The Uyghur Question Is Nothing but Capitalism’s Continuity

In China’s Xinjiang region, the Uyghur question has arisen. Here we find at least three ideologies that see it fit to divide the region’s proletariat to the whims of differing bourgeois interests

The first enemy is nationalism. It expresses itself through a Uyghur independence movement, which seeks to establish an “East Turkestan,” independent from the PRC.

This perspective must be rejected. The capitalist world revolution is complete and any new nationalist struggle will only give rise to new national bourgeoisies. Our communist and revolutionary tactics therefore no longer support nationalist movements that fight for the creation of independent states. Instead, we recognise only a single revolutionary struggle: that of the international proletariat against the bourgeois world order.

The other enemy is democracy. It deploys humanist rhetoric in order to co-opt the Uyghur question for the imperialist aims of Western democracies, whose bourgeois press has long shone a spotlight on China’s alleged genocide of the Xinjiang Uyghurs.

The rotten capitalist order routinely invokes “the defense of peoples” to excuse its ignominious wars. In Ukraine, Moscow defends its imperialist venture as defending Russian-speakers from the “Nazis” in Kyiv.

This is, of course, the imperialist appetite grooming its working-class with humanitarian violations so as to prepare them for war propaganda.

Our third enemy is China’s counterfeit socialism. Beijing pedals the Uyghur question with tales of seamless harmony between the Han majority and Muslim minorities, claiming its economic model has hauled Xinjiang out of “backwardness” and poverty.

In reality, “socialism with Chinese characteristics” offers the proletariat nothing but obedience to capital. Sweating for the national economy today, and bleeding for the defense of the motherland tomorrow.

These are the three insidious enemies the Xinjiang proletariat must confront if it is to reclaim its class autonomy.

The Xinjiang Populace

Chinese historiography portrays Xinjiang as an inseparable limb of the motherland, citing supposedly ancient bonds. In reality, the millennial Chinese empire held sway over the region only intermittently—and often only over portions of it—when its frontiers pushed into Central Asia.

Only in 1758 did the Qing dynasty secure Xinjiang’s formal annexation.

Even then, imperial authority was never fully controlled and uprisings against Qing rule amassed as early as the nineteenth century.

During Qing rule, Xinjiang drew almost no immigration from China and remained on the fringes of the empire.

Even after the Xinhai revolution, Xinjiang maintained a measure of autonomy from the central government.

In the first decades of the twentieth century, the earliest Uyghur nationalism manifested through Pan-Turanian ideas that circulated mainly among the more affluent Uyghurs.

From the 1920s onward, the echo of the International Revolution was heard in this remote area. An embryonic Uyghur national movement emerged, sympathetic to Bolshevik policies on oppressed nationalities. Keen to blunt Pan-Turkic currents, the Bolsheviks attempted to morph Xinjiang’s Turkic-Muslim struggle in explicitly revolutionary terms.

The subsequent separatist currents established into short-lived independent states two separate times: first, the East Turkestan Republic of 1933-34, and a decade later with the Second East Turkestan Republic in 1944.

The latter was sovereign until 1949 when it was incorporated into the young People’s Republic of China.

There were two major reasons for Xinjiang’s annexation. First, to cement control from the newborn People’s Republic. Secondly, to unlock fresh sources for accumulation. By crushing Uyghur nationalism, Beijing cut off any foreign power that might have rallied the region’s Muslim minorities to extend the civil war against Mao’s “communists.” Once pacified, the province’s coveted oilfields—and its vast cotton acreage—could at last be exploited, resources the fledgling state badly needed.

In order to achieve these goals, an increase in the Han population of the region was planned from the outset.

Beijing soon moved to dilute Uyghur dominance by sponsoring migration of Han settlers into Xinjiang.

Beginning in 1954, Beijing created semi-military production corps, composed of demobilised soldiers. Tasked with both farming and policing, these units became a linchpin of central control over the region.

