly amounted to adding ‘terrorism crimes’ with stauncher penalties to an existing list of violations under the category of ‘Endangering Public Security,’ Amnesty International also noted at the time that these new crimes lacked sufficient definition to be fairly punished.¹

In the wake of these legal and discursive changes, PRC security organs launched a substantial crackdown on dissent in the Uyghur region under the guise of combating ‘terrorism’ and ‘extremism.’ This widespread campaign, the first year of which has been thoroughly documented by Amnesty International, resulted in scores of arrests of Uyghurs suspected of harboring self-determination aspirations on charges related to ‘terrorism,’ many carrying death sentences.² At the same time, security forces also launched a massive campaign in the region to limit religious observation and access to ‘unofficial’ information in the name of combating ‘extremism.’ Through this campaign, the state would arrest dozens of clerics and civilians who practiced religious activities outside official state-sponsored institutions, and would close numerous mosques deemed to have a ‘bad influence’ on youth due to their proximity to schools.³ It also limited the religiosity of daily life by prohibiting certain religious rites in the life-cycle rituals of weddings, circumcisions, and funerals, by seeking to prevent Uyghurs, especially school children and government officials, from observing the Ramadan fast, and by forcing Imams to undergo additional ‘political education’ on Communist Party doctrine.⁴ Finally, it used the justification of combating ‘terrorism in the spiritual field’ to confiscate un-censored publications and recordings and to arrest numerous Uyghur artists for the writing and/or reciting of poems and stories that implicitly criticized state policy or expressed Uyghur aspirations for self-determination.⁵

While all of these efforts were similar to the crackdowns in the region during the 1990s, their new framing as ‘counterterrorism,’ an internationally recognized justification for the suspension of human rights, facilitated a more aggressive approach towards controlling the ways that Uyghurs behaved and thought. This was a trend that would continue with increased intensity in the years that followed, especially in the southern Tarim Basin, which accounted for about 82% of the Uyghur population at the time.⁶ In fact, there is evidence that Uyghurs in the Han-dominated northern areas were largely spared the worst impacts of these campaigns, and some international scholars, whose experiences had primarily been in such Han-dominated regions, suggested that a ‘Uyghur-Han rapprochement’ was underway in the early 2000s due to increased Uyghur integration and a noticeable decline in alleged Uyghur-perpetrated violence.⁷ However, by the end of the decade, it would be clear that such a prognosis was not even appropriate for those Uyghurs living in the Han-dominant north who, while less impacted by the state’s new ‘counterterrorism’ campaigns, were particularly subjected to the pressures of increased development in the region.

‘OPEN UP THE WEST’ BEFORE THE 2009 URUMQI RIOTS: INTEGRATION OR SETTLER COLONIALISM?

While state-led development in the Uyghur homeland had increased substantially in the 1990s, its benefits were simultaneously geographically and ethnically stratified.⁸ Most development had occurred in the north of the region, which was where almost 88% of the region’s Han lived, while the south, which was home to over 80% of the Uyghurs, was experiencing little change.⁹ The PRC was well aware of this problem, which created an obvious obstacle to the region’s integration. As a result, two critical development projects were launched in the 1990s to link the north and south of the region, subsequently facilitating more cohesive regional development in the future. These were the construction of the Taklamakan Desert Highway between Urumqi and the southern region of Khotan, completed in 1995, and the new rail line from Urumqi to Kashgar, completed in 1999. While these projects set the scene for much more ambitious development efforts in the south of the region during the 2000s, this would not immediately be felt during the first decade of the new millennium. Initially most development in the region in the early 2000s was financed by a large state-led campaign primarily focused on infrastructure known as ‘Open Up the West,’ which was launched in 2000 to address regional economic inequality in the PRC. Despite efforts to increase development in western China during the 1990s, the west still lagged significantly behind eastern China economically, and the gap was only increasing.¹⁰

With regards to the Uyghur homeland and the Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR), both of which were included in this program, ‘Open Up The West’ also hoped to achieve political goals by helping to halt the calls for increased self-determination voiced by these regions’ residents frequently during the 1990s under the assumption that macro-economic growth would ease ethnic tensions. This faith in the power of development to resolve ethnic tensions relied on the logic of outdated theories of modernization from the 1950s.¹¹ These theories assumed that industrialization, the introduction of new technology, the establishment of new infrastructure, and general macro-economic growth would gradually eliminate cultural differences and historical grievances by providing new economic opportunities to all.¹² However, for development to contribute to resolving ethnic tensions in the Uyghur region, it would have required addressing the region’s structural racism and ethnic stratification, which the state-led and infrastructure-focused efforts of ‘Open Up The West’ would not do. The campaign as it was implemented in the Uyghur homeland focused almost exclusively on mega-projects related to energy, natural resource exploitation, and transportation infrastructure, both within the region and between the region and inner China.¹³ According to Nicholas Becquelin, as early as 2003, Beijing ‘had reported having effectively invested more than 70 billion yuan (US$8.6 billion) in building highways, power plants, dams and telecommunications facilities in Xinjiang.’¹⁴

These projects would undoubtedly contribute to connecting the Uyghur region with both the national and global economy over the long-term, but they did not provide significant immediate improvement in the daily lives of most Uyghurs. In fact, in many ways, this development served to aggravate the already tense relations between Uyghurs and the state. Infrastructure construction served to further militarize the region, as the paramilitary XPCC was tasked with implementing the majority of the campaign’s early construction projects, which also frequently served to displace Uyghur communities involuntarily. Uyghurs also associated this development campaign with an increase in ethnic Han civilian migration to the region, especially in the north, where the majority of economic activity remained. In this context, the campaign appeared more like encroachment on a territory that most Uyghurs consider their own, rather than an attempt to improve their lives. While a small handful of Uyghurs, especially in the capital of Urumqi, certainly became wealthy at this time through the opportunities afforded by the development campaign, the majority found themselves increasingly alienated in their own homeland. Nicholas Bequelin has suggested that this result was essentially the intent of the ‘Open Up the West’ campaign. He describes the campaign as a continuation of integration efforts from the 1990s, but with a more explicit assimilationist intent. Without using the term ‘settler colonialism,’ Becquelin notes that the goals of this campaign were in line with a colonization effort, overtly promoting ‘increased Han migrations into borderland national minority areas’ and the ‘homogenization of the Chinese nation.’¹⁵

Coupled with these mega-projects, the PRC was also pushing substantial urban development in the region during the early 2000s. This process was even more controversial among Uyghurs than the aforementioned infrastructure projects, since urban renewal had more direct and tangible impact on Uyghur communities and often created displacement. Furthermore, especially in the south, where cities still had a strong Uyghur character and the division of mähällä neighborhoods remained a part of social structure and social capital, urban development had the potential for cultural destruction.

