Nationalism rewrites the state. It rewrites authoritarian states as democracies. It rewrites democracies as authoritarian states. Whatever its cause and whatever its ends, it has been central to narratives of state transformation since the seventeenth century. Nevertheless, it is not a primeval force, is not ever-residing. It is derivative, and the historian who sorts out the roots and branches of an apparently nationalist phenomenon will discover that it disappears under scrutiny. It is, like centripetal force, an ideation that explicates but is not itself real.

Nationalism is able to rewrite the state because it is the accumulation of manifest internal opposition to an existing regime, based on the premise that the present form misrepresents the nature and interests of a defined population. In any nationalist movement, opposition is redefinition. For such opposition to thrive, it must draw upon established public terms of legitimacy, historical claims, and the credible definition of national solidarity in opposition to its governance.

This chapter explores how autocrats use propaganda to explicitly threaten repression, which often occurs via codewords. Threats of repression remind citizens of the consequences of dissent, but they are costly. When propaganda apparatuses seek credibility, threatening repression makes persuading citizens of regime merits more difficult. Threats of repression also endow sensitive moments with even more significance to citizens. We show that propaganda-based threats of repression are more common where electoral constraints are non-binding. Even as Ben Ali was losing power in Tunisia, for instance, his propaganda apparatus chose to concede citizen frustrations and emphasize the government’s determination to do better, rather than advertise the military’s loyalty and training, both routinely cited during the succession crisis in Uzbekistan. We find that Cameroon’s Paul Biya issues threats in English, but not in French; his political in-group is francophone, his out-group anglophone. We find that the CCP is far more likely to explicitly threaten repression in the Xinjiang Daily, which targets the ethnic Uyghur out-group, and on the anniversaries of ethnic separatist movements.

In the absence of regular elections, the chief moments of tension are often anniversaries of failed pro-democracy movements, which routinely implicate the regime in crimes against citizens. This chapter explores a trade-off. Propaganda content intended to threaten citizens may be useful to deter protest, but draws attention to moments that the regime might prefer citizens forget. This chapter explores how the most repressive governments resolve this tension between memory and forgetting. The CCP, we find, goes to extraordinary lengths to scrub pro-democracy anniversaries from public consciousness, and so reserves propaganda spikes and threats of repression for major political events and the anniversaries of ethnic separatist movements. There is, however, one pro-democracy anniversary that the CCP knows citizens will not forget: the Tiananmen massacre of June 4, 1989. Since the Xinjiang Uprising of 2009, on each anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre, the CCP has used propaganda to remind Beijing’s urban class of ongoing repression against ethnic Uyghurs, millions of whom have been incarcerated. Using a survey experiment, we show that many citizens interpret this as threatening.

In the middle of the eighteenth century, the Qing empire’s invasion of what is now Xinjiang resulted in the destruction of Zünghar Mongol society and their almost complete extermination as a people. The policy of mass killing represented the failure of the first Qing military campaigns into the steppe to incorporate the fragmenting Zünghar polity. Continuing violence, exacerbated by famine and disease, drove the Qianlong emperor to issue instructions to exterminate the ‘mahachin’, i.e. Zünghar Mongols who had sought refuge from the invasion and/or were still holding out. This chapter charts the historical background to this conflict, situates it in a wider Inner Asian context, and offers a close analysis of the events and imperial decrees that triggered the descent into indiscriminate killing. Despite the ferocity of the campaign, the Zünghars were not entirely wiped out, and I conclude by discussing the resettlement of survivors and their fate during the remainder of the Qing Dynasty.

The Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region has received global attention since 2017 due to China’s massive crackdown on Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities in the region. Since 2017–2018, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s crackdown on Uyghur and other Muslim minorities in Xinjiang has become unprecedented in its scope and intensity. Reports on the CCP’s highly repressive strategies in that region led to a formal expression of concern by the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination in August 20181 and several legislative hearings in the United States.2 In 2020, the United States imposed sanctions on three officials, including Chen Quanguo, who are in charge of the Xinjiang’s recent development and a major economic and paramilitary organization, the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps (known as bingtuan), accusing it of “facilitating widespread abuses against Uighur Muslims.”3

Enslavement and punitive deportations from the south to the north of what is today the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (in northwest China) have been a feature of this region’s history. This chapter considers various reflections of captivity at the hands of both the Junghar Mongols (ca. 1690–1750) and the Qing Dynasty (from the 1750s onward) in literature produced by the Muslims of the Tarim Basin, that is, today’s Uyghurs. Enslavement by the infidel is a common trope of local hagiographic literature, which taps into Quranic narrative models of exile and deliverance. Alongside these narratives of charismatic male figures, folk songs mourning the experience of captivity also produced a set of popular female heroines in Uyghur literature. The most widely disseminated of these victim narratives, that of Nazugum, circulated in various forms in the late Qing, and after the dynasty’s fall became an important allegory of nationalist resistance among Uyghurs in both China and the Soviet Union.