As a result, the Han population grew from 300,000 in 1953 to over 5 million in 30 years.

Their share of Xinjiang’s population grew from about 8% in 1949 to nearly 40% by 1978, a ratio that has held steady ever since.

Xinjiang’s current demographics were collected in a 2020 census.

Xinjiang spans roughly one-sixth of China’s landmass, yet it is among the country’s most sparsely populated provinces, with barely 12 inhabitants per square kilometre. Despite being destitute, it is quite diverse. There are at least thirteen ethnic groups, although the Uyghurs and Han Chinese dominate the demographic balance.

According to China’s census, Xinjiang has 25.9 million inhabitants. Of these, 11.6 million (~45%) are Uyghurs, while 10.9 million (~42%) are Han.

Since 2010, when the population of Xinjiang was 45.84% Uyghur and 40.48% Han, the Han population has grown more than the Uyghur population, with the Han increasing by 25% and the Uyghurs by 16%.

The data has been read differently.

Beijing’s critics say they confirm a deliberate drive to shrink the region’s Muslim minorities. Beijing, for its part, brandishes them as proof that Western claims of a Uyghur “genocide” are unfounded. They argue that the rise in Han numbers reflects internal migration from other provinces, while the slower growth among Uyghurs and other minorities stems from economic development that encourages later marriages and smaller families.

In opposition, the United States and its Western allies centers their propaganda on accusations of a genocide, as wel as supposed concentration camps and forced-labor schemes.

They allege that China runs concentration-style “re-education” camps holding over a million Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and Kyrgyz who are conscripted into forced labor. Beijing, in turn, insists these facilities are merely “education and vocational-training centres” essential to its counter-terrorism campaign.

In any case, the presence of these concentration camps in Xinjiang would represent nothing new under the regime of capital. It has already concentrated and forced masses of humanity to work, exploiting them to death, for the production of surplus value.

This mass-incarceration apparatus functions as a mechanism of primitive accumulation. By supplying factories with cheap labor, it drags Uyghurs who formerly engaged as pre-capitalist small producers, artisans, and peasants, into the ranks of the wage-earning proletariat.

The lure of cheap, incarcerated labor acts as a magnet for capital, driving new investment and coaxing factories to relocate into the region.

The textile and garment industries have particularly benefited, and exploit Xinjiang as the main source of Chinese cotton.

Independence and Repression

Current Uyghur nationalism originated in the 1980s and early 1990s.

The Soviet War in Afghanistan first destabilised regional order. Later, the collapse of the USSR placed newly independent Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan on Xinjiang’s doorstep. These two events revived long-dormant separatist sentiments, now intertwined with a renewed Islamic religious fervor.

The resurgence of separatist demands is thanks to widespread economic discontent among the Uyghurs.

The economic development in the 1950s only deepened Xinjiang’s internal divide. An industrialised North drew migrant Han labor, while the South—where most Uyghurs lived—remained tethered to archaic farming and herding.

With the 1980’s push for market liberalization, Beijing redoubled its push to “develop” Xinjiang. Yet this agenda only deepened economic stratification between the Han migrants who reaped the benefits and the Uyghurs who were shunted into the region’s lowest-paid, least-skilled jobs. Their quality of life fell far below the  Han Chinese.

Economic discontent soon stoked political unrest. By the late 1980s, Turkic-speaking Muslim communities had been driven into open struggle against the Chinese government that combined the call for a “holy war” and Xinjian’s independence (East Turkestan in the separatists’ view). The result was a slew of attacks throughout the 1990s.

For this reason, the US’s War on Terror also involved Uyghur organisations.

Under the same pretext, China went on to repress any manifestation of aspirations for independence. The government lobbied to have the East Turkestan Islamic Movement  (today the Turkestan Islamic Party) designated a terrorist organisation, portraying it as a front for Islamist extremism.

