Glocal Impact from Bandung to the Belt and Road Initiative: Material, energy and human flows and their effects on Socio-Environmental (in)justice in China

Abstract

The aim of this article is to investigate the impact of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) on the appropriation of materials and energy in XUAR (PRC). To do this, I propose a critical contrastive analysis of official historiographical narratives: narratives about the official inclusion of the conquered territory of the Uyghur Autonomous Region of Xinjiang (XUAR-PRC) at the borders of the Qing Empire in the 18th century; the Final Communiqué of the Bandung Conference; the modernizing speeches imposed by the PRC on the territory of XUAR through the developmental narratives that accompany the BRI.
The autochthonous socio-environmental systems have been subjected, since the inclusion of the territory into the Chinese borders, to mechanisms of colonialism implemented by external agents. This process has given rise to an interethnic conflict and a process of gentrification of the territories resulting from an extractivist and capitalist model of natural resource management (agriculture, gas, oil). The BRI, based on the development of transport and logistics infrastructures, reflects a strategy that aims to promote PRC's role in global relations: it enhances international investment flows and commercial outlets for Chinese products, through land and sea routes, trying to reestablish the ancient Silk Roads, and promotes the creation of new roads, in order to connect a wider number of territories and countries —around sixty—.
In turn, this research aims to reveal the impact of the imposition of the PRC neo-colonialist economic and extractive model, as well as the future consequences, on indigenous populations and management models. In terms of methodology this requires reconstructing the poverty narrative of Uyghur peoples, including accounts of their exclusion, ejection from the original areas, and a special emphasis on autochthonous outlook on their environment and how Modernity invades their natural and human space.
Local and regional sociopolitical tensions have, in the final third of the twentieth century, forced or encouraged Uyghur emigration from XUAR and from the PRC, leading to the creation of distant exile communities. Through the inclusion of Uyghur studies (Jacobs, 2016; Leibold, 2007; Millward, 2007, 2018; Sautman, 2000; Thum, 2012, among others), in a wider panorama of decolonial studies (Escobar, 2016; Restrepo, 2016; Santos y Meneses, 2014, Ortega Santos y Olivieri, 2020, etc.), academia still faces the need to continue researching the socio-environmental impact of the modernization policies imposed by the PRC and its impact on the forms of autochthonous management of human and natural resources of the territory of XUAR. This, under Chinese domination in its different historical stages, has become a scenario of socio-environmental conflicts: economic, political and identity consequences return the image of a colonized territory (Millward, 2007, 2018; Sautman, 2000; Olivieri, 2020; Roberts, 2020), subjected to continuous extraction and repression processes by the central government. This institutional constraint, in recent years, has been legitimized by the PRC central state within the international community by accusing Uyghurs —culturally Muslims by majority— of terrorism, and thus including the whole oppression policies in the global scenario of GWOT (Roberts, 2020). This strategy hides the extractive-colonial interests that China has on the indigenous land of Uyghurs and other turkic peoples —such as Kazakhs, which represent more than a million people living in the territory—.
Post-coloniality and national independence in a global scenario have presented the overwhelming need to rethink Asia in all its political and cultural complexity, and to launch projects —such as the one proposed at the Bandung Conference (1955), in which China played a leading role— that promote a supra-national unity respectful of plurality (Peña, 1956; Yoon, 2018); however, it seems now necessary to analyze how Bandung narratives coexist with those of a sinocentric megaproject (Pérez, 2014), with modernizing and developmental neo-colonial purposes (Islam, 2019). The BRI proposes reestablishing connections between Europe, Asia and Africa —that is, reviving old geoschemes (Millward, 2018) from a neo-colonial perspective (Clarke, 2017). Those links allegedly propose an economic supra-national development plan on an intercontinental scale, with the aim of modelling a scenario of revived cultural and human contacts, as well as commercial exchanges—. Nevertheless, the PRC’s BRI underlies the imposition of its economic and cultural model and the application of measures of natural resources extraction on the affected regions. The current conflict in XUAR may be seen as socio-environmental for: 1. The economic divide between Han/Uyghur-North/south in the region, is also a divide between agrarian and commercial-urban economies; 2. The PRC development strategy is focused on urbanization, but within XUAR, the Uyghur south has been largely left out of urban-based development, or controlled by the predominantly Han organization of the Bingtuan (Production Construction Corps) which is now developing colonies in southern XUAR that largely excluded local Uyghurs from the benefits of housing and commercial opportunity; 3. XUAR has a systemic water deficit, and dire prospects within decades as climate change melts the glaciers on whose melt water the region currently relies.
Since the annexation of the territory of XUAR, the Government has been launching policies aimed at developing a greater control and power over the Uyghur historical region which represents a fundamental enclave both for natural resources extraction and for geopolitical strategies of Chinese politics and trade. The conquest and the subsequent mechanisms of coloniality have imposed in XUAR changes in the modes of management and those related to the natural environment, turning “particular ecosystems” into “modern forms of nature” (Escobar, 2016). Throughout this research, the term “coloniality” will be understood as a process that has certainly transformed the forms of domination deployed by Modernity, but not the structure of the center-periphery relations worldwide. In this particular case study, we are confronted with a scenario where decolonization has not happened; in fact, it is still denied, by the government itself, that there has been a colonization per se. Therefore, coloniality here is built from the creation of denialist and inclusionist discourses, which nullify the possibility of the subjects’ —in broad terms: the land of XUAR and those who inhabit it— very existence. Since then, the ways of life of the subaltern groups, in all aspects, are subject to the Modern/Colonial model, it is necessary to re-dignify the community attempts of survival and resistance, as ones of subjects oppressed by the mechanisms of capitalist modernity.
Through this article I aim to reveal the Uyghurs perspective on how the official narratives about “development” and “modernity” proclaimed by the BRI, besides the monetary growth, hide colonial and oppressive control politics, and whose consequences are exclusion, repression, and even elimination of autochthonous identities in order to impose control over their territories and resources. So, jointly with a deep bibliographical and theoretical reflection, the very voices of exiled Uyghurs are here anonymously presented, based on Participatory Action Research (PAR) and Community Based Participatory Research (CBPR).