Challenging the People’s War on Terror: Transnational Civic Mobilization Against Crimes Against Humanity in China’s Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region

The Chinese Party-State has long cultivated an association of Islam, especially so far as practiced in Xinjiang, with terrorism, sometimes characterised as an ‘infection’ of the mind in official discourse. Since 2016, the authorities have established camps, officially characterised as vocational training or ‘education and conversion’ centres, to ‘cure’ inmates of their ‘ideological viruses’. In fact, these camps are places of coercive detention and mental and physical torture at an unknown, but likely large scale, with estimates of over a million inmates put forth by credible researchers. Detention in the camps, for many, is followed by enforced ‘work experience’ amounting to forced labour. These practices occur in a wider setting of intensive and comprehensive surveillance of ethno-religious minority populations and of a neo-totalitarian turn in the wider political-legal system. Numerous international bodies, transnational advocacy organisations and foreign governments have criticised these policies and practices and exposed mounting evidence of apparent crimes against humanity and ‘cultural genocide.’ This paper will discuss the role played by transnational, Han and ethnic minority diaspora activists and survivors of Party-State repression in gathering evidence, exposing the apparent crimes of the state, and calling for support against them. It argues that in a situation where civil society repression on the one hand, and the extreme ‘political sensitivity’ of the issue at hand on the other, render effective domestic activism impossible, transnational diaspora activism assumes a dual significance. It not only offers opportunities to expose and challenge grave rights violations of internment, physical and mental abuse, and mass surveillance, but also allows activists kept apart by Party-State sponsored ethnic hatred within China to come together in joint acts of citizenship without national identity constraints