The Movement, initially irrelevant, ended up increasing its influence in reaction to Beijing’s repression. It became one of the largest organisations of Uyghur extremism, aiming for separation from China as an independent state. In the process, it also acquired battlefield experience by fighting in Syria alongside the anti-Assad front.

The repercussions of 2008’s economic crisis—hitting hardest in Xinjiang’s oil sector, the region’s economic backbone—sharpened Uyghur anger over their deteriorating economic conditions. One must include Beijing’s iron-fisted rule and the numerous economic projects which bulldozed through vast infrastructure and urban projects, as well as forcibly displacing thousands of Uyghurs.

In 2009, the growing regional tension in the capital, Ürümqi, exploded into clashes between Han and Uyghurs resulting in dozens of deaths.

As a result, Beijing intensified its repression in Ürümqi as the Uyghur minority were considered to be the source of instability. Rather than restoring order, Uyghur resistance grew into terrorism. Among them the 2014 attacks on the Kunming and Ürümqi railway stations are attributed to Uyghur terrorist organisations.

Since the latter half of the 2010s onward, the government has continued to escalate its crackdown on the Uyghur population, leaning ever more heavily on its burgeoning network of internment camps.

Anti-historical Uyghur Nationalism

From a revolutionary communist standpoint, the Uyghur question demands that we first analyze the roles played by the various  classes. Equally, we must clarify the objectives pursued by the movement unfolding in that specific geo-historical context.

To this end, the Uyghur question must begin with a firm reaffirmation of our doctrine on the liberation struggles of oppressed nationalities. We must then restate the unshakable principles at the heart of our approach to the national question.

Opportunism shows two faces on the national question.

First, it simply denies that the nation-state was a decisive weapon in the bourgeois assault on feudalism. Second, conceding that the nation-state was once a necessary bridge out of pre-capitalist society, it keeps invoking that logic even in regions where anti-feudal and anti-colonial struggles have already produced fully bourgeois states—thereby seeding the working class with the toxin of nationalism and patriotism.

Against the first form of opportunism on the national question, the Marxist doctrine and the method of economic determinism gave an explanation of national struggles, establishing the struggle for the independence of an oppressed nation and its political unification into a nation-state.

This would have created the conditions for the transformation of the old economic-social structures in a bourgeois sense, allowing for the rapid development of capitalism and consequently the development of the full opposition between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, thus maturing the conditions for the proletarian revolution.

But at the same time, Marxism established limits in both time and space for support of national liberation struggles.

In the context of an anti-feudal or anti-colonial revolution, the proletariat supports the struggle for national liberation because it creates the best conditions for the implantation of the capitalist mode of production. However, once we come to a mature capitalism where the bourgeoisie having seized state power and the antagonism between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat has unfolded, the proletariat must reject any call for national unity and solidarity. Instead, the proletariat must claim its dictatorship as the only perspective.

In this way, Marxism had established that with 1871 and the bloody defeat of the Paris Commune, the cycle of national liberation struggles came to an end for Western Europe. This was because, in this geo-historical area, all the European bourgeoisies were united to crush the proletariat. From then on the only struggle was that for the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Revolutionary national movements did, however, occur in Eastern Europe and throughout the Afro-Asian area.

For several decades now, these national revolutions have led to the establishment of bourgeois states everywhere. The capitalist mode of production now prevails throughout the world, and even in Africa and Asia the cycle of national revolutions is well and truly over.

Nowhere in the world is there a process of national independence to be completed. On the contrary, everywhere we find the conditions for the proletariat to fight its own bourgeoisie and overthrow the regime of capital.

Statistics compiled by the Chinese authorities provide a general picture of the economic and social structure of Xinjiang.

Data referring to 2020 show that 14.61 million people live in urban areas, 56.53%, and 11.24 million in rural areas, 43.47%.

Compared to 2010 (thus over the ten-year period 2010-2020), the urban population increased by 5.28 million and the rural population decreased by 1.24 million.

