Sinicization and Satellization : Suddenly, the Chinese Threat to Australia Is Very Real

After a businessman said Chinese agents sought to implant him in Parliament, that revelation and other espionage cases have finally signaled the end of a “let’s get rich together” era.
By Damien Cave and Jamie Tarabay

Chinese tourists taking photographs outside Parliament House in Canberra, Australia, in January.

CANBERRA, Australia — A Chinese defector to Australia who detailed political interference by Beijing. 

A businessman found dead after telling the authorities about a Chinese plot to install him in Parliament. 

Suspicious men following critics of Beijing in major Australian cities.
For a country that just wants calm commerce with China — the propellant behind 28 years of steady growth — the revelations of the past week have delivered a jolt.
Fears of Chinese interference once seemed to hover indistinctly over Australia. 

Now, Beijing’s political ambitions, and the espionage operations that further them, suddenly feel local, concrete and ever-present.“It’s become the inescapable issue,” said Hugh White, a former intelligence official who teaches strategic studies at the Australian National University. 

“We’ve underestimated how quickly China’s power has grown along with its ambition to use that power.”
American officials often describe Australia as a test case, the ally close enough to Beijing to see what could be coming for others.
In public and in private, they’ve pushed Australia’s leaders to confront China more directly — pressure that may only grow after President Trump signed legislation to impose sanctions on Chinese and Hong Kong officials over human rights abuses in Hong Kong.

A rally last month in Hong Kong in support of a bill in the American Congress.

Even as it confronts the specter of brazen espionage, Australia’s government has yet to draw clear boundaries for an autocratic giant that is both an economic partner and a threat to freedom — a conundrum faced by many countries, but more acutely by Australia.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison continues to insist that Australia need not choose between China and the United States. 

A new foreign interference law has barely been enforced, and secrecy is so ingrained that even lawmakers and experts lack the in-depth information they need.
As a result, the country’s intelligence agencies have raised alarms about China in ways that most Australian politicians avoid. 

The agencies have never been flush with expertise on China, including Chinese speakers, yet they are now in charge of disentangling complex claims of Chinese nefarious deeds.
In the most troubling recent case, first reported by The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, the Australian authorities have confirmed that they are investigating accusations made by Nick Zhao, an Australian businessman who told intelligence officials that he had been the target of a plot to install him in Parliament as a Chinese agent.

Mr. Zhao, a 32-year-old luxury car dealer, was a member of his local Liberal Party branch. 

He was a “perfect target for cultivation,” according to Andrew Hastie, a federal lawmaker and tough critic of Beijing who was briefed on the case. 

He told The Age that Mr. Zhao was “a bit of a high-roller in Melbourne, living beyond his means.”
Another businessman with ties to the Chinese government, Mr. Zhao said, offered to provide a million Australian dollars ($677,000) to finance his election campaign for Parliament. 

But a few months later, in March, Mr. Zhao was found dead in a hotel room. 

The state’s coroner is investigating the cause of death.
In a rare statement, Mike Burgess, the head of Australia’s domestic spy agency, said on Monday that his organization was aware of Mr. Zhao’s case and was taking it very seriously.

Last week, a young asylum seeker named Wang Liqiang presented himself to the Australian authorities as an important intelligence asset — an assistant to a Hong Kong businessman who is responsible for spying, propaganda and disinformation campaigns aimed at quashing dissent in Hong Kong and undermining democracy in Taiwan.

Xiang Xin, the man Mr. Wang identified as his former boss, has denied having anything to do with him, or even knowing him.
The challenge of the case is just beginning. 

The detailed 17-page account that Mr. Wang gave to the authorities as part of an asylum application is being taken seriously by law enforcement agencies worldwide.

Taiwan’s Ministry of Justice detained Xiang and another executive with the company Mr. Wang said he worked for, China Innovation Investment Limited. 

Investigators in Taiwan are looking into assertions that their business acted on behalf of Chinese intelligence agencies.
Other details in Mr. Wang’s account — about the kidnapping of booksellers in Hong Kong, spying on Hong Kong university students, and the theft of military technology from the United States — are still being examined by Australian officials.
“Australia’s peak intelligence agencies are being put to the test,” said John Fitzgerald, a China specialist at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne. 

“It’s a tough call, and they cannot afford to get it wrong.”

Chinese mole: Questions of loyalty continue to swirl around a Liberal Party member of Parliament, Gladys Liu.