Chapter 1 sets the stage for our study, introducing both the political violence and repression endemic to Xinjiang. We provide a brief account of the recent history of Xinjiang and the Uyghurs to contextualize the current situation before introducing the book’s motivations, arguments, and structure.

One cannot fully understand Beijing’s long strategy over Hong Kong without considering China’s imperial legacy of stepwise absorption and assimilation of its ethnic frontiers and the history of the CCP’s struggle to control these frontiers in the early years of the PRC. Chapter Five outlines the development of the ideas and experiments of “One Country, Two Systems” before Hong Kong, analyzing the CCP’s attempt to absorb and assimilate its ethnic frontiers such as Tibet since the 1950s. Beijing’s leaders explicitly referenced these histories, in particular the history of Tibet in 1951-59, when they first devised and promoted the “One Country, Two Systems” formula in the early 1980s as a solution to the Hong Kong question.

Corporations can be implicated in human rights violations in direct and indirect ways: Direct violations are caused by corporations through their own activities; indirect violations are caused by third parties and corporations contribute indirectly. This chapter looks in detail at this important distinction between direct and indirect human rights violations. It presents a common typology of different kinds of complicity, ranging from direct to indirect, beneficial and silent complicity. It then contrasts some legal and non-legal implications deriving from these. Before doing so, some critical reflection on terminology is provided, particularly as it pertains to the notions of human rights impacts and human rights violations.

The politicization of religion is the result of the competition over loyalties between the nation-state and religious groups. The state regulates the immanent and the transcendent. Allegiance to the state transcends the allegiance to God on the Chinese territory. The genealogy of this habitus is traced back to the Jesuit mission to China in the 16th century through the rise of the Communist Party and the current mode of regulation/repression of religion by the state, especially the Muslims in the Xinjiang province.

Chapter 2 critically examines Uyghur inclusion through official Zhonghua Minzu narratives in mass education as an identity-security practice after the July 2009 violence. The chapter analyses how party-state historical narratives demarcate hierarchical boundaries between majority Han and ethnic minorities (shaoshu minzu少数民族), particularly in universal ‘ethnic unity’ (minzu tuanjie 民族团结) education. The first section shows the party-state narrates Zhonghua Minzu by unifying all peoples’ histories within China’s contemporary borders as timelessly constituted by the minzu category and hierarchical majority-minority relations. Section 2 shows how nation-building texts relationally constitute and normatively evaluate identities of the Han as a timeless, modernising “frontier-building culture” against ethnic minorities as passive, backward recipients. The final section analyses how 'bilingual education' (Mandarin-medium education) policy is presented as the means to 'fusion' and national unity within these hierarchical relations. Official texts deploy concepts of fusion (jiaorong 交融) and minzu extinction (minzu xiaowang 民族消亡) to narrate the disappearance of shaoshu minzu identities as teleological progression of Zhonghua Minzu. The chapter shows that official nation-building narratives produce a hierarchical and ethnocentric China by framing Uyghur identity as backward obstacles to China’s unity and security.

Chapter 3 analyses exclusion of Uyghur identities in Zhonghua Minzu, specifically the 'East Turkestan' (dongtu 东突) narrative in minzu tuanjie education texts that explain contemporary violence and articulate Uyghur-ness as an external threat through the Turk category. The first section analyses how official East Turkestan narratives project external territorial borders and internal ethnic boundaries through each other, marking Uyghur language and religion as internal security problems from outside China’s cultural boundaries. The second section analyses official explanations of violence and protest in Xinjiang through East Turkestan and 'inside/outside Three Evils' ('terrorism, separatism, and extremism') narratives. This analyses how the party-state turns external cultural boundaries inward, demarcating ethno-spatial boundaries between sub-regions that are more and less secure and more and less Chinese. The final section uses semi-structured interviews and discourse analysis of Nurmehemmet Yasin’s short story 'Wild Pigeon' to examine the productive effects of these narratives. It analyses how Uyghurs redeploy official East Turkestan narratives to articulate alternative configurations of identity and security. The chapter argues that tensions between inclusion and exclusion in official security discourses, which ambivalently inter-weave civilisational and nationalist discourses by identifying intertwined threats inside and outside Zhonghua Minzu produce possibilities for resistance within its logics.