Abstract
We use the predatory theory of the state to explain China’s violent assimilationist campaign targeting the Uyghurs, a predominantly Muslim minority group in China that constitutes a population majority in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. Our analysis suggests that growing political centralization under the leadership of President Xi Jinping, combined with technological changes that reduced the costs of implementing predatory policing in Xinjiang and elevated the perceived economic benefits from integration, contributed to the choice of destructive cultural assimilation rather than respect for the rights and autonomy of Uyghurs in Xinjiang. While the economics literature sometimes describes the political economy of China’s growth miracle as the byproduct of a constrained Leviathan, the present paper shows that a predatory theory of the state is more useful for understanding how a cultural genocide can occur alongside economic growth.
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Notes
While most detained individuals are Uyghurs, other Muslim minorities in Xinjiang (including Kazakhs, Uzbeks, Kyrgyz, and Hui) have been subject to unlawful detention as well.
Buchanan and Congleton (1998, pp. 11–13) argue that a system characterized by general rules is more efficient relative to a system that introduces inequality. This is because the latter system requires more resources to make fine distinctions in the application of law across individual cases.
Johnson and Koyama (2019, pp. 285–287) make clear that the rise of the modern state did not make religious freedom inevitable. “Power states”, or high-capacity states enforcing identity rules, such as Nazi Germany and contemporary China, serve as obvious exceptions.
The Chinese government places the Urumqi death toll at 197 people (134 Han Chinese and only 10 Uyghurs) with more than 1600 injured. International observers dispute those numbers, claiming that 400 Uyghurs were killed in Urumqi, plus an additional 100 in Kashgar (Human Rights Watch 2009, pp. 11–13).
For a counterargument—that the genocide label is unwarranted—see Sachs and Schabas (2021).
Alesina et al., (2013, pp. 2–6) define nation building as “a process which leads to the formation of countries in which the citizens feel a sufficient amount of commonality of interests, goals, and preferences that they do not wish to separate from each other.” Nation building may take on both productive forms (e.g., building highways) and odious forms (e.g., prohibiting the use of a native language; committing genocide).
The CCP’s stated justifications for the coercive policies include alleviating poverty and achieving economic growth in Xinjiang (Zenz, 2019a).
Surveillance technology, including AI and DNA identification, developed by US companies, have assisted the CCP’s repressive efforts in Xinjiang (Chin & Lin, 2019; Wee, 2021). Recent events in Afghanistan reflect tell the same story, as one headline reads, “US-built databases a potential tool of Taliban repression” (Bajak, 2021).
Spanning 130 + countries since its 2013 inception, BRI comprises massive investments in infrastructure, energy, and telecommunications projects (Hillman, 2020).
The same dynamic also played out in North America with colonial powers and settler-colonial governments, when indigenous peoples typically confronted extraction as state capacity increased, precisely because such increases in capacity included rising military capacity—which governments typically used to extract more from indigenous people. Hence, Candela and Geloso’s (2020) finding that Native people were better off stateless.
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Acknowledgements
We’re grateful for insightful comments from anonymous referees. We also thank Meina Cai, Tyler Cowen, Chris Coyne, Vincent Geloso, Chandler Reilly, Scott King, Henry Thompson, Marcus Shera, and participants at the 2020 Southern Economics Association and 2021 Public Choice Society meetings for valuable comments.
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Caskey, G.W., Murtazashvili, I. The predatory state and coercive assimilation: The case of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang. Public Choice 191, 217–235 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-022-00963-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-022-00963-9