BRI: Neutralizing Xinjiang and Legitimizing Stability-Security Paradigm

Abstract

BRI intends to utilize Xinjiang’s crucial geographical position facilitating the institutionalization of the region as a connectivity corridor. The Xinjiang government has issued a new transportation development plan (2016-2030) to become vital transportation, trade, logistics, culture, science, and education center and a core area on the Silk Road Economic Belt. This complex trade interconnectivity eventually underplays the significance of Xinjiang, while overtly projecting it as the gateway or connectivity corridor.

Xinjiang in the ancient civilization, as well as in the contemporary context, represents the pivotal theatre of a non-inclusive Uyghur ethnicity with its Islamic orientations that constitute an existential challenge to the Han civilizational empire. The Uyghurs at the borderland in the past, if not also in the contemporary era, has raised the issue of loyalty and control for the Central State. In contemporary times, China being a Postcolonial Imperial Empire has a problematic relationship between the majoritarian nationalism and ethnic nationalist collective at the borderlands. However, as Anand (2012) argues, most of the discussions in academia on Empire and imperialism ignore the non-Western states except as collaborators/victims. Hence the victimhood status often camouflages strong integrationist measures leading to human rights abuses, religious repression, civilian surveillance, police/military brutality, and economic inequality. There is limited tolerance of dissent from this picture of centuries of glory upset by decades of humiliation that are over now and will soon be followed by a regaining of rightful place as a great power in the scheme of things.