This seems like a reasonable write-up, but I'm highly skeptical of any kind of "re-education" ever accomplishing what it intends to. You could replace "vague hope of shipping them to Madagascar" with "vague hope that they'll assimilate into Han culture (or at least abandon extremism)". When it doesn't work, what then? When this indigenous people starts to feel more and more (essentially colonial) pressure from the economic development of Belt & Road, what would you expect to happen then? The conditions leading to radicalization, even outside of IS or CIA involvement, are only going to get more intense, not less so. Telling someone their culture is important and valued by the majority as it continues to be pushed further to the fringes by a majority ethnic group gentrifying (on a massive scale) their home will lead to backlash, and the only type of backlash that will find support from the outside world will be right-wing extremism.
One of the biggest issues is that over the past 30 or so years, the Uighur populace has had fewer economic opportunities than the Han/Hui populace. The economic liberalisation of the 1980s gave greater opportunities to people connected with the central and coastal areas, and that meant people with family there already, and people who could communicate in mandarin. So Uighurs were set on a worse path from a while back. This was well before the BRI rolled out.
That said, development isn’t the same as gentrification. The important thing is that as development occurs in the region, the Uighur populace gets to participate, and isn’t left behind or forced out. One way of preparing for that is to teach the lingua Franca, mandarin, and have state support for placement in industrial jobs.
It’s also important to note that the extremism didn’t come out of nowhere. The economic liberalisation tilled the soil, but Saudi Arabia’s worldwide export of Wahhabism laid the seeds.
Right now, the wider world is actively trying to impoverish the Uighur populace by targeting production chains that have Uighur labour. The claim is ‘forced labour’, the same one that’s levied against Cuba sending doctors to other countries.
The conditions leading to radicalization, even outside of IS or CIA involvement, are only going to get more intense, not less so. Telling someone their culture is important and valued by the majority as it continues to be pushed further to the fringes
In theory, re-education programs can improve the material conditions of people (in the same way investing in education everywhere else does), which should help keep them from being pushed to the fringes of society.
But also, yes, some people do need political re-education. Tens of millions of people in this country just flat-out don't give a shit about the value of human life outside of the lives of their family and friends. That mindset is fundamentally incompatible with any society worth having. Any acceptable solution to that gigantic problem is going to involve re-educating people.
I'm not disagreeing, I just don't think that any heretofore discovered method of re-education actually works.
The third option that I think exists that OP did not discuss is that when investing in a community, you make sure the people who were already there are the ones who benefit. This is the same thing that gets brought up in discussions of marijuana legalization and gentrification in the US.
How many of these new factories in Xinjiang are collectively owned by people from Xinjiang? How many factory forepersons are Uyghurs? Are the new housing housing units being constructed being given to the existing population?
I just don’t think that any heretofore discovered method of re-education actually works.
I can think of at least three existing tools that are pretty effective at influencing mass attitudes:
Mass media, particularly film and TV. For example, consider all the copaganda on existing police shows and imagine if the message was inverted. Instead of a cop planting evidence to nail a guy they know is guilty, they find one piece of potentially exonerating evidence and the message is about how important it is to disclose that to the prosecutor and defense counsel. Instead of a cop roughing up a suspect and getting useful information, a cop roughs up a suspect, gets made-up info that blows up in their face, and they get reprimanded or fired for it. Instead having an entire series about how horrible sex criminals are lurking around every corner, you have a series about some juvenile diversionary program that keeps kids from getting into deeper trouble.
Emotionally jarring messaging. The two examples that come to mind are Holocaust museums and the type of video they show you before you go white water rafting (where they show all the bodies they drag out of the river each year). It's possible to design messaging that really hits hard -- imagine if we had U.S. war crimes museums, or Gilded Age worker abuse museums.