The most emblematic case of such displacement and cultural destruction during the first decade of the 2000s was in the city of Kashgar, viewed by Uyghurs as a historical center of their urban culture. In Kashgar, the municipal government of the city had already begun an urban renewal campaign in the first years of the ‘Open Up the West’ campaign. Given its geographic location along routes to the west and south-west, Kashgar was strategically positioned to become a center of the PRC’s regional trade, production, and commerce that could rival Urumqi in the north. However, the heart of the city contained most of the best-preserved examples of traditional Central Asian urban residential architecture in the world, especially in the form of its old city’s labyrinth of mud-brick houses connected by narrow alleyways. In order to modernize the city and turn it into an international hub of commercial activity, the local government had decided that this old city would need to be demolished. While this project would raise concerns internationally for its destruction of important historical sites, for Uyghurs in Kashgar, its impact would also include involuntary displacement and the destruction of social capital.¹⁶ As an excellent report by the Uyghur Human Rights Project (UHRP) on the Chinese State’s demolition of Uyghur communities points out, not only were the local residents of the old city not consulted with regards to the development plans, but the removal from their homes was accompanied by a large armed police presence that ensured no resistance to relocation.¹⁷

While the destruction of Kashgar’s old city was the most publicized manifestation of the PRC’s urban development in the region during the first decade of GWOT, it was not a unique case. In an effort to modernize the region’s cities, traditional Uyghur communities were being displaced and symbols of Uyghur culture were being erased throughout the area’s urban landscape. In Urumqi, a substantial development project during the early 2000s turned the Erdaoqiao neighborhood, the primary Uyghur community in the city, into a tourist attraction and a center of formal commerce, establishing a new expansive and sanitized bazar boasting the ‘largest market of ethnic minority goods in Xinjiang,’ an ‘ethnic dance ballroom,’ and numerous new commercial buildings.¹⁸ In the process, many were displaced from this area of the city, further marginalizing the Uyghurs’ position in this long Han-dominated city. Similarly, Ildiko Bellar-Hann provides an account of how the state in the city of Kumul razed parts of a Muslim cemetery at the same time to facilitate the development of a tourism center around a former Qing palace.¹⁹

ASSIMILATING UYGHURS IN THE NAME OF MODERNIZATION AND COUNTERTERRORISM

If many Uyghurs recognized these development projects as part of a creeping settler colonization of their homeland, the simultaneous projects to ‘integrate’ the Uyghur people that took place during the early 2000s were even more colonial in their appearance. While in the 1990s, the state had sought to entice Uyghurs in the north to ‘integrate’ into Han culture through economic opportunities, in the early 2000s state-sponsored programs were explicitly created for this purpose. While most of these programs remained nominally ‘voluntary’ and driven by incentives, the harsh crackdown on expressions of Uyghur dissent in the name of ‘counterterrorism’ added coercive dimensions to their implementation, especially in the rural south.

Probably the most substantial of these assimilationist policies during the early 2000s was what the PRC refers to as its ‘bilingual’ education program in the region. Beginning in the 1990s, the state invested significant money into promoting Chinese-language instruction throughout the Uyghur region.²⁰ In 2002, the state closed the Uyghur language track at the premiere higher educational institution in the region, Xinjiang University, in all subjects except Uyghur language and literature.²¹ This set the stage for the decision of the regional government in March 2004 that all students at all educational levels in the province would mandatorily receive instruction in Mandarin Chinese. Officially, this was promoted as a ‘bi-lingual education’ policy where non-Han students could be instructed in both Chinese and their own language, but, as Adrienne Dwyer has suggested, this was actually a ‘covert policy of monolingual education’ because the state had consolidated most non-Han language schools into Chinese-language schools, subsequently removing the curriculum in other languages almost entirely.²²

As Dwyer further demonstrates, these policies were accompanied by reductions in the number of publications produced in non-Chinese languages as well as by a trend to produce periodicals plus radio and television programming in these languages that were merely translated versions of Chinese-language material produced in inner China.²³ As a result, not only was the Uyghur language slowly disappearing from the region’s media, but even narratives with Uyghur cultural content were being wiped out.

A more aggressive educational program that was offered to select minority students involved boarding schools in inner China, where all instruction was in Chinese. These schools, known as the ‘Xinjiang Class,’ were begun in 2000 with the opening of twelve institutions in different regions of China proper.²⁴ By 2006, they had expanded to 26 different locations where they educated 10,000 students.²⁵ The schools were focused particularly on political indoctrination and enforced a strict atmosphere of control that one former student compared to a prison.²⁶ Part of this political indoctrination included overt attempts to strip students of any religious beliefs, such as only giving one day off for major Muslim holidays, during which time students were required to partake in secular celebrations and refrain from prayer.²⁷

While the state framed these education policies as a means of increasing Uyghur employability and integration in the PRC, they had substantial impact on Uyghurs’ identity and social relations as well. While the policies for elementary and primary education would take time to implement, and their impact would only be fully noticeable a decade later, they were laying the groundwork for the creation of the first generation of Uyghurs who would be assumed to be completely literate in the Chinese language. Especially in southern rural areas where Uyghurs had poor if any Chinese-language skills, this would eventually drive a wedge between the youth and their parents’ generation. Timothy Grose’s research on the ‘Xinjiang Class’ schools suggests that this program’s results were even more immediate if they were limited to a small number of Uyghur children. As Grose notes, these schools created particularly intense identity dilemmas for their students, who found themselves after graduation detached from Uyghur culture (sometimes not even able to speak Uyghur well) while also not quite being accepted by Han as one of their own.²⁸

