Thanks for an interesting article.
What’s strange here, is there is no mention of the main symbolic significance of the Urumchi road protest: it was potentially (and in some cases, actually), a sign that Chinese people are beginning to grasp the enormity of the genocide carried out against the Uyghurs, Kazakhs, etc. since 2017, under Xi’s close leadership and command.
It is true that the state, using the twin weapons of draconian news censorship and ultranationalist terrormongering propaganda, has been tremendously successful in duping the Chinese people, preventing them from waking up to the reality and enormity of the genocide carried out in their name. (Even today most Chinese are, f.ex., prevented from knowing that note that the “Victims in Urumqi fire that sparked protests were all Uyghurs,” RFA, 2022.12.02, — and that while mothers and children died, their husbands were not home, because they are in Xi’s signature concentration camps, dead or alive we do not know).
But this tremendous effort from the state –to shield the lead genocidaires– is precisely why it was so significant that at least some protesters were able to break through this taboo and express solidarity with the Uyghurs, — moving beyond thinking of ‘Xinjiang’ as not just a Chinese (settler-colonist) province but as a region inhabited by natives who are being subjected to a whole array of atrocities (mass family separations, mass internment, mass forced labor, and so on), far beyond the suffering of the covid lockdowns — although these, by the way, in the case of the native population also seem to have been turned into a weapon of starvation, used to kill, like inside the camps.
Magnus Fiskesjö nf42@cornell.edu
ps. there is (not yet) any “Xinjiang Province.” Perhaps when the regime gets to the point of formally abolishing all ethnic minorities, they will re-make it as a “Province” — since the post-1949 ruse of “autonomy” will have run its course. But we are not there yet. In the present, however, the name “Xinjiang” (New Conquest in imperial parlance) serves us well to constantly remind us of China’s main conundrum: whether to be a tolerant nation, or be an empire like the ones that came before.