Social/academic/employment consequences. People used to say the n-word all the time. You know how the n-word (largely) disappeared from mainstream society? There started to be serious consequences for saying it. If some talking head on TV said the n-word on a broadcast they'd be fired. What if they could get fired for calling on police to beat up protesters, or denying climate change, or defending U.S. invasions of other countries? It wouldn't, by itself, solve everything (just as driving the n-word from mainstream society hasn't solved racism). But it would create a a cultural current that's at least heading in the right direction, much like how we went from segregation being a legitimate political issue to something that even racists have to agree is wrong if they want to get any mainstream purchase.
But say you're right, and we're not sure any method of re-education will work. The alternative -- letting people who don't give a damn about human lives have real political power -- is more dangerous than at least trying to re-educate those people.
How many of these new factories in Xinjiang are collectively owned by people from Xinjiang? How many factory forepersons are Uyghurs? Are the new housing housing units being constructed being given to the existing population?
This is a fair question, and that's an ideal to strive for, but you can still do good things (e.g.. job guarantees, free education) even if they aren't collectively owned by the people involved. The Civilian Conservation Corps was a step in the right direction even if the workers didn't own their immediate means of production.
I think it's pretty unrealistic to expect the Uyghurs to subsume their identity while they're essentially being colonized by Han Chinese just because you taught them Mandarin and gave them jobs in a factory.
If they're left out of the massive creation of wealth that is occurring (which I fully expect they will be since, you know, they don't own the means of production) it's not going to go smoothly.
I very purposefully said "subsume" and not "eliminate" because what's expected is that they'd view themselves as Chinese first and as Uyghurs second, right? With "Uyghur" in the future carrying an implication of "Chinese".
Your defense of belt and road reads like a defense of southeast asian sweatshops. Just because China is doing it doesn't mean it's good. Cheering on the exploitation of people by capital because the global poverty stats will go down sounds like a straight up neoliberal talking point.
It's fully within China's power to make these new factories that are being built (Uyghur) worker-owned cooperatives.
From a Marxist point of view, the working conditions barely enter into why such factories are bad in Bangladesh and why they're still bad in China. Labor is being exploited in both.
A pattern repeated elsewhere will repeat again: A new territory is opened for the expansion of capital. It is colonized and the indigenous people will not see the same benefits as their colonizers.
I'd hardly call worker-owned co-ops a strictly anarchist organizing method just because they're horizontal.
But as you said, co-ops are having the workers exploit themselves. This is why people say co-ops aren't socialism when they're inside a capitalist society. The difference being that they receive a greater proportion of the actual value of their labor vs. simple wages.
What do you mean by "hard to implement at scale"? The capitalists are having the factories built. A state as strong as China's could surely expropriate these factories and give them to the workers.
BRI is mostly transportation infrastructure and coordinated at a very high level. However, this infrastructure investment has signaled to capitalists that Xinjiang is "open for business" and has spurred a lot of recent development (factory construction, housing construction).
I don't care so much about the road and train building so much as I care about the tagalong development alongside it, especially with respect to how the wealth from it is not going to the people who are from Xinjiang.
This seems like a reasonable write-up, but I'm highly skeptical of any kind of "re-education" ever accomplishing what it intends to. You could replace "vague hope of shipping them to Madagascar" with "vague hope that they'll assimilate into Han culture (or at least abandon extremism)". When it doesn't work, what then? When this indigenous people starts to feel more and more (essentially colonial) pressure from the economic development of Belt & Road, what would you expect to happen then? The conditions leading to radicalization, even outside of IS or CIA involvement, are only going to get more intense, not less so. Telling someone their culture is important and valued by the majority as it continues to be pushed further to the fringes by a majority ethnic group gentrifying (on a massive scale) their home will lead to backlash, and the only type of backlash that will find support from the outside world will be right-wing extremism.
One of the biggest issues is that over the past 30 or so years, the Uighur populace has had fewer economic opportunities than the Han/Hui populace. The economic liberalisation of the 1980s gave greater opportunities to people connected with the central and coastal areas, and that meant people with family there already, and people who could communicate in mandarin. So Uighurs were set on a worse path from a while back. This was well before the BRI rolled out.