Another state effort to transform Uyghurs during the early 2000s involved sending workers to inner China to work and live in factory dormitories with Han. One of these programs, apparently hoping to increase inter-ethnic marriage, sent young Uyghur women from rural areas in the south of the Uyghur region to the interior of China to work in factories accompanied by language training and ideological courses.²⁹ Based on local news reports from the region, the UHRP was able to infer that as many as 10,000 Uyghur women between the ages of 18 and 20 from rural areas in the south participated in this program during 2006 and 2007 alone.³⁰ While these programs were touted as economic opportunities for Uyghurs, official accounts also noted that they would help to incorporate rural Uyghurs into the ‘the “great socialist family” of the Chinese motherland’ by improving their ‘thinking and consciousness’ as well as their manners and civility.³¹ Technically, these programs were voluntary but, given the population they targeted in rural Uyghur areas in the south, it can be assumed that denying participation would bring one’s family under suspicion of ‘extremist’ and ‘terrorist’ sympathies.

Thousands of Uyghurs participated in these educational and work programs during the first decade of the 2000s, but the programs still only touched a small percentage of the Uyghur population. Among those who did participate, most did not subsequently jettison their Uyghur identity or proclaim loyalty to the PRC, and many reasserted their identity through nationalism and religion.³² In short, these programs did not really serve their intended purpose of further integrating Uyghurs into a Han-dominant culture. At most, they were able to do so for a small Uyghur elite in Urumqi and perhaps in a few other urban areas, but the majority of the population likely viewed these efforts as yet one more way that the state was seeking to destroy their culture.

Despite the ineffectiveness of such integration and assimilation measures in creating ‘loyal’ Uyghurs, and the pressures created by the development projects of ‘Open Up the West,’ there were remarkably few violent incidents reported inside the Uyghur region during the early 2000s. Justin Hastings, points out that, in contrast to the 1990s, violence during 2000 to 2008 was almost non-existent.³³ Similarly, Gardner Bovingdon’s list of protest and violent incidents for this time hardly includes any that could be unequivocally categorized as acts of political violence.³⁴ While this paucity of violence was likely due largely to the increased security environment in the region, it also suggests that, contrary to PRC rhetoric, there was no violent ‘terrorist threat’ to the security of China at this time. However, it was also clear that the situation in the Uyghur region was increasingly tense. Han in-migration was expanding, Han-focused urban re-development was dislocating many Uyghurs and removing signs of Uyghur culture from the landscape, and the state was increasingly adopting assimilationist policies. For a small number of Uyghurs, this situation was offering new opportunities to enrich themselves, but for the majority, it was creating an environment of alienation. It would only be a matter of time before this alienation was to explode into violent rage.

THE TURNING POINTS: THE 2008 OLYMPICS AND THE 2009 URUMQI RIOTS

In the run-up to the Beijing Summer Olympics of 2008, the PRC increased its security in all areas of society to prevent any disruption of the games, and the Minister of Public Security announced that ‘terrorism,’ assumed to be specifically related to Uyghurs, represented ‘the greatest threat to the Olympic Games.’³⁵ Given the paucity of violence involving Uyghurs since the 1990s, this seemed to be an odd concern to many international observers. Chinese authorities claimed to have raided a large Uyghur ‘terrorist camp’ in early 2007 in a mountainous area near Kashgar, but there was much skepticism about these claims. According to Hastings, a Spanish journalist had reported that the incident had actually been a dispute about illegal mining that turned violent and ended up in the death of a policeman, which authorities covered up as being related to ‘terrorism.’³⁶ Furthermore, virtually nothing had been heard of the activities of ETIM for the first seven years of GWOT.

However, Beijing’s rhetoric about the threat that ‘terrorism’ posed to the games increased significantly in the spring of 2008. This was probably, at least partially, initiated by the video released on 1 March 2008 by TIP showing Abdul Häq threatening to attack the games.³⁷ While the video received little initial attention from international journalists or analysts, a series of alleged foiled ‘terrorist’ attacks announced by authorities in March and April did. First, on 7 March 2008, Chinese authorities grounded a plane traveling from Urumqi to Beijing on which a Uyghur woman was alleged to have planned an attack with gasoline canisters.³⁸ Then, in April, the PRC announced that it had broken up two other alleged ‘terrorist cells’ in the Uyghur homeland since January and had apprehended a total of 45 Uyghurs, allegedly with bomb-making materials intended for use in attacks on the Olympics.³⁹ However, little information was available about these incidents, and international journalists and analysts speculated whether they had even occurred as described. Some journalists believed that these allegedly foiled plots were a creation of the government to send a message of strength as a means of deterring any attempted disruption of the games.⁴⁰ Other observers, who took the claims at face-value, noted that the explosives reported seized from the alleged ‘terrorist cells’ were minimal and insufficient for even constructing a car bomb, suggesting a gross over-exaggeration of the threat.⁴¹

Nonetheless, the hype created by the PRC about the alleged risk of ‘terrorism’ disrupting the games would escalate in coming months. Bus explosions in Shanghai and Kunming in May and July respectively would raise more speculation about this threat, especially given that TIP had issued an ominous video claiming responsibility for both blasts.⁴² While the Chinese government officially denied that these blasts had anything to do with Uyghurs, the anxiousness about this alleged threat only grew in the country as the games approached.⁴³

