Dispossession and displacement of migrant workers: the impact of state terror and economic development on Uyghurs in urban Xinjiang

ABSTRACT

The media often focuses on the visible aspects of state violence. However, the invisible aspects of everyday struggle often go under-reported. How does dispossession and displacement occur for Uyghurs in Xinjiang? What is the role of their dispossession in securing state territorial control? Some Uyghurs from rural areas in Xinjiang, China have experienced a triple dispossession: displacement from the countryside, alienation in the city, and eviction from the city. The stories concern the agony people feel as they move from rural to urban settings and back again, pain caused by severe hardship in the economic, political and cultural senses. This case shows how economic development works together with interventionist state power to violently dispossess and displace the most vulnerable poor minorities from their homes and livelihoods.

KEYWORDS:

• China
• Uyghur
• dispossession
• displacement
• migration
• territory

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Correction

Acknowledgements

This article is indebted to everyone in Xinjiang who gave me their hearts, their lives, their stories, their patience, their time, and their hospitality. Without them and their vulnerability, this article would never have been possible. I cannot thank them or lots of other people by name here. This paper was initially inspired by the graduate seminar ‘Economic Geography: Geographies of Dispossession’ course during Spring 2018 by Joe Bryan at CU Boulder. Joe commented on earlier versions of the paper. The chapter was presented at the 2018 Central Eurasian Studies Society conference panel on ‘Regions and Imagination’ with Charles Weller as the discussant, who commented on previous drafts, and benefited from conversations with the audience there, especially Eric Schlessel, Sean Roberts, Jim Millward and Elise Anderson. The paper also benefited from comments from John O'Loughlin, Tim Oakes, Emily Yeh, Jennifer Fluri, Anna Secor and Gardner Bovingdon. All errors in the article are exclusively my own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article was originally published with errors, which have now been corrected in the online version. Please see Correction (http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02634937.2020.1752553)

Notes

1 I use the word territory to encompass not simply land but the economic, political and cultural networks that shape a certain space and place.

2 Settler colonialism gains control of territory, extracts resources for economic profit, and eliminates marginalized groups and cultures that are already in that space (Coulthard 2014).

3 Chinese governments have financed Han migration to Xinjiang since the 1800s (Perdue 2005; Millward 2007). The Chinese state continues to use Han migration as a tool of state control of the region (Cliff 2009; Bovingdon 2010). The Han population of Xinjiang was recorded as 200,000 in 1944. Only 5% of Xinjiang’s population was Han in 1949 (Dautcher 2009, 49). After additional state-directed immigration began in 1950, the Han population increased to 5 million in 1975 and 9 million in 2010 (Bovingdon 2010, 11–12). Today the total population of Xinjiang is almost 23 million people, with approximately 10 million Uyghurs, 9 million Han Chinese (not including military troops stationed there), and 4 million Mongols, Kazakh, Hui and other Chinese minorities (Toops 2004; Dautcher 2009, 49). The dramatic increase of Han migrants shows patterns of settler colonialism. Furthermore, Dautcher (2009, 57) records that there were ‘discriminatory zoning regulations and the coerced sale of Uyghur-owned land to Han in-migrants’ in Xinjiang in the 1990s.

4 The bingtuan, also known in English as the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps (XPCC), are special administrative areas that oversee Han Chinese military farms.

5 Thank you to the anonymous reviewer who pointed this out to me.

6 Some moved to the city for vocational training or higher education. Some reported having moved to the city when they were young for middle or high school because the quality of education was higher there.

7 Thank you to the anonymous reviewer for pointing this out.

8 Household registration (hukou) is one of many institutional barriers to resources in the city for those moving from the countryside. The hukou system both restricts and encourages the movement of cheap labour (Pun 2005).

9 Although inter-ethnic friendships and marriages among Han and Uyghurs were rare, this was a mixed-ethnic friend group, and Zohre and her Han husband were in a consensual and loving relationship, not a forced marriage, such as I have heard about in the media since 2017. I chose this example specifically because it shows how Han people were allowed to rent homes but Uyghur people were not. Details of gender and other demographic information have been changed.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Science Foundation [grant no. 1633894 and DGE 1144083].