The Epidemiologization of Politics and the Preventive Repression in Xinjiang

• In Event: Government and Citizen Responses to the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

In 2017, the Chinese regime started building a detention program in Xinjiang that expanded to become the largest internment program since the Second World War. The estimations vary, but up to 10 to 20% of the adult Uyghur population, as well as people from other Muslim minorities, are detained to be treated for what the Chinese authorities consider an ideological epidemic, as part of the ongoing Chinese de-extremification efforts. We still do not have well-grounded explanations of this shift towards extralegal preventive collective repression or its scale beyond the limited securitization framework. The recent reports reveal that internment camps are only a part of a vast surveillance-detention-forced labor system, with horrendous human rights abuses, with consequences amounting to cultural genocide. Not only the massive scale of the repression but also the transparent epidemiologic discourse of the “ideological virus” that drives the efforts of “treatment” by indoctrination, surveillance, and the control of every aspect of Uyghur life is puzzling.
I argue this ideational turn in minority governance, aiming to control people’s minds, is a result of the epidemiologization of politics, use of epidemiology to politically repurpose health and treatment in a way that is detached from medicine in any recognizable sense of the word. Epidemiologic rhetoric legitimates and informs increasingly repressive and pervasive policies; and I contend that an epidemiologic logic determines the way policies are designed, implemented, evaluated. I compare the regime’s response to an actual pandemic, COVID-19, to reveal the similarities and correspondence of converging public health and security policies. I propose moving beyond securitization because this system of collective preemptive repression and cultural genocide cannot simply be explained as an effort to prevent terrorist attacks or infiltration of extremist ideology, though this is also an essential part of the Chinese narrative. Through an examination of recently revealed primary documents and reports on the detention programs in Xinjiang, I show how epidemiology, the Foucauldian apparatus par excellence, in a novel political form that relies on big data and artificial intelligence created an intrinsically totalitarian system, a totalitarian form of governance located at the individual level.
This contribution throws into relief two important issues. First, the overall surveillance-detention program is distinctly epidemiological. This not only legitimizes an incredible level of permeation of state control on society; it determines the way policies are designed and carried out. That has significant consequences for determining the risks and threats, how to prevent and control, how to treat and eradicate the infection (by addressing the root causes), which is reflected in a continuum of repressive practices of the People’s War on Terror and weiwen (stability maintenance) through fangkong (prevent and control) which, as I demonstrate, overlaps with the system of pandemic prevention-control. Secondly, epidemiology, especially in its digital/algorithmic forms, is highly political, and public health is intrinsically biopolitical. It is more so in China, which has a distinct authoritarian biopolitical legacy, and this is becoming more pertinent with the digital technologies of control. I argue that the enormous level of data gathered by the Chinese state makes a new epidemiological totalitarianism possible. Putting the literature on Chinese repression, sociology of medicalization, and criminalization of deviance in dialogue, I argue epidemiologization might become a distinct feature of technocratic authoritarianism, especially with the acceleration of the convergence of security and public health after the Coronavirus pandemic.
Another key finding of this paper is that the most dangerous aspect of the idea of an ideological virus is not direct dehumanization of minority members as deadly infectious agents that need to be cleansed (however terrible the consequences of this are); it is the implications of the idea for ideological immunity and health. Elimination of a dangerous ideology, according to this line of thought, would require not only indoctrination of the infected but also elimination of the risk factors and alteration of environmental conditions that support or produce them. A thought virus cannot be simply removed from the mind; it could only be invalidated and overruled by “the right ideas.” So, any behavior outside of the prescribed is considered dangerous, and in this context, any frame of reference, any loyalty outside of the Chinese Communist Party becomes a source of (potential) infection. This could only be prevented by total control of almost every aspect of human life. This approach is blind to the dehumanization it creates, as it defines its goal as improvement of “health” and human well-being. And dehumanization is the result of this blindness.

Author

• Seyfullah Ozkurt