Beyond the relationship itself, the state of Australia’s China debate is also increasingly toxic. Those who recognise the risks of engaging with China but still advocate for continued engagement have been excoriated as “craven,” or worse. Those sounding the alarm bells about Beijing’s malign intentions, in turn, have been accused of sowing a “China panic.”

The demonstrable shift toward a more adversarial relationship – a “new Cold War” defined by “extreme competition” – between China as Australia’s largest trading partner, and the United States as Australia’s main ally, has further sharpened these divides under both the Trump and Biden administrations.

Nowhere is this division more unhelpful than in the context of Australia’s response to the ongoing human rights abuses of Uyghur and other Turkic Muslim ethnic minorities in Xinjiang. Unfortunately, the handling of this issue in Australia’s China debate is increasingly held captive to broader concerns about Australia’s role in the increasingly overt Sino-US strategic competition.

The evidence that large-scale human rights abuses are occurring in Xinjiang has been clear for some time. Analysis based on Chinese government procurement contracts for construction of these centres and Google Earth satellite imaging has revealed the existence of hundreds of large, prison-like facilities throughout Xinjiang. One of the largest detention centres, Dabancheng, near the regional capital Ürümqi alone is estimated to have a capacity to hold up to 130,000 people. There remains debate about how many people are actually detained in these facilities. However there is no doubt that they exist and are part of a systematic effort to “re-educate” Turkic Muslim minorities. This is a fact now openly celebrated by the Chinese authorities through official policy documents, and a spate of documentaries aired on China Global Television Network.

Witness and survivor testimonies have also provided accounts of what occurs within the detention centres. Although framed by Beijing as “transformation through re-education” centres, the testimonies of such witnesses and survivors reveal them to be facilities in which individuals are subjected to deeply invasive forms of surveillance and psychological stress as they are forced to abandon their native language, religious beliefs, and cultural practices, and in some instances, endure sexual abuse.

Outside of the detention centres, the Turkic Muslim population of the region exists in a “carceral state” where they are subjected to a dense network of high-tech surveillance systems, checkpoints, and interpersonal monitoring which severely limit all forms of personal freedom.

Yet this evidence has been used and interpreted in fundamentally different ways in Australia’s China debate. Two broad trends are apparent here.

One reflects the influence of the so-called “Wolverines,” a group of MPs with hawkish views on China, supported by more bellicose voices in the commentariat. They have used human rights abuses in Xinjiang as a cudgel to rhetorically beat not only Beijing but also those in Australia deemed to be “soft” on China. For such observers, Beijing’s “program of genocide in Xinjiang” is but further proof that Australia confronts a “fascist power that is crushing human liberty at home” and “using brute force to make illegal territorial grabs abroad,” thus justifying heightened “national security” measures such as the Foreign Interference Transparency Scheme. To do anything else would be to yield Australia’s “independence to a rising fascist power.” The shrill nature of debate – punctuated by inflated panic over the “hidden hand” of Chinese influence and interference – has also harmed societal cohesion by casting doubt on the loyalty of Chinese-Australians.

On the other side, a dangerous “what-aboutism” has begun to permeate a segment of the other side of the China debate. It attempts to deflect the “Wolverine” discourse by pointing to human rights abuses by Australia and the United States or to anti-China geopolitical motivations or both. The conclusion of a recent article by former diplomat and long-term activist Alison Broinowski neatly encapsulates each of these elements.

According to Broinowski, before “Australians join the Western pile-on over the Uyghur ‘genocide’,” the country should consider comparing its “‘concentration camps’ in Nauru and Manus Island with China’s ‘education’ centres in Xinjiang” or the fact that, Australia doesn’t “allow Australian foreign fighters or their families to return from Syria, as China does.” This is a classic example of what-aboutism: seeking to distract consideration of an uncomfortable reality – in this case the Chinese Communist Party’s mass repression of an ethnic minority – with counter claims about the malign actions of others.

Broinowski’s article also includes a second theme in Xinjiang crisis denialism: that those researchers and commentators highlighting abuses in Xinjiang are simply either active agents of the United States and the CIA, or “share far-right religious convictions and enmity towards China.” Even a cursory examination of the many academics, researchers, and journalists who have published material on the current crisis in Xinjiang would reveal this characterisation to be, at best, misleading and, at worst, actively mendacious.

Each of these dynamics are entirely unhelpful. They do nothing to inform public discourse on what Australia’s policy response should be. This is because they are primarily concerned with rhetorical point-scoring rather than establishing an evidence base for policy prescription. A healthy debate should be encouraged, but Australians ultimately deserve better than the cheap bifurcated rhetoric they are currently forced to endure.

The article was originally published in Australian Outlook on 30 April 2021.

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The known practices of the ‘re-education’ facilities clearly resonate with the worst totalitarian precedents of the 20th century. Many of these facilities resemble prisons complete with hardened security and surveillance features including barbed wire, guard towers and CCTV cameras. Further, within them detainees experience a regimented daily existence as they are compelled to repeatedly sing “patriotic” songs praising the benevolence of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and study Mandarin, Confucian texts and Xi Jinping Thought. Those detainees who resist or do not make satisfactory progress “risk solitary confinement, food deprivation, being forced to stand against a wall for extended periods, being shackled to a wall or bolted by wrists and ankles into a rigid ‘tiger chair’, and possibly waterboarding and electric shocks”. More recently, evidence of sexual assault, forced contraception and sterilization of Uyghur women has also emerged.