Taking into account the employment figures of the primary, secondary, and tertiary sectors, we have that in 1955, 86.9% were employed in the primary sector, and this had reduced to 45.4% in 2014.

The contribution of the primary sector to GDP was 54.4% in 1955 and 16.6% in 2014.

In 2019, the share of workers employed in the primary sector decreased further to 36.4%.

From this meager data provided by bourgeois statisticians, we derive the process of transition from a backward, pre-capitalist economy, based on traditionally conducted agriculture and animal husbandry, to a modern, capitalist society, with the development of a local industrial structure and related activities.

The current trend is therefore the liberation of surplus rural labor that is increasingly moving to cities, leading to the transformation of peasants and farmers into proletarians.

As according to revolutionary Marxism, the cycle of national liberation struggles has been completed, Uyghur nationalism and the demand to establish an independent nation-state is anti-historical and reactionary. This divides the proletarians of Xinjiang on the basis of their nationality, setting them against each other, and thus ensures the perpetuation of capitalist exploitation.

Proletarians have no homeland, including the Uyghur one.

The Importance of Xinjiang

Today, the Uyghur question is used in the clash between rival imperialisms, whose opposing propaganda masks the considerable importance of Xinjiang in imperialist contention.

Xinjiang’s importance is first and foremost due to the wealth of energy resources in its subsoil, especially oil and gas, but also to its strategic economic, commercial and political position.

Xinjiang is the westernmost region of the People’s Republic of China.

Its geographical location allows Xinjiang to be well connected with the rest of the world.

It borders Mongolia to the northeast, Russia to the north, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan to the northwest and India, Pakistan and Tajikistan to the southwest.

If in the past the region had remained on the fringes of the Chinese empire and then of the People’s Republic, the impetuous development of Chinese capitalism has reached that decidedly inhospitable territory and from there it is transiting to reach markets in the West.

The need for the export of goods and capital, and the import of raw materials for the country’s industries, is expressed in the project that Beijing has called the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the New Silk Road.

In the development of the BRI, which envisions the construction of imposing infrastructures, the Xinjiang region is of enormous importance since no less than three economic corridors cross its territory.

These are the New Eurasian Land Bridge (NELBEC), which runs from the coastal regions of eastern China to the markets of northern Europe; the China-Central Asia-West Asia (CCAWAEC), which runs from Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, through the Middle East to the port of Piraeus in Greece; and the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), which runs from the city of Kashgar in southern Xinjiang, through Pakistan, and reaches the waters of the Arabian Sea.

The development of the New Silk Road thus requires a stable and secure Xinjiang, which Beijing tries to guarantee by all means, but the contradictions that run through Xinjiang become weapons used by rival bourgeoisies in their clash with Chinese imperialism.

Among these is precisely the ethnic division of the region, which US imperialism uses to create an internal front against Beijing.

It is the escalation of the clash between the imperialist powers that leads to the involvement in the dispute of certain internal Chinese areas that have long been hostile to the central power.

The very issue of Taiwan, witch is the point of maximum friction between American and Chinese imperialism, is considered by the latter as an internal affair.

Then there was Hong Kong, where the widespread hostility towards the Beijing government is currently at a standstill but could flare up again as it did in the summer of 2020. There is also the People’s Republic’s other vast peripheral province, Tibet, which, like Xinjiang, is riddled with long-standing tensions that make it unstable.

The interest of the Western capitalist powers in the plight of the Uyghur population represents an attempt to foment division and adversity towards Beijing, which has the primary need to quell any threat at home in order to aspire to a new world partition.

Given the situation in Xinjiang, in order not to spill their blood in the service of opposing bourgeois interests, the proletariat in the region must first of all unite over ethnic divisions. They must set up their own organisations of struggle that will unite proletarians regardless of ethnicity. Together with the entire proletariat of the vast China, they must reject nationalist and democratic appeals, fight against the monstrous Chinese bourgeois state, which is deceptively painted red, until the conquest of the true dictatorship of the proletariat.