As a result, the PRC adopted increasingly draconian security measures towards the Uyghurs in the months leading up to the Olympics. These heightened security efforts explicitly profiled Uyghurs as a people and effectively isolated them from contact with the games’ international audience. This ‘quarantining’ of Uyghurs in advance of the Olympics was especially visible in Beijing, where Uyghurs were reportedly refused hotel rooms, and local sources suggested that as many as 4,000 to 5,000 were either detained or expelled from the city in the months prior to the games.⁴⁴ These measures were not based on suspicions about specific Uyghur individuals, but targeted the entire ethnic group, sending a clear message to Uyghurs that they were not welcome to be part of the largest international event in China in PRC history. The Chinese state employed similar exclusionary measures against Tibetans during the Olympics, but as one report at the time suggested, ‘the Uyghurs are under greater pressure … because the government sees them not only as potential protesters but also as potential terrorists.’⁴⁵ Furthermore, these exclusionary measures in Beijing and elsewhere in inner China were accompanied by increased security efforts inside the Uyghur homeland, where virtually any Uyghur displaying open religiosity or animosity towards the state was profiled as a potential ‘terrorist’ and monitored closely for the duration of the games.

Two violent events did occur in the Uyghur homeland during the week of the Olympics’ opening ceremonies in August 2008, but these incidents were more likely a response to the tight controls put on Uyghurs at this time than they were premeditated attempts to disrupt the games. The first incident took place in Kashgar on 4 August, a few days ahead of the opening ceremonies. According to official accounts, two Uyghurs stole a truck and allegedly rammed it into a group of soldiers during their morning march, throwing explosives and stabbing the soldiers with machetes, reportedly killing sixteen of them.⁴⁶ However, there also remained much speculation about the accuracy of these reports. In September, The New York Times published a lengthy article drawing on interviews with western tourists who saw the attack from their hotel room windows.⁴⁷ According to these eyewitnesses, a truck had rammed into the group of soldiers, but no explosions were heard. Furthermore, they suggested that the men seen stabbing soldiers with machetes were also wearing military uniforms.⁴⁸ Regardless of what really happened on 4 August in Kashgar, the incident served to feed the hysteria surrounding the alleged ‘terrorist threat’ to the games.

The second incident took place in the city of Kucha on 10 August, two days after the opening ceremonies. According to Chinese government accounts, a group of Uyghurs commandeered a taxi or taxis in the morning and allegedly proceeded to throw explosives from the car(s) at police patrols, the Public Security Bureau building, the industry and commerce administration building, and possibly several other buildings, killing police and injuring civilians.⁴⁹ When the alleged perpetrators were confronted, the government said that eight Uyghurs assailants were killed, two were captured, two blew themselves up, and three others allegedly escaped.⁵⁰

Little is known about the motivations for this violence. Unlike the bus explosions in Shanghai and Kunming, TIP did not claim to have anything to do with these apparently rudimentary attacks. Furthermore, it is unclear whether the acts of violence were meant to be political statements about Uyghur self-determination timed for the Olympics, acts of rage in response to the massive crackdown on Uyghurs during the games, or a reaction to something else entirely. Regardless, they were significant given the relative lack of reports of violent resistance from Uyghurs since the 2002 international recognition of ETIM as a ‘terrorist organization.’ Taken together with the threatening videos produced by TIP, these acts of violence would only invite more scrutiny of Uyghurs from state security organs in the coming months.

Following this violence, the Chinese Communist Party Secretary of the region, Wang Lequan, declared a ‘life or death struggle’ against ‘terrorists.’⁵¹ The aggressive crackdown that followed reportedly mobilized some 200,000 public security officers and armed police and included official orders to punish the families and neighbors of those suspected of being involved in the Kashgar and Kucha violence. Reportedly, an Imam in Kucha was even given a life-sentence prison term because one of the alleged attackers had attended his mosque.⁵² According to official accounts, nearly 1,300 Uyghurs were arrested for ‘state security crimes’ in 2008, including on charges of ‘terrorism,’ substantially more than in previous years.⁵³ The oppressive environment that these measures cultivated among Uyghurs over the course of 2008 undoubtedly contributed to the tensions that exploded in Urumqi in the summer of 2009.

Less than a year after the opening ceremonies of the Beijing games, the city of Urumqi witnessed what was likely the worst incident of ethnic violence in the history of the PRC. While this incident had nothing to do with an alleged ‘terrorism threat’ or with any sort of premeditated violence, it would further fuel both state and Han citizen fears of Uyghurs as an inherently ‘dangerous’ population. As a result, it would begin a period of unprecedented repression in the Uyghur homeland that would only destabilize the region further.

This incident began in the evening of 5 July 2009 as a peaceful protest led by Uyghur youth who were demanding justice for the brutal murder of two Uyghur workers at a toy factory in Shaoguan city in China’s southern Guangdong province.⁵⁴ The murders had apparently transpired during a violent clash where Han workers ambushed sleeping Uyghur workers in their dormitory after rumors had spread on the internet that Uyghur male workers had raped a Han woman.⁵⁵ This incident in Guangdong was also clearly linked to state development policies since the Uyghurs in the factory were presumably working there under one of the state-promoted work programs for Uyghurs in inner China that had been developed in the early 2000s.

The protest itself was substantial and unusual for the Uyghur region of China where, unlike in inner China, such public expressions of discontent were severely punished. However, it was also unique in that the protestors who organized it were among those Uyghurs who had chosen paths of integration into the PRC and were placing faith in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to apply justice for the incident in Guangdong. In fact, videos of the initial protest showed what appeared to be Uyghur university students carrying PRC flags and signs in Chinese at the front of the march, appealing to authorities on the basis of their status as citizens of China, not merely as Uyghurs.