That said, development isn’t the same as gentrification. The important thing is that as development occurs in the region, the Uighur populace gets to participate, and isn’t left behind or forced out. One way of preparing for that is to teach the lingua Franca, mandarin, and have state support for placement in industrial jobs.
It’s also important to note that the extremism didn’t come out of nowhere. The economic liberalisation tilled the soil, but Saudi Arabia’s worldwide export of Wahhabism laid the seeds.
Right now, the wider world is actively trying to impoverish the Uighur populace by targeting production chains that have Uighur labour. The claim is ‘forced labour’, the same one that’s levied against Cuba sending doctors to other countries.
The US has its way to deal with Uighur extremists/terrorists in the region.
I don't think that is really preferable.
In theory, re-education programs can improve the material conditions of people (in the same way investing in education everywhere else does), which should help keep them from being pushed to the fringes of society.
But also, yes, some people do need political re-education. Tens of millions of people in this country just flat-out don't give a shit about the value of human life outside of the lives of their family and friends. That mindset is fundamentally incompatible with any society worth having. Any acceptable solution to that gigantic problem is going to involve re-educating people.
I'm not disagreeing, I just don't think that any heretofore discovered method of re-education actually works.
The third option that I think exists that OP did not discuss is that when investing in a community, you make sure the people who were already there are the ones who benefit. This is the same thing that gets brought up in discussions of marijuana legalization and gentrification in the US.
How many of these new factories in Xinjiang are collectively owned by people from Xinjiang? How many factory forepersons are Uyghurs? Are the new housing housing units being constructed being given to the existing population?
I can think of at least three existing tools that are pretty effective at influencing mass attitudes:
But say you're right, and we're not sure any method of re-education will work. The alternative -- letting people who don't give a damn about human lives have real political power -- is more dangerous than at least trying to re-educate those people.
This is a fair question, and that's an ideal to strive for, but you can still do good things (e.g.. job guarantees, free education) even if they aren't collectively owned by the people involved. The Civilian Conservation Corps was a step in the right direction even if the workers didn't own their immediate means of production.
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I think it's pretty unrealistic to expect the Uyghurs to subsume their identity while they're essentially being colonized by Han Chinese just because you taught them Mandarin and gave them jobs in a factory.
If they're left out of the massive creation of wealth that is occurring (which I fully expect they will be since, you know, they don't own the means of production) it's not going to go smoothly.
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I very purposefully said "subsume" and not "eliminate" because what's expected is that they'd view themselves as Chinese first and as Uyghurs second, right? With "Uyghur" in the future carrying an implication of "Chinese".
Your defense of belt and road reads like a defense of southeast asian sweatshops. Just because China is doing it doesn't mean it's good. Cheering on the exploitation of people by capital because the global poverty stats will go down sounds like a straight up neoliberal talking point.
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It's fully within China's power to make these new factories that are being built (Uyghur) worker-owned cooperatives.
From a Marxist point of view, the working conditions barely enter into why such factories are bad in Bangladesh and why they're still bad in China. Labor is being exploited in both.
A pattern repeated elsewhere will repeat again: A new territory is opened for the expansion of capital. It is colonized and the indigenous people will not see the same benefits as their colonizers.
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I'd hardly call worker-owned co-ops a strictly anarchist organizing method just because they're horizontal.
But as you said, co-ops are having the workers exploit themselves. This is why people say co-ops aren't socialism when they're inside a capitalist society. The difference being that they receive a greater proportion of the actual value of their labor vs. simple wages.
What do you mean by "hard to implement at scale"? The capitalists are having the factories built. A state as strong as China's could surely expropriate these factories and give them to the workers.
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BRI is mostly transportation infrastructure and coordinated at a very high level. However, this infrastructure investment has signaled to capitalists that Xinjiang is "open for business" and has spurred a lot of recent development (factory construction, housing construction).
I don't care so much about the road and train building so much as I care about the tagalong development alongside it, especially with respect to how the wealth from it is not going to the people who are from Xinjiang.
No I think you don’t understand. Communism is when China does things. If you don’t approve of the ethnic cleansing, you aren’t a communist.
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