What’s clear, though, is that they are helping to push the public away from supporting cozy relations. Polls showed a hardening of Australian attitudes about China even before the past week.
Now Mr. Hastie, the Liberal Party lawmaker who chairs Parliament’s joint intelligence committee, says his office has been overwhelmed by people across the country who have emailed, called and even sent handwritten letters expressing outrage and anxiety about China’s actions in Australia.
Questions of loyalty continue to swirl around another Liberal Party member of Parliament, Gladys Liu, who fumbled responses to questions in September about her membership in various groups linked to the Chinese Communist Party.

Massive Chinese fifth column: Chinese student-spies shouting at pro-Hong Kong protesters outside the University of South Australia in Adelaide in August.

The espionage cases also follow several months of rising tensions at Australian universities, where protests by students from Hong Kong have been disrupted with violence by opponents from the Chinese mainland.
Several student activists have told the authorities that they have been followed or photographed by people associated with the Chinese Consulate.
It’s even happened to at least one high-profile former official, John Garnaut. 

A longtime journalist who produced a classified report on Chinese interference for former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull in 2017, he recently acknowledged publicly that he had been stalked by people who appeared to be Chinese agents — in some cases when he was with his family.
These actions of apparent aggression point to a version of China that Australians hardly know. 

For decades, Australia has based its relations with Beijing on a simple idea: Let’s get rich together. 

And the mining companies that are especially close to Mr. Morrison’s conservative government have been the biggest winners.
But now more than ever, the country is seeing that for the Communist Party under Xi Jinping, it’s no longer just about wealth and trade.
“The transactions aren’t satisfying them enough; they want more,” said John Blaxland, a professor of international security and intelligence studies at the Australian National University. 

“They want to gain influence over decisions about the further involvement of the United States, about further protestations to Chinese actions in the South China Sea, in the South Pacific, in Taiwan.”
Mr. Blaxland, along with American officials, often points out that Australia’s biggest export to China, iron ore, is hard to obtain elsewhere reliably and at the prices Australia’s companies charge. 

That suggests that the country has more leverage than its leaders might think.Mr. Hastie, who was recently denied a visa to travel to China as part of a study group that included other members of Parliament, agreed. 

In an interview, he said the recent revelations were “the first time the Australian public has a concrete example of what we are facing.”
Now, he added, it’s time to adapt.

The Han Supremacists Of China

By Dr. Habib Siddiqui

‘Sinicization’ is defined as bringing people who are not of Chinese descent under the influence of Chinese culture. 

Truly speaking, it is a process where societies that are traditionally non-Chinese are put under the influence of the Han Chinese communities, by adapting to their culture, customs, and way of life.
Along with Dr. Imtyaz (an area specialist on ethnic and minority studies) I have been calling the process of Sinicization, as practiced by the government of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), as Hanification (a term which has become more common these days compared to more than half a decade ago when we first used it). 

It is essentially a supremacist policy. 

It aims to cement the supremacy of the Han Chinese majority through the PRC’s government policies of imposed acculturation, forced assimilation, or cultural imperialism on non-Han citizens of the state.
The spoken language of the Han Chinese is Mandarin. 

There are 292 non-Mandarin languages spoken by other non-Han (and yet native) nationalities in today’s China.
Although mainland China today is a people’s republic – or more properly, a communist-ruled state with managed capitalism – that is run by Han Chinese, it had a long history as a multi-ethnic empire when Sinicization accommodated and respected diversity, thus, allowing others – the non-Han communities – to strengthen the cultural influence of imperial China.
Consider, e.g., the case of Sayyid Ajjal Shams al-Din Omar, a Muslim (of Bukhara), who was the governor of Yunnan (located in south-west part of today’s China) under the (non-Han) Mongol-founded Yuan dynasty (1271-1368 CE).
After conquering the Bai Kingdom of Dali, Sayyid Ajjall promoted Sinicization of the non-Han Chinese peoples in Yunnan during his reign. 

He founded a “Chinese style” city where modern Kunming is today, called Zhongjing Cheng.
Both Confucianism and Islam were promoted by Sayyid Ajall in his “civilizing mission” during his time in Yunnan. 

He ordered that a Buddhist temple, a Confucian temple, and two mosques be built in the city. 

The Confucian temple that Sayyid Ajjall built in 1274, which also doubled as a school, was the first Confucian temple ever to be built in Yunnan. 

After his death, his son Nasir al-Din became the Governor of Yunnan in 1279.
Admiral Zheng He (1371-1435), a great-great-great-grandson of Sayyid Ajjal Shams al-Din Omar, served as commander of the southern capital Nanjing (the capital was later moved to Beijing by the Yongle Emperor). 

