wheatpopcorn

I'm going to put your interrogation of Rushan aside and ask that you reflect sincerely on your positionality of this issue and self-proclaimed dedication to colonized peoples around the world.

As a self-professed academic, have you done literally any academic reading about the Uyghurs or history of Xinjiang? I doubt it, your posts demonstrate an incredible--but at this point predictable--ignorance. There is an entire field of research conducted predominantly by anti-colonial left wing scholars dedicated to Uyghur/Xinjiang history and anthropology (I can give names/books if you're genuinely interested). Look up what these scholars are saying about what's happening in Xinjiang. You clearly care way less about the Uyghurs and their colonization or in understanding how their colonization and oppression in China is clearly linked to both global capitalism and a type of Islamophobia pioneered by the U.S. after 9/11.

Please start ACTUALLY READING AND DOING RESEARCH and stop embarrassing the international anti-colonial left that actually cares about the Uyghur people. People like here: http://criticalchinascholars.org/

Case in point, there are dozens and dozens of articles written about the Guantanamo Uyghurs that answer all of these questions you have.

You asked, for example, "They went to Afghanistan to escape from China's oppression? Why flee to a war-torn hotbed of international affairs with no significant representation of their ethnincity rather than, say, Kazakhstan or Kyrgyzstan, where hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs live in relative peace? Or Turkey, which hosts many Uyghurs and shares close linguistic and cultural ties to its people?"

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Qassim became involved in "Islamic Advocacy" after the February 5, 1997 Ghulja demonstration in Xinjiang, China, and was arrested in June 1998.

"They accused me of being part of the separatist movement. And they jailed me for seven months."

After his release, Qassim decided to try find an Uighur village in Afghanistan. Many Uighurs fleeing China chose to go to Afghanistan because it is one of the few countries in the region that doesn't have an extradition treaty with China. He found the village near the mountains a few hours outside of Jalalabad. This village was later named as a Taliban training camp by the US military.

"All of us who stayed there had great respect for the Afghan people, and the Taliban, because no one else provided refuge to the Uighur people. You didn't need a passport or anything else. Even if you were not making any money you still had three meals a day. I'm still grateful to them. No other country has given Uighur refugees anything like that," says Qassim.

https://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/specialseries/2015/12/uighur-guantanamo-22-151206112137598.html

(1) What are your thoughts on anthropologist Darren Byler's usage of the term "terror capitalism" to describe what's going on in Xinjiang?

Byler describes "terror capitalism" as follows:

"Terror capitalism justifies the exploitation of subjugated populations by defining them as potential terrorists or security threats. It primarily generates profits in three interconnected ways. First, lucrative state contracts are given to private corporations to build and deploy policing technologies that surveil and manage target groups. Then, using the vast amounts of biometric and social media data extracted from those groups, the private companies improve their technologies and sell retail versions of them to other states and institutions, such as schools. Finally, all this turns the target groups into a ready source of cheap labor – either through direct coercion or indirectly through stigma.

The people being targeted by terror capitalism include entire stateless groups, such as ethnic Bengalis in north-east India and Palestinian Arabs. They are almost always from minority or refugee populations, especially Muslim ones. While the Chinese system is unique in terms of its scale and the depth of its cruelty, terror capitalism is an American invention, and it has taken root around the world.

…

Meanwhile, across Europe and North America, terror-capital surveillance tools have placed hundreds of thousands of Muslims on watchlists as part of Countering Violent Extremism programs. In the United States, immigration control measures taken in the aftermath of 9/11 have paved the way for a system that monitors and controls asylum seekers who enter the country at the southern border."

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jul/24/surveillance-tech-facial-recognition-terror-capitalism

https://logicmag.io/china/ghost-world/

Do you think framing it in these terms will help many of those who politically identify on the anti-colonial left in finally seeing the CCP's treatment of Uyghurs as a more localized manifestation of what is clearly a global phenomenon (and one in which Western countries are also complicit)?

(2)Likewise, do you have other thoughts about how those of us on the left and suspicious of the US government's motives can incorporate the clearly colonial and racialized violence against Uyghurs into transnational critiques of colonialism and imperialism without also reinforcing the goals of Western powers?

(3) As a Uyghur, what books about Uyghur/Xinjiang history do you think are most useful for providing historical context for the developments in Xinjiang over the past decade or so?

(4) How can we help center Uyghur voices in our responses to colonization?