This seems like a reasonable write-up, but I’m highly skeptical of any kind of “re-education” ever accomplishing what it intends to. You could replace “vague hope of shipping them to Madagascar” with “vague hope that they’ll assimilate into Han culture (or at least abandon extremism)”. When it doesn’t work, what then? When this indigenous people starts to feel more and more (essentially colonial) pressure from the economic development of Belt & Road, what would you expect to happen then? The conditions leading to radicalization, even outside of IS or CIA involvement, are only going to get more intense, not less so. Telling someone their culture is important and valued by the majority as it continues to be pushed further to the fringes by a majority ethnic group gentrifying (on a massive scale) their home will lead to backlash, and the only type of backlash that will find support from the outside world will be right-wing extremism.
One of the biggest issues is that over the past 30 or so years, the Uighur populace has had fewer economic opportunities than the Han/Hui populace. The economic liberalisation of the 1980s gave greater opportunities to people connected with the central and coastal areas, and that meant people with family there already, and people who could communicate in mandarin. So Uighurs were set on a worse path from a while back. This was well before the BRI rolled out.
That said, development isn’t the same as gentrification. The important thing is that as development occurs in the region, the Uighur populace gets to participate, and isn’t left behind or forced out. One way of preparing for that is to teach the lingua Franca, mandarin, and have state support for placement in industrial jobs.
It’s also important to note that the extremism didn’t come out of nowhere. The economic liberalisation tilled the soil, but Saudi Arabia’s worldwide export of Wahhabism laid the seeds.
Right now, the wider world is actively trying to impoverish the Uighur populace by targeting production chains that have Uighur labour. The claim is ‘forced labour’, the same one that’s levied against Cuba sending doctors to other countries.
This seems like a reasonable write-up, but I’m highly skeptical of any kind of “re-education” ever accomplishing what it intends to. You could replace “vague hope of shipping them to Madagascar” with “vague hope that they’ll assimilate into Han culture (or at least abandon extremism)”. When it doesn’t work, what then? When this indigenous people starts to feel more and more (essentially colonial) pressure from the economic development of Belt & Road, what would you expect to happen then? The conditions leading to radicalization, even outside of IS or CIA involvement, are only going to get more intense, not less so. Telling someone their culture is important and valued by the majority as it continues to be pushed further to the fringes by a majority ethnic group gentrifying (on a massive scale) their home will lead to backlash, and the only type of backlash that will find support from the outside world will be right-wing extremism.
One of the biggest issues is that over the past 30 or so years, the Uighur populace has had fewer economic opportunities than the Han/Hui populace. The economic liberalisation of the 1980s gave greater opportunities to people connected with the central and coastal areas, and that meant people with family there already, and people who could communicate in mandarin. So Uighurs were set on a worse path from a while back. This was well before the BRI rolled out.
That said, development isn’t the same as gentrification. The important thing is that as development occurs in the region, the Uighur populace gets to participate, and isn’t left behind or forced out. One way of preparing for that is to teach the lingua Franca, mandarin, and have state support for placement in industrial jobs.
It’s also important to note that the extremism didn’t come out of nowhere. The economic liberalisation tilled the soil, but Saudi Arabia’s worldwide export of Wahhabism laid the seeds.
Right now, the wider world is actively trying to impoverish the Uighur populace by targeting production chains that have Uighur labour. The claim is ‘forced labour’, the same one that’s levied against Cuba sending doctors to other countries.