He commanded expeditionary treasure voyages to Southeast Asia, South Asia, Western Asia, and East Africa from 1405 to 1433 and built mosques on his traveled lands.
Six of Ming dynasty (1368-1644) founder Hongwu Emperor’s most trusted generals are said to have been Muslim, including Lan Yu who, in 1388, led a strong imperial Ming army out of the Great Wall and won a decisive victory over the Mongols in Mongolia, effectively ending the Mongol dream to re-conquer China.
During the war fighting the Mongols, among the Ming Emperor Zhu Yuanzhang’s armies was the Hui Muslim Feng Sheng. 

When the Qing dynasty invaded the Ming dynasty in 1644, Muslim Ming loyalists led by Muslim leaders Milayin, Ding Guodong, and Ma Shouying led a revolt in 1646 against the Qing during the Milayin rebellion in order to drive the Qing out and restore the Ming Prince of Yanchang Zhu Shichuan to the throne as the emperor.
The Muslim Ming loyalists were crushed by the Qing with 100,000 of them, including Milayin and Ding Guodong killed. 

The Muslim Ming loyalists were joined by Tibetans and Han Chinese in the revolt.
The rulers of the Qing dynasty (1644-1911) were ethnic Manchus, who were a minority. 

They developed a sense of Manchu identity and used Central Asian models of rule as much as Confucian ones. 

Nevertheless, there is also evidence of Sinicization. 

For example, Manchus originally had their own separate style of naming from the Han Chinese, but eventually adopted Han Chinese naming practices.
The Qing dynasty witnessed multiple revolts. 

In 1759 Manchu Qing emperor Qianlong defeated the Jungar Mongols and completed the conquest of Dzungaria. 

It committed genocide by liquidating the entire Dzungar nation, almost to the last baby; those who survived were killed by the following epidemic of smallpox; total loss of the population in Dzungaria reached 1,000,000, transforming it eventually into the Land without people.
Concurrently, the Qing Dynasty occupied the Altishahr region of Eastern Turkestan, which had been settled by the followers of the Muslim political and religious leader Afaq Khoja. 

After the Qing conquest, the Chinese began to incorporate Altishahr and the Tarim Basin into their empire. 

The territory came to be known as Xinjiang. 

This resulted in a substantial resistance movement against the Qing rule, led by the Khojijan princes of Kashgar (officially named Kashi), which continued for decades until the Manchus were overthrown by the Kuomintang revolution of 1912. 

Between 1759 and 1862 the Uyghurs – the natives of East Turkestan who are Muslim by faith and are ethnically Turkic – revolted 42 times against the rulers of the Qing Dynasty.
The Ush rebellion in 1765 by Uyghurs against the Manchus occurred after some Uyghur women were gang raped by the servants and son of Manchu official Su-cheng. 

The Manchu Emperor ordered that all the Uyghurs in the rebel town be massacred. 

Accordingly, the Qing forces enslaved all the Uyghur children and women and slaughtered the Uyghur men. 

The heinous crimes against Muslim Uyghurs, including raping Uyghur women, caused massive hatred and anger by Uyghur Muslims to the criminal Manchu rule. 

The anti-Muslim attitudes of the Qing officials resulted in attempted uprisings by Hui and Salar Chinese Muslims in 1781-84, who had hitherto tried to remain neutral.
The liberation of Kashgar (1818-28) by Jahangir Khoja was preceded by the rape of a Muslim girl by another Manchu official, Binjing. 

Such rape of Muslim women by Manchu officials became quite common enraging many Muslims. The Qing dynasty sought to cover up the rape of Uyghur women by Manchus to prevent anger against their rule from spreading among the Uyghurs.
The Manchu official Shuxing’a started an anti-Muslim massacre which led to the Panthay Rebellion, which occurred in Yunnan province from 1855 to 1873, and the Dungan revolt, which occurred mostly in East Turkestan, Shensi and Gansu, from 1862 to 1877. 

He ordered several Muslim rebels to be sliced to death in a slow and painful way. 

The Manchu government ordered the execution of all rebels, killing a million people in the Panthay rebellion, and several million in the Dungan revolt.
During the waning years of Quing dynasty, some Muslim generals like Ma Qianling and Ma Fuxiang, played important roles to strengthen Sinicization of the conquered territories. 

The Hui Muslim 36th Division (National Revolutionary Army) governed southern East Turkestan in 1934–37. 