The exact circumstances under which the protest became violent is unknown. Chinese authorities suggested that the violence was premeditated and had been orchestrated by the WUC leader Rabiya Kadeer from abroad.⁵⁶ However, most other reports suggest that the violence was a spontaneous response to security forces’ aggressive attempts to stop the marchers from advancing, quickly spreading beyond the protestors to include Uyghur bystanders unleashing their anger at the state and the dominant Han ethnic group. The violence itself was raw and intense as Uyghurs throughout the city set vehicles on fire, destroyed stores, and began attacking Han civilians, leaving a reported 156 people dead.⁵⁷ The descriptions of the intense violence that took place were testament to how tense relations between Uyghurs and Han had become in the preceding decade. The next morning, groups of Han vigilantes responded by attacking Uyghurs, allegedly while security forces looked on passively and perhaps even provided these vigilantes with weapons, and in the evening security forces swept through Uyghur neighborhoods hauling away suspected participants in the violence.⁵⁸ The violence continued for two days after the initial riot broke out; there remains no reliable account of how many were killed over the three-day period, but it is assumed that casualties were at least several hundred.

In many ways, the violent passion unleashed in Urumqi in July 2009 was a boiling over of the tensions that development, settler colonialism, and Uyghur marginalization in the region had fostered. As Rian Thum pointed out at the time, this violence marked a clear change in the shape of Uyghur resistance to Chinese rule that had now become focused on the Han as a people rather than just on the government.⁵⁹ At the same time, it also marked a clear change in the way that Han migrants to the region viewed the local Uyghur population. If the Han had long held racist stereotypes of the Uyghurs as backward and lazy, now they also considered this people to be an inherent danger. Combined with the fears of ‘terrorism’ allegedly associated with Uyghurs that had spread through China during the Olympics, these attitudes would facilitate among Han an increasingly exclusionary attitude towards the Uyghurs. All Uyghurs had suddenly become ‘dangerous’ and worthy of particular scrutiny. As Tom Cliff has suggested, for many Han in the region, the Urumqi riots, frequently referred to simply as ‘7/5,’ unleashed an unprecedented demonization of the Uyghurs, which can be clearly compared to the Islamophobia that spread in the US after 9/11.⁶⁰ This response from the Han population within the Uyghur homeland put increased pressure on local authorities to do something about the ‘dangerous’ Uyghur people, and the state responded to these demands aggressively.

The official response to the 2009 riots was to further increase security measures in the region, including a virtual state of martial law for the next year. This encompassed a heavy security presence in Urumqi for months afterwards and stepped up security operations elsewhere in the region. Extensive searches for Uyghurs alleged to be involved in the violence were carried out, including door-to-door searches of Uyghur-populated apartment buildings and neighborhoods.⁶¹ The number of those arrested and jailed in connection with the riots remains unknown, but the Financial Times reported that at least 4,000 Uyghurs had already been arrested within two weeks of the events.⁶² Arrests of Uyghurs accused of involvement in the riots continued for months afterwards in both Urumqi and in other areas of the Uyghur region.⁶³ Among the reportedly thousands detained in connection with the riots, a substantial number remain unaccounted for, leading Human Rights Watch to categorize them as ‘enforced disappearances.’⁶⁴

Additionally, tight restrictions were placed on communications throughout the region. Immediately after the riots began, the government shut down the internet locally, only restoring it incrementally between December 2009 and May 2010. Cell phone text messaging was prevented until January 2010, and international phone calls were blocked until December 2009.⁶⁵ In short, state security organs put the entire region under lock-down for almost an entire year following the riots.

While the violence in Urumqi was clearly neither a ‘terrorist attack’ nor related to Uyghurs’ Muslim faith, the security response included more searches for alleged ‘terrorists’ and ‘extremists’ as well as a general crackdown on all religiously inclined Uyghurs, especially in the rural south of the region, whose migrants to Urumqi were blamed by many Han for the violence. During this time, the state increased its oversight of sermons given at mosques – requiring Imams to cover themes of importance to PRC policy, and making it prohibitively difficult to perform the Haj pilgrimage – and sought to more aggressively prevent religious teachings in private homes.⁶⁶ Unfortunately, given the almost complete information blackout to which the Uyghur homeland was subjected in the year following the Urumqi riots, the full extent of these measures remains unknown.

EXPEDIATED DEVELOPMENT, 2010–2012

Despite the apparent links between the pressures of development in the region and the 2009 riots, the state did not respond by seeking to mitigate these pressures, at least as they impacted Uyghurs. Rather, the state continued to view the riots as an indication of ‘underdevelopment,’ and subsequently responded by only seeking to increase its development efforts. Within a month of the riots, then CCP General Secretary Hu Jintao announced that the only solution to the ‘problems’ in the Uyghur region of China was to ‘expedite development.’⁶⁷ The new Party Secretary appointed in the region after the violence, Zhang Chunxian, supported this assertion, noting that the state would ensure ‘leapfrog development and lasting stability,’ suggesting that these two concepts are inextricably linked.⁶⁸ In this sense, the government seemed to be doubling down once again on its trust in an outdated form of modernization theory, believing that more economic growth would inevitably lead to improved ethnic relations, if not the disappearance of ethnic difference entirely. However, the ways in which this was done also suggested that the PRC was looking to an even older model of development and ethnic integration for its inspiration, that of settler colonization.

In late 2009, Beijing sent three investigation teams to the region to examine ways to ‘expediate development,’ replaced the Party Secretary of the region, and began planning a large Xinjiang Work Forum for May of 2010.⁶⁹ This first Xinjiang Work Forum, in turn, laid out a new and more aggressive vision for the region that sought to both stimulate development and establish stability. While this strategy’s goals differed little from those that the PRC had been pursuing in the region since the 1990s, its more aggressive approach was more overtly assimilationist, especially in its attempts to change the landscape and demographics of the region.

This aggressive strategy of economic and cultural integration also became more directed towards the Uyghur-dominant south after the Work Forum. While development had increased in the urban areas of the Uyghur-majority south during the first decade of the 2000s, these efforts at best maintained the development gap that had existed between north and south at the turn of the millennium. Likewise, despite attempts to implement mandatory education in the Chinese language and entice Uyghurs from the south to work at factories in inner China, the population of the southern Tarim Basin remained resistant to assimilation and the adoption of the Chinese language. Now, the PRC hoped to expedite development and assimilation efforts in the south. However, for many Uyghurs in the south, this would appear to be an intensification of the state colonization of the region, only provoking more resistance.

