The “Xinjiang Papers”: How Xi Jinping commands policy in the People’s Republic of China

This report shows how “the Xinjiang papers” reveal the centralised decision making processes behind mass mobilisation, mass detention, and dispersal of Uyghur and other Turkic-speaking Muslim communities in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR). The report explains the thinking and mechanisms behind Xi Jinping’s Xinjiang policy, which targets signs of everyday Uyghur identity as security threats. It provides new evidence of centrally directed local implementation of mass detention (section 4.2) and arbitrary dispersal of Uyghur communities (4.3). The report shows how Xi is transforming the PRC’s political system towards a totalitarian model based on personalised rule, mass mobilisation and surveillance, ideological education, and transformation of thought. Xi has centralised China’s political system by designing and implementing institutional co-ordination and supervision mechanisms that use material punishments and rewards to prevent organisations and officials from acting outside central policy commands, or from displaying signs of thinking outside his ideological framework of correct Chinese identity and history. Xi’s micro-managed policy implementation prevents any opposition to genocidal practices, including cultural destruction (section 3: “Sinicisation” policy), arbitrary mass detention (4.2) and community dispersal (4.3). Mass human surveillance links party institutions, security services, and neighbourhoods in the “People’s war on terror” (4.1). Xi’s focus on policing everyday thought is strictly imposed through regular party meetings and education sessions for cadres and security personnel, which outline his ideological principles and severe punishments for alternative thought or failing to implement his personal orders (section 2). The policy approach of democratic states towards the PRC under Xi Jinping requires new longer-term, strategic planning that is realistic about the PRC’s power and its domestic and international goals under Xi Jinping, who views international political and economic relationships as a means towards maintaining personalised totalitarian rule and enacting genocide.