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Genocide is a series of long-term processes emerging from “states of emergency” to convert targeted groups and secure the nation. This paper builds on Critical Genocide Studies literature to historically contextualize China’s “fusion” policy, a narrative of emergency officially explaining extra-legal internment camps and inter-generational separation in Xinjiang. Although China’s policymakers traditionally frame “one-nation-one-state thinking” as Western colonialism, critical approaches to Chinese politics show the party-state frames ethnic identities through colonial binaries of backward/modern and savagery/civilization. How does the party-state’s “historic mission” to overcome colonial “humiliation” promote colonialism? The paper analyses how routine, dehumanizing official narratives of identity and danger enable genocides, conceptualized as planned processes of social death by attrition. It argues that contemporary “fusion” policy interweaves cultural superiority and ethnocentric developmentalism, seeking to resolve China’s “ethnic problem” and decolonize Xinjiang through social death of Turkic Muslims.

The official China Dream of the Great revival tells a story of China reversing “humiliation” by Western powers and returning to its premodern, rightful place at the center of world affairs. However, since ethnically targeted violence in Ürümqi in 2009, leading thinkers and policy makers ask how they can avoid a “nightmare” of frontier insecurity derailing dreams of international power. This article uses a postcolonial approach to critically analyze tensions between ethnic inclusion and exclusion in visual and textual narratives from a Xinjiang regional exhibition that celebrated the PRC’s sixtieth anniversary. It asks who is included and excluded in these visions of China’s rise? How does China domestically refract insecurity from experiences of a colonial world order that constructs it as inferior? The event tells a story of the history and future of a powerful rising state but expresses deep insecurities that domestic cultural difference is an obstacle to China’s global power.

The People’s Republic of China (PRC), in the eyes of its leadership, has been perceived as a unitary multiethnic state (duo minzu guojia), comprised of the Han majority and fifty-five ethnic minorities. State propaganda routinely emphasizes the inseparability of the Han from other ethnic groups that have seamlessly cohered into one harmonious whole in the course of five thousand years of history. The “ethnic minorities” (shaoshu minzu) concept attained its meaning during the minority identification project (minzu shibie) of the mid-1950s shortly after the establishment of the PRC. Yet, the ideas and principles of the Chinese national model formalized through the ethnic identification project are informed by the centuries of the Chinese central state’s expansion and absorption of new territories and people into its domain. The articulation of the Chinese territorial and cultural borders went hand in hand with the development of new forms of categorization and demarcation of difference encountered as Chinese borders expanded. Prior to the Republican period (1911–1949), to be Chinese was a matter of accepting and converting into Confucian norms. According to the rules of the governing order of imperial China, tianxia, practicing the Confucian ritual and ethical principles was sufficient to become Chinese (huaren). In the period of China’s forced opening-up to the outside world in the mid- to late 1800s, the formulation of national principles was part of the process of negotiating what constituted China and who the Chinese people were. The concepts of ethnicity and nation developed at the intersections between Chinese state’s relations with its domestic Others and its turbulent interactions with the outside world. The themes of national survival, territorial unity, cultural cohesion, stability of borders, and the development of the Chinese nation into a strong modern state are closely related to the formation of the politics of ethnic and national identity.

In July 2009, nearly 200 people were killed in ethnically targeted mass violence between Turkic-speaking Muslim Uyghurs and Han Chinese in Urumqi, overshadowing the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China (PRC). How have ethnic relations between Han and Uyghurs descended into mass violence among ordinary people? This paper argues that the party-state exacerbates ethnic tensions between Han and Uyghurs through ethnocentric security narratives. These narratives frame China's identity as being under threat from Turkic enemies within who are supported by Islamic terrorists and Western “enemies of China” from outside. Discourse analysis of official texts, participant-observation of security practices, and interviews with Han and Uyghurs reveal the interplay between official identity discourses and everyday security practices before, during and after the violence. Since July 2009, one official solution to ethnic violence has been the construction of a shared multi-ethnic identity, officially described as a “zero-sum political struggle of life or death.” However, Han-centric conceptualizations of ethnic unity promote Han chauvinism and portray the Uyghur as a security threat. The party-state thus creates hierarchical ethnic relations that exacerbate both Han and Uyghur insecurities and contribute to spirals of violence. China's extra-judicial internment camps in Xinjiang are the logical conclusions of the ethnocentric insecurity cycles analysed in this article.

This paper aims to explore the interface between Benedict Anderson's (1991) imagined, conceptual communities linking people who have never met and what Vered Amit (2002) called face to face communities of groups based on social practices. Communities are imagined from above but communities also negotiate their own social and spatial boundaries, often in response to these imaginations. What is imagined can only be felt if it can be socially realised. This paper will compare findings from discourse analysis of official texts with ethnographic data collected through informal interviews with over 100 Han Chinese and Uyghurs in Urumchi, the capital city of Xinjiang. It asks how these face-to-face communities are framed by the party-state and how they understand their place within the Chinese nation themselves. Specific reference to the party's concept of ethnic unity will be used to explore the relationship between ethnicity and nationhood in China. This aims to contribute to our understanding of the variety of competing self-understandings in China and how national identities are formed and negotiated at a local face-to-face level.

President Xi Jinping’s China Dream is the ‘renewal of the Chinese nation’ to become a ‘strong and prosperous nation’ (fuqing daguo).1 This chapter will analyse China Dreams as acts of identity articulation to chart China’s (inter)national identity. It analyses China’s ethnic minority policy debates which centre on arguments about whether China should be a multi-ethnic state or a mono-ethnic nation-state. The increasingly contested relationship between ethnicity and nation is central to understanding how China’s leading thinkers articulate who is China and how the answer will either propel or bring an end to China’s rise. The chapter then explores how these different ethnic futures are deeply intertwined with predictions about China’s position in international politics. The China Dream thus becomes a way to chart the future of China’s domestic and international politics and a means to narrate who is China at home and abroad. William A. Callahan2 has shown how Chinese exceptionalism is increasingly popular amongst political elites and public intellectuals in China. The military invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq alongside the 2008 financial crisis have led to a perception amongst Chinese thinkers such as Hu Angang3 and Zhang Weiwei4 that the soft power of the United States is declining and China’s is concomitantly rising.