The approach for developing this region economically was somewhat innovative. While its logic of integration and the dissolution of dissent was still based in 1950s modernization theory, if not Marxism to which that theory was a response, its implementation was decidedly neo-liberal in a very Chinese way, and its outcomes looked more like the settler colonialism of the nineteenth century. This program was called the ‘Pairing Assistance Program’ (PAP) and partnered economically successful regions elsewhere in China with ‘underdeveloped’ locations in the Uyghur region, primarily in the south. The program initially involved 19 Chinese provinces and municipalities outside the region, all of which gained particular benefits from the region’s oil and gas, pledging to contribute 0.3–0.6% of their fiscal revenue for 2011–2020 to the development of their corresponding ‘sister’ regions in the Uyghur region, mostly funneled through companies located in these ‘partner provinces.’⁷⁰

Thomas Cliff has asserted that this program ‘epitomizes the logic of integration’ since it brings the power of administrations in inner China into the development of the Uyghur region.⁷¹ Cliff suggests that this was done as much for reassurances of stability to the Han migrants who had come to the region in the previous decades as it was for its effectiveness in driving development. With the Han population having lost confidence in local PRC administrations to protect them from the increasingly ‘demonized’ Uyghurs after the Urumqi riots, it was hoped that existing Han migrants would be encouraged to stay and new ones would be enticed to come to the region if the administrations of prominent Chinese cities like Shanghai and Shenzhen were involved in planning local development. Indeed, the PAP would lead to massive urban development in the Uyghur cities of the south and appeared to be helping tip the demographic balance in these urban centers increasingly towards the Han.

The other new economic policy to come out of the Work Forum was the establishment of ‘Special Economic Trading Areas’ (SETAs) in Kashgar near the Kyrgyzstan border and in Khorgus on the Kazakhstan border respectively. This effort made obvious sense in the context of the PRC’s use of the Uyghur region as a commercial bridge to Central and South Asia, especially given that many of the infrastructure projects connecting the region to neighboring countries during the early 2000s were already entering China at these two outward-looking geographic nodes.⁷²

If the location of these two proposed SETAs made strategic sense, the context in which they were to be built were very different. Khorgus was a remote and lazy border town that could easily be built up from scratch, but Kashgar was a densely populated Uyghur-majority city that was critical to Uyghur history and identity. Thus, developing Kashgar into a SETA would necessarily involve displacement and destruction of what already existed in the city in addition to massive development of a new city. It is not surprising in this context that the PRC chose Shenzhen, China’s first ‘Special Economic Zone’ during the 1980s, to partner with Kashgar in the PAP. Furthermore, Kashgar was slated to receive nearly half of the PAP assistance for the entire region during the program’s first years.⁷³ As one observer at the time suggested, this effort reflected a ‘frenzy to develop Kashgar in the model of Shenzhen.’⁷⁴

In addition to the destruction of the old city and the relocation of the majority of its Uyghur inhabitants to concrete apartment buildings, the state was busily focused on developing manufacturing in the city, with plans to create an industrial park 160 square kilometers in size.⁷⁵ These developments inevitably pushed many of the native Uyghur population further into the margins of the city, if not outside it entirely. In fact, the announcement of Kashgar’s future role in the region immediately fostered a housing boom, and the majority of new apartments were bought before completion by speculators from China’s interior who hoped to profit on Kashgar’s future role as a manufacturing and commercial center.⁷⁶

It is important to recognize that this massive development push in the Uyghur region after 2010 benefited numerous Uyghur elites economically. As Alessandro Rippa and Rune Steenberg have pointed out in an article about Kashgar’s development at this time, the money pouring into the city gave many Uyghurs opportunities to engage more in the formal economy and made some Uyghurs extremely wealthy.⁷⁷ However, the development was also very evidently marginalizing Uyghur influence on the city’s overall development: large Chinese companies began to dominate the economy; the demographic balance of the city was shifting; and the Uyghur cultural characteristics of the city that had long distinguished it began to disappear. Furthermore, most of the city’s inhabitants would benefit little if at all from the city’s transformation, particularly given the discriminatory hiring practices of many of the Chinese companies involved in the development. Despite labor laws to the contrary, it had become increasingly prevalent after the 2009 riots for companies and even state institutions to advertise for employment with stipulations that only Han need apply.⁷⁸ Although these blatantly discriminatory hiring practices were justified by employers as linguistically driven, given the low-level of most Uyghurs’ knowledge of the Chinese language, they were primarily propelled by the growing Han fear of Uyghurs as ‘dangerous’ as well as by the long-held stereotype among Han of Uyghurs as ‘lazy’ and ‘unproductive.’

In addition to being shut out of major sectors of employment in the economy, many Uyghurs were also being further physically displaced by the region’s development boom. As a result, many of the PAP projects involved significant efforts to build new housing stock. For example, the city of Shanghai, which had been partnered with the Kashgar Prefecture outside the city limits, pledged to ‘complete resettlement projects for 80,000 households’ covering four different counties in three years.⁷⁹ Additionally, regional authorities pledged to ‘transform’ 1.5 million houses throughout the region between 2010 and 2015, primarily in the Uyghur neighborhoods of Urumqi, Kashgar, Turpan, Hotan, Ghulja, Kumul, Aksu, and Korla.⁸⁰ While housing was usually provided to those Uyghurs who were displaced by such development, the new housing was not shaped around traditional Uyghur community structures, thus helping to break down the social capital of densely Uyghur-populated neighborhoods that had long existed in the region.

Finally, this new strategy for the region also involved continued and more intense efforts to assimilate Uyghurs into a Han-dominant culture through educational and work programs. The Work Forum, for example, had pledged to fully realize the ‘bilingual education’ initiative started several years earlier, with the goal of having all Uyghur children speaking fluent Chinese by 2020.⁸¹ Likewise, enrollments in the ‘Xinjiang Class’ schools would steadily increase between 2010 and 2012.⁸² While the work programs that brought Uyghurs to do manufacturing jobs in China’s interior were suspended after the events in Guandong that sparked the Urumqi riots, the Party continued to explore ways to improve this program, which would once again be rolled out with more intensity and increased assimilationist aims after 2012.

