Ethnic Governance under Xi Jinping: The Centrality of the United Front Work Department & Its Implications

The Chinese Communist Party: A 100-Year Trajectory

“…The system was reinvigorated in Xinjiang under Zhang Chunxian's guidance in 2014 and was considerably expanded when Chen Quanguo became the CCP secretary for Xinjiang in 2016 (Grose and Leibold 2022). According to Adrian Zenz's analysis of satellite data and government contracts, more than 10 per cent of the Uyghur population is believed to have passed through the system (Zenz 2018;Zhao and Leibold 2019). The re-education system in Xinjiang employs a vast network of education/re-education/de-extremification devices and structures aimed at reforming minds in order to build a society of loyal citizens sharing common views, beliefs and values with the Party.…”

“No Cracks, no Blind Spots, no Gaps”: Technologically-Enabled “Preventative” Counterterrorism and Mass Repression in Xinjiang, China

“…In October 2014, the National Security Commission (NSC) also established a National Anti-Terrorism Intelligence Centre to strengthen anti-terrorism intelligence gathering in order to boost its counterterrorism pre-emptive and preventive capabilities ( [53]: 190). The State Ethnics Affairs Commission (SEAC), which had previously led the development and implementation of governance of ethnic minority regions, was also down-graded as the locus of ethnic minority governance after 2009 as provincial level CCP United Front Work Department 'offices assumed primary responsibility for ethnic work in ethnic minority regions, with SEAC officials left to follow the direct lead of their Party counterparts' ( [21]: 491).…”

The Minorities of Chinese Philosophy: Ideology and Identity in the Academic Discipline of “Ethnic Minority Philosophy”

“…Similarly, another major project spearheaded by the Association for the Study of the History of the Philosophies and Social Thought of China’s Ethnic Minorities, which was already decided upon at its annual meeting in 2004, namely that of compiling a Compendium of Chinese Minority Intellectual Culture 中国少数民族思想文化全书 (Association, n.d.), has not yet been realized. These prolonged delays might very well be related to recent political developments, more precisely the fact that the association falls under the supervision of the State Ethnic Affairs Commission (SEAC), which was placed under the leadership and closer ideological scrutiny of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) United Work Front Department in 2018 (Zhao and Leibold, 2020). Specific subdomains such as that of research into Uyghur philosophy, for which ambitious outlines had appeared since the early 1980s (Amanullah, 1981; Abduxukur, 1997), have unsurprisingly ground to a halt following the worsening of ethnic tensions and the increasing crackdown on minority populations and identity under the presidency of Xi Jinping.…”