China’s Protracted Securitization of Xinjiang: Origins of a Surveillance State

This article focuses on two key developments in the contemporary history of Xinjiang that help make sense of the ‘surveillance state’ as the culmination of a sustained security agenda aimed at tightening the grip of the Communist Party of China (CCP) on the region. The first is the abandonment of the moderate approach which characterized China’s ethnic minority policies in the early years of the ‘reform and opening up’ (1980s). A second key development is the issuing in 1996 of the directive ‘Chinese Communist Party Central Committee Document No. 7’. This set of instructions established a new security agenda for Xinjiang that defined the contours of much of the practices now observed in the region.