In many ways, these post-2009 development efforts represented just another chapter in what Nicholas Becquelin has called the ‘staged development’ of China’s Uyghur region, the logical conclusion of which is the complete integration of this region and its people into modern China.⁸³ However, the new stage that emerged from the Urumqi riots and that was increasingly focused on the region’s Uyghur-dominant southern oases also looked even more like settler colonization than had previous development stages. As Thomas Cliff has stated, this was an attempt ‘to drive the region’s progression from … a “frontier of control” (military occupation) towards a “frontier of settlement” (Han civilian occupation).’⁸⁴

As such, these efforts also complemented a new assimilationist trend in the PRC’s general relationship with non-Han people.⁸⁵ Since the early 2000s, there had been debates within the CCP policy community, especially championed by the ethnic Hui scholar Ma Rong, about the appropriateness of the ethnic autonomy model for the administration of China’s territories, arguing that this model had led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. Rong, and others aligned with him, argued that China should adopt a ‘melting pot’ approach to promoting a singular civic identity in place of ethnic distinctiveness and autonomy, a position that would subsequently be known as ‘Second Generation Nationalities Policy.’⁸⁶ While these approaches to ethnic policy had previously been viewed as marginal to Party debates, after the Urumqi riots this was starting to change, and they were particularly apparent in the policies to come out of the Xinjiang Work Forum. In many ways, the Uyghur region would provide the perfect testing ground for many of the policies associated with the ‘Second Generation Nationalities Policies,’ which fit in well with the region’s increasingly apparent Han settler colonization.

UYGHUR RESISTANCE AND STATE COUNTERTERRORISM, 2010–2012

In addition to these assimilationist development policies, the Work Forum also ushered in a new era of securitization in the Uyghur homeland. Following the violent and extensive crackdown on Uyghurs during the first year after the riots, the PRC would begin implementing a much-enhanced security environment in the region in 2010. This was the ‘stability’ portion of the state’s post-riot strategy of ‘leapfrog development and lasting stability,’ and would be articulated increasingly in terms of ‘counterterrorism.’ The pressures that this increased security would place on Uyghurs, especially in the rural south, would be particularly intense, and predictably only led to a rise of Uyghur-initiated violence targeting the state.

By the first anniversary of the 2009 Urumqi riots, local officials reported that ‘40,000 high-definition surveillance cameras with riot-proof protective shells had been installed throughout the region.’⁸⁷ In Urumqi, there were also reports that city officials were placing permanent barriers between Uyghur and Han neighborhoods.⁸⁸ However, in the Uyghur-dominated south of the region, the environment was particularly tense. There were limits imposed on traveling outside one’s home region, frequent checkpoints between cities, and ethnically profiled random searches. Furthermore, Uyghur refugees from rural areas, with whom I spoke in Turkey in 2016, repeatedly told me that they had been put under constant surveillance by local authorities for several years after the 2009 riots due to their profiling as particularly ‘religious’ Uyghurs. These refugees, who said their situation was akin to house arrest, reported that these measures were the primary reasons they fled the country. In addition to these efforts to monitor and control the general Uyghur population, even more substantial controls on the practice of Islam were established. Many of these controls utilized public institutions, including schools, hospitals, and mosques, to regulate Uyghurs’ public behavior, beliefs, and dress, to prevent Uyghur children from embracing Islam, and to control the messages they received from their own religious leaders.⁸⁹

In the face of this intensifying securitization, Uyghur violent resistance to police and security forces would soon become a common occurrence, especially in the Uyghur-majority south. The first report of such violent resistance since the Urumqi riots was an alleged bombing of a police station in Aksu in August 2010, but similar events would be reported over the next several years with increased frequency. While information about this violence remains limited, the majority of incidents through 2012 appear to have been clashes between Uyghurs and law enforcement officers.⁹⁰ Although Chinese officials questionably labeled all of these incidents as ‘terrorist acts,’ most do not fit this description per this book’s working definition. Rather, they appear more like reactions to equally violent security actions in the region, and many of them obviously were provoked by the invasive security that would increasingly blanket the region.

The most publicized of these violent incidents would be a series of alleged attacks on police and security forces in Kashgar and Khotan in July of 2011. The first of these incidents occurred in the city of Khotan on 18 July. While the details are disputed, it appears that a group of Uyghur men clashed with police at a station in the city, killing several of them, taking others hostage, and setting the station on fire.⁹¹ The South China Morning Post later reported that the impetus for the violent incident had been a recent ban on veiling and the wearing of black clothing among Uyghur women in the area.⁹² In the end, the death toll was placed at 18, but 14 of these were from among the alleged Uyghur attackers. The Guardian would term the incident ‘one of the deadliest encounters’ the region had seen in recent years.⁹³ Within two weeks, a series of violent incidents also took place in the city of Kashgar. On a Saturday night around midnight, there appeared to be an unsuccessful attempt at moving explosives into the city, and a mini-van exploded. Two Uyghur men who were apparently involved fled and stole a truck that they then drove through a crowded street of food stalls, eventually jumping off to attack people in the crowd, including police.⁹⁴ Seven people were allegedly killed, including one of the purported perpetrators, and some 22 were injured. The next day, a riot broke out that appeared to begin with an attack on a restaurant where several Uyghur men allegedly threw hand-made explosives and used knives to attack people.⁹⁵ After the two days of violence had ended, some 20 people had been killed, including several of the alleged attackers.