A Muslim army called the Kansu Braves led by General Dong Fuxiang fought for the Qing dynasty against the foreigners during the Boxer Rebellion (1899-1901). 

They included well known generals like Ma Anliang, Ma Fulu, and Ma Fuxiang.
After the fall of the Qing Dynasty, Sun Yat-sen, who established the Republic of China on Jan. 1, 1912, immediately proclaimed that the country belonged equally to the Han, Man (Manchu), Meng (Mongol), Hui (Muslim), Tsang (Tibetan), and Miao peoples. 

Uyghur nationalism become a grave challenge to the post Qing warlords controlling East Turkestan. 

Twice, in 1933-34 and 1944-49, the Uyghurs successfully regained their independence for East Turkestan Republic.
During the rule of the Kuomintang party, the Kuomintang appointed the Muslim chiefs of the family known as the Ma clique (in Northwestern China) as the Military Governors of the provinces of Qinghai, Gansu and Ningxia for 10 years from 1919 until 1928. 

Bai Chongxi was a Muslim General (1926-49) and Defence Minister (1946-48) of China during this time. 

He rejoined the Central Government at the invitation of Chiang Kai-shek in 1937 and took a leading role as a strategist and Chief of the General Staff (1937-49) in liberating China from Japanese invaders.

Many Hui, Turkic Salar, Dongxiang, and Bonan Muslims fought in the war against Japan. 

Besides Bai, Ma Bufang and Ma Bufang served as Muslim generals against the Japanese occupation forces. 

Ethnic Turkic Salar Muslims made up the majority of the first cavalry division which was sent by Ma Bufang.
The Chinese communist party during the civil war (against the nationalist forces of Chiang Kai-shek) promised that ethnic groups in regions such as Mongolia, Tibet and East Turkestan would be free to choose their own future.
However, as soon as they came to power, Mao Zedong repudiated self-determination as an option and rejected any prospect of dividing China into federated republics. 

Instead, he created the concept of “autonomous regions, provinces and districts” within which the various ethnic groups were promised “equality” with the Chinese Han majority. 

The Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region was proclaimed in 1955. 

In fact, as the most westerly outpost of the Chinese empire, Xinjiang has always been treated in a typical colonial fashion by whichever faction ruled in Beijing-Feudalists, Nationalists and Communists-since the Manchu dynasty. 

In 1949, East Turkestan’s (Uighur) rulers did not agree to form a confederate relation within Mao Zedong’s People’s Republic of China.
After the communists came to power, Muslim Kuomintang National Revolutionary Army forces in Northwest China, in Gansu, Qinghai, Ningxia, East Turkestan, as well as Yunnan, continued an unsuccessful insurgency against the communists from 1950 to 1958, after the general civil war was over.
During Mao’s communist rule, the slow process of Sinicization was changed to an aggressive and a violent one. 

In the last 70 years, the Muslim population, which once numbered more than 10% before the communist revolution, has been brought down to less than 20-50 million today (less than pre-1949 figures) within an overall population of 1.4 billion, thus, accounting for anywhere between 1.5 to 3.5 percent only. 

During the Cultural Revolution (1966-75), mosques along with other religious buildings were defaced, destroyed or closed and copies of the Qur’an were destroyed along with temples and churches. 

Muslims were forced to renounce Islam, raise pigs and eat haram (religiously forbidden) food. 

In 1975, in what would be known as the Shadian incident, the PLA (People’s Liberation Army) massacred 1,600 Hui Muslims.
After the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, the communist party-state began to relax its policies towards Muslims in 1978. 

However, the PRC has become a state of, for and by the Han Chinese via the all-too-obvious supremacist Hanification process that has seemingly reached its climax under its new dictator Xi Jinping! 

Thus, the disappearance and detention of a million Uighurs in East Turkestan who face a socio-cultural genocide today with their rights robbed is a footnote – albeit a big one – in Chinese history in that calculus of Hanification.

The world must stand against China’s war on religion

By Chris Smith

Muslim protesters outside China's embassy in Jakarta, Indonesia, on Dec. 21. 

Mihrigul Tursun said she pleaded with God to end her life as her Chinese jailers increased the electrical currents coursing through her body. 

Tursun, a Muslim Uighur whose escape led her to the United States in September, broke down weeping at a Nov. 28 congressional hearing as she recounted her experience in one of China’s infamous political “ re-education centers. ”
It is an appalling story but one that is all too familiar as existential threats to religious freedom rise in Xi Jinping’s China. 