Beijing’s defence of these policies ― that they are measures to prevent ‘terrorism and extremism’ amongst Uyghurs through the provision of ‘education’ and ‘training’ ― while easily dismissed as a mendacious justification for mass repression, nonetheless hints at the nature and ambition of the Party-state’s undertaking in Xinjiang.

The intersection of technologically-enabled surveillance with the CCP’s evolving efforts at ideological ‘remoulding’ of certain categories of the XUAR’s population arguably emerges as a defining characteristic of what two theorists, Ding Wang and Dan Shan at the Xinjiang Police University, described in 2016 as the ‘Xinjiang mode’ of counterterrorism. This ‘Xinjiang mode’ combines what they define as the ‘war model’ of counter-insurgency adopted by the US military in Iraq and Afghanistan with China’s own ‘public security model’ and ‘governance model’. This fusion has resulted in the development of a new technology of control that seeks the negation of the very possibility of societal resistance to the Party-state.

While the Party-state’s securitisation of Uyghur identity has long been evident, it was intensified by several orders of magnitude with the appointment of Chen Quanguo and Zhu Hailun as XUAR party chief and deputy party chief respectively in 2016. Chen himself had accumulated experience in Tibet, where he had been party secretary from 2011 until his transfer to Xinjiang. In Tibet, Chen had implemented a policing system of ‘grid style management’ that segmented ‘urban communities into geometric zones’ policed by ‘convenience’ police stations connected to CCTV cameras and police databases enabling greater surveillance capabilities.

Once in Xinjiang, Chen has implemented ‘grid management’ and integrated it with the surveillance systems established under his immediate predecessor, resulting in a multi-tiered policing system based on exponential recruitment of contract police officers to man ‘convenience’ police stations.

The purpose of such a system was explicitly detailed by Chen in a speech on 18 August 2017 in which he gave instructions for the ‘party, government, military, police, soldiers and civilians’ of Xinjiang to ‘unite closely’ to ‘build a wall of copper and iron against terrorism’ and to implement a mechanism of ‘comprehensive, round-the-clock and three dimensional prevention control’ to ensure that ‘terrorists’ were caught ‘before they appear’.

The technological edge of this ‘three dimensional prevention control’ is the aggregation of data provided by the XUAR’s use of facial recognition scanners at checkpoints, train stations and petrol stations, collection of biometric data for passports, and mandatory apps to cleanse smartphones of subversive material. This data is then fed into the ‘Integrated Joint Operations Platform’ (IJOP) ― an app used by XUAR public security ― to report ‘activities or circumstances deemed suspicious’ and to prompt ‘investigations of people the system flags as problematic’.

This, as the two Xinjiang Police University theorists Wang and Shan note, provides the basis of the ‘public security’ model, as this ‘anti-terrorism intelligence system’ provides security forces with ‘the ability to obtain information on signs, tendencies…related to violence and terrorism’ and thereby enhance ‘social prevention and control capabilities’.

Yet surveillance, as Richard Jenkins reminds us, is but ‘a means to an end’ ― i.e. the ‘protection’ and ‘management’ of either the population-at-large or specific segments thereof. And it is here that the ‘public security’ model intersects with what Wang and Shan term the ‘governance model’ to create the ‘Xinjiang mode’ of counterterrorism. The ‘governance model’, they note, is focused on the long-term ‘resolution of ethnic and religious ideological issues’ that give rise to ‘extremism’ and ‘terrorism’. Here, Wang and Shan assert that as religious ‘extremism’ is an ‘ideological’ problem, it must be solved ‘by ideological methods’. These include sustained ‘education’ of the population in order to ‘reject the brainwashing of distorted religious views’ and thereby increase their ‘immunity to extreme terrorism’.

The ‘anti-terrorism intelligence system’ erected in Xinjiang permits the Party-state to undertake ‘social sorting’ ― the ‘identification and ordering of individuals in order to “put them in their place” within local, national and global “institutional orders”’.

The XUAR surveillance apparatus thus enables the authorities to not only identify and categorise particular populations as prone to ‘distorted religious views’ but to ascribe to them particular penalties, constraints or sanctions according to their categorisation. Thus for example, the surveillance apparatus may track and document ‘48 signs of extremism’ that can then determine the detention of Uyghurs (and other Turkic Muslims) to ‘re-education’ centres.

In a broader perspective, the ‘Xinjiang mode’ of counterterrorism is highly suggestive of processes of ‘high modernism’ described by James C. Scott in which the state seeks to legitimise the ‘rational design of social order’ through the centralisation, collection, and processing of information. As Scott noted, however, most previous such projects of the modern state to reduce the chaos and disorder of social reality ‘to something more closely resembling the administrative grid of its observations’ have proven to be not only ‘utopian’ but ‘continually frustrated’.

Xi Jinping and the CCP appear to remain undeterred by such precedents. According to Xi’s report to the CCP Central Symposium on Xinjiang-related work on 26–27 September 2020 the Party’s Xinjiang policy is ‘100 per cent correct’. He goes further to say that ‘education on the sense of Chinese identity should be incorporated into the education of officials and the younger generation in Xinjiang as well as its social education’ to ‘let the sense of Chinese identity take root in people’.

While it has arguably been the technologically-enabled ‘anti-terrorism intelligence system’ that has captured much of the world’s attention, this apparatus is but a means to an end. The ‘Xinjiang mode’ of counterterrorism amounts to a coercive instrument of social management and re-engineering designed to compel the assimilation of the Uyghur and other Turkic Muslims to the Party-state’s vision of what it means to be a ‘modern’ Chinese citizen.

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