While not claiming credit for the incidents, TIP issued a video about this series of alleged attacks in Kashgar and Khotan, calling them jihad operations. Furthermore, it was this particular video where TIP was able to document that one of the participants in the Kashgar violence had in fact been in Waziristan in 2006.⁹⁶ In the video, Abdushukur, who had taken over in Abdul Häq’s place as Emir of TIP, read a statement that pointed to the many assimilationist policies in the region as reason for the action, including the education and work programs as well as the influx of Han migrants.⁹⁷

The timing of these incidents within a month of each other combined with the video from TIP showing one of those involved in Waziristan five years earlier appeared to seriously concern authorities. As a result, in the wake of this violence, the PRC even uncharacteristically criticized Pakistan, one of its closest allies, for harboring Uyghur ‘terrorists,’ and Pakistan responded by promising to assist China in its struggle against the alleged ‘terrorist threat’ posed by Uyghurs in all ways possible.⁹⁸ Predictably, the local Chinese administration in the Uyghur region also responded by increasing its monitoring of Uyghurs and announcing a new campaign to police religious behavior in the name of combating ‘extremism.’⁹⁹ However, it appears that not all locals were convinced of the state narrative that international ‘terrorists’ had carried out the violence. As one Uyghur, interviewed by The Wall Street Journal in Kashgar at the time stated, ‘they say the people came from Pakistan; they say they were international terrorists, but that’s not true; they were local people angry with the government and with the Han Chinese.’¹⁰⁰

This statement, while completely anecdotal, is telling about the extent of influence from TIP in the region at the time. Indeed, TIP had been making videos promoting jihad in the Uyghur homeland throughout 2010, and it is possible that some of these videos had gotten into the hands of local Uyghurs, especially after the 2010 establishment of 3G cellular networks and the proliferation of smart phones among Uyghurs. However, it was clear that Uyghurs in the southern Tarim Basin had plenty to be angry about and did not need any provocation from TIP to engage in violent resistance.

Violence similar to that which took place in Khotan and Kashgar in the summer of 2011 would gradually become more commonplace over the next two years. Furthermore, each time violence occurred, the heavy-handed response of the state would only make matters worse. Often what was framed as a ‘terrorist attack’ by authorities at this time was really armed self-defense against police and security forces, which were seeking to aggressively apprehend Uyghurs they viewed as ‘disloyal’ to the state, often merely determined by their religiosity. This appears to have been the case in the next major violent event that would take place in December 2011 in the Guma region outside Khotan. It was reported that a group of young Uyghur men had been pursued by police as they allegedly planned to go to Pakistan, and, in the midst of a confrontation with police, the Uyghurs took hostages and eventually got into an armed conflict with the police.¹⁰¹ At the end of the confrontation, seven of the Uyghurs were dead, in addition to one policeman.¹⁰²

Even by the sparse information coming out of the region, it was apparent that such incidents only increased in frequency in 2012, involving violence initiated by both Uyghurs and police. In February, Uyghur youth in Karghilik allegedly killed 13 Han migrants to the area on the street for unknown reasons, and the police would kill all seven of the alleged attackers.¹⁰³ In March, police killed four Uyghurs during a ‘raid’ on what the state deemed to be an ‘illegal religious gathering’ in Korla but may have merely been a group of Uyghurs praying.¹⁰⁴ In June, six Uyghurs were apprehended for allegedly planning to hijack a plane from Khotan to Urumqi, but the details and circumstances surrounding this incident are contested. Also in June, a ‘raid,’ on what authorities called an ‘illegal religious school’ in Khotan, but which may have been just an unregistered Uyghur school, led to severe burn injuries to multiple Uyghur children.¹⁰⁵ In August, authorities jailed 20 Uyghurs on charges of ‘separatism’ for information they had posted on the internet.¹⁰⁶ In October, clashes between Uyghurs and Han civilians in Korla led to invasive police sweeps throughout the city’s Uyghur residential neighborhoods, and a Uyghur carried out an alleged suicide attack on a border post near Karghilik on the country’s ‘National Day.’¹⁰⁷ In short, the situation in the south of the Uyghur homeland was quickly evolving into an escalating conflict between Uyghur citizens and security organs. However, the nature of this violence suggested that this conflict was not led by any organized insurgency, let alone by an international ‘terrorist organization,’ but was most likely an outgrowth of growing tensions between an increasingly invasive security apparatus and Uyghurs in the region, which was further aggravated by the state’s assimilationist policies and increased colonization of the region.

This increase in violence facilitated an escalating cycle of repression followed by violence and more repression throughout much of the southern Tarim Basin in the following years. In the wake of every act of violence or in advance of important public events, the state increased its security presence, recruited ‘volunteer’ security officers to monitor public places, established numerous checkpoints, and conducted widespread security sweeps in local Uyghur communities.¹⁰⁸ These security measures also included explicit efforts to police public expressions of Islam.¹⁰⁹ In turn, after each of these intensive security lock-downs, the incidents of violence only increased.

In many ways, this emerging self-perpetuating conflict between Uyghurs and security organs in the south was a logical outcome of the first decade of GWOT in the Uyghur homeland. A dangerous combination of the Han-dominated state’s settler colonialization aspirations in the region with the Islamophobic and security-obsessed narrative of GWOT had created a situation where Uyghurs and the state were pitted against each other. One of the few attempts by Uyghurs during the decade to peacefully protest PRC policies in Urumqi in 2009 was repressed by security organs and spiraled into tragic violence, clearly showing that there was no political space for Uyghurs to voice their concerns about the situation peacefully. The handful of Uyghur self-proclaimed jihadists in Waziristan that represented TIP sought to insert themselves into this situation through prolific video production, but they were really a sideshow to what was happening on the ground in the region, serving mostly to justify increased state violence against Uyghurs.

This self-perpetuating cycle of violence in the south of the Uyghur homeland would continue over the next several years and create a ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’ of Uyghur militancy both inside and outside China, only providing the state further justification for its suspension of Uyghur rights in the name of ‘counterterrorism.’ As this self-fulfilling prophecy moved out of the Uyghur homeland into inner China, it would also fuel a broader, mostly Uyghur-specific, Islamophobia that would help to build support from ethnic Han throughout the country for any measures, regardless of how extreme, that the state took against its Uyghur population, which was increasingly demonized as an existential threat to state and society.