The world can’t ignore what’s happening there. 

We must all stand up and oppose these human rights violations.
The ruling Chinese Communist Party has undertaken the most comprehensive attempt to manipulate and control — or destroy — religious communities since Mao Zedong made the eradication of religion a goal of his disastrous Cultural Revolution half a century ago. 

Now Xi, apparently fearing the power of independent religious belief as a challenge the Communist Party’s legitimacy, is trying to radically transform religion into the party’s servant, employing a draconian policy known as sinicization.
Under sinicization, all religions and believers must comport with and aggressively promote communist ideology — or else.
To drive home the point, religious believers of every persuasion are harassed, arrested, jailed or tortured. 

Only the compliant are left relatively unscathed.
Bibles are burned, churches destroyed, crosses set ablaze atop church steeples and now, under Xi, religious leaders are required to install facial-recognition cameras in their places of worship. 

New regulations expand restrictions on religious expression online and prohibit those under age 18 from attending services.
Government officials are also rewriting religious texts — including the Bible — that remove content unwanted by the atheist Communist Party, and have launched a five-year sinicization plan for Chinese Protestant Christians.
These efforts have taken a staggering human toll. 

In recent months, more than 1 million Uighurs and other Muslims in the East Turkestan colony have been detained, tortured and forced to renounce their faith. 

The U.S. government is investigating recent reports that ethnic minorities in internment camps are being forced to produce goods bound for the United States.
Yet, despite this anti-religion campaign, the Vatican has shown a disturbing lack of alarm concerning these threats and, instead, appears to be seeking a form of accommodation. 

In September, Vatican officials signed a “provisional agreement” that essentially ceded to the Chinese government the power to choose — subject to papal review — every candidate for bishop in China, which has an estimated 10 million to 12 million Catholics.
Cardinal Joseph Zen Ze-kiun, a retired bishop of Hong Kong, in September called the deal “a complete surrender” by the Vatican and an “incredible betrayal” of the faith.
At a congressional hearing I chaired in September, Tom Farr, president of the Religious Freedom Institute, testified that the government-controlled body charged with carrying out the policy, the Catholic Patriotic Association, had drafted an implementation document containing the following passage: “The Church will regard promotion and education on core values of socialism as a basic requirement for adhering to the Sinicization of Catholicism. It will guide clerics and Catholics to foster and maintain correct views on history and the nation.”
One can hope that Beijing has made concessions to the church that have yet to be revealed. 

Initial reports are less than promising. 

Since the agreement was reached, underground priests have been detained, Marian shrines destroyed, pilgrimage sites closed, youth programs shuttered, and priests required to attend reeducation sessions in at least one province.
The Vatican should reconsider its arrangement with the Chinese government. 

But what can be done more generally in response to Xi’s war on religion? 

The United States and several European countries have condemned it, but any nation that values freedom of religion should unite in denouncing China’s treatment of Muslim Uighurs, Christians, Tibetan Buddhists and Falun Gong practitioners. 

In particular, Muslim-majority countries, strangely muted regarding the persecution of Muslim Uighurs, must protest these abuses even at the risk of endangering the benefits from China’s “Belt and Road”infrastructure projects.
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and I have urged the Trump administration to use Global Magnitsky Act sanctions to target Chinese officials responsible for egregious human rights abuses. 

We have sought expanded export controls for police surveillance products and sanctions against businesses profiting from the forced labor or detention of Uighurs. 

We have also introduced the bipartisan Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act of 2018 to provide the administration with new tools to comprehensively address the abuse.
The United States must lead the way in letting the Chinese Communist Party know that taking a hammer and sickle to the cross and enslaving more than 1 million Uighurs in an effort to erase their religion and culture are destructive, shameful acts that will not be tolerated by the community of nations.

Criminal Confession

China Locks Up Ethnic Minorities in Camps. It Says So Itself.
By Rian Thum

An image from undated video footage of Muslims reading from official Chinese language textbooks at a training center in Hotan, in East Turkestan. The Chinese authorities recently acknowledged the existence of a vast network of indoctrination camps.

NOTTINGHAM, England — “Citizens, please remain calm and relax, no one in the re-education camps will starve, be left in the cold, be punished or be forced to work.” 

With these words, an official from China’s Communist Youth League tried to reassure relatives and friends of members of predominantly Muslim ethnic minorities who had been taken to internment centers. 

The detainees were “infected by an ideological illness,” the official said, and the camps would “cleanse the virus from their brain.”
When the speech was delivered in October 2017, the camps were unknown even to some of the people they targeted, the roughly 11 million ethnic Uighurs and one million Kazakhs of East Turkestan, a colony in northwestern China. 

A year later, the network of indoctrination centers is widely known even outside China: first revealed by inmates’ families and then confirmed, perhaps unwittingly, by the government’s public call for bids on procurement contracts to build camp infrastructure — and now by an official justification of sorts.
A couple of weeks ago, the East Turkestan People’s Congress passed legislation that for the first time provides an explicit basis for the “transformation” of people influenced by “extremism” in “education institutions” through “ideological education, psychological counseling, behavioral correction, Chinese language training” and other programs. 

Last week, the chairman of East Turkestan’s government described the camps as air-conditioned boarding schools that offer cultural programs for people suspected of minor offenses to help them realize that “life can be so colorful.”
Yet former participants have described a system of forced detention and abuse, with military-style discipline, solitary confinement, beatings and torture.
In the past, local officials and local media would sometimes boast online of successfully implementing this camp system. 

But more senior officials — presumably partly out of concern with global opinion — have tended to profess ignorance, including as late as August, in response to questions by a United Nations panel on racial discrimination.
So why is China suddenly acknowledging a network of concentration centers whose existence it had so adamantly denied?
Some news reports say that the law “legalizes” the camp system. 

But that characterization is misleading: Authorizing the construction and administration of so-called training centers does not in itself sanction the extrajudicial internment of people in them, which, as scholars have argued, is illegal even under Chinese law.
The recent legislation does, however, recognize and officialize the detention system — and that’s significant.
In China, the law sometimes seems to play catch-up with enterprising officials. 

For example, “abnormal” beards were legally banned in March 2017, years after the East Turkestan authorities had begun arresting or otherwise penalizing men with large beards. 

Likewise, the latest legislation is evidence that the entire camp program has evolved from local, extralegal improvisation to a formal system that is to be woven into the fabric of the Chinese state.
The concentration camps no longer are an ad hoc measure; they are meant to be permanent. 

And their reach is spreading geographically.
Uighurs throughout China have been called back to East Turkestan by their hometown police and then detained. 

Thousands of Uighurs also appear to have been sent out of East Turkestan to prisons elsewhere in China.
The central government in Beijing provides part of the funding for this enormous internment and indoctrination system. 

And only the highest levels of the ruling Politburo could have decided in 2016 to reassign Tibet’s party chief Chen Quanguo to East Turkestan — to which he brought the repressive measures he had used against Tibetans and Buddhist pilgrims.
The intensifying repression against Uighurs and other minorities in East Turkestan reflects a nationwide shift in the government’s approach to ethnic difference. 

Chinazism

Whereas the Chinese Communist Party (C.C.P.) once professed to value diversity, it now increasingly seeks to assimilate minorities: In recent years, it has even encouraged Uighurs to marry members of the ethnic Han majority by offering cash to mixed couples. 

And as the anthropologist Darren Byler has documented, the authorities are enlisting Han civilians in their efforts, sending them out as “big brothers” and “big sisters” to check in on and watch Uighur and Kazakh homes.
The foremost theorist of this Sinicization project, known as “ethnic mingling,” is Hu Lianhe, an official at the Central Political and Legal Affairs Committee. 

He was the Chinese representative who denied the existence of re-education camps in East Turkestan to the United Nations panel this summer. 

Hu is also known for developing a “theory of stability” that links ethnic identity with extremism, and as the political scientist James Leibold recently pointed out, Hu’s growing visibility likely is no coincidence. 

It may portend a far more comprehensive effort by the government in Beijing to control and subjugate non-Han minorities throughout the country within what official propaganda calls the “Chinese race.”
As the C.C.P. has steadily moved away from recognizably communist policies over the last three decades, its leaders have increasingly justified their rule through Han-centered nationalism and by casting the party as the ultimate guarantor of China’s stability and prosperity, notions encapsulated under the slogan “Chinese Dream.” 

Uighur aspirations for basic cultural rights and more autonomy threaten those claims, and the handful of Uighur attacks over the past decade or so call into question the C.C.P.’s ability to protect the country’s ethnic-Han majority.
Han-centric racism and Islamophobia are driving China’s leaders to blame unrest on Uighur culture and religion. 

But behind their efforts to forcibly re-engineer minority cultures also lies a pressing need to boost their legitimacy and account for their hold on power. 

The East Turkestan problem, in their view, isn’t a local issue; it’s a threat to the foundations of the entire system they oversee today.