Xinjiang Part 2: The drug trade, detention camps and future prospects.
The final installment in our series of interviews with Jehangir
In the last segment we talked about the history, culture and people of Xinjiang, this segment will focus on more recent developments vis-à-vis the Kazakh drug trade, crackdown on Uyghur nationalism and what we can expect moving forward.
1. How does the drug trade in Xinjiang work?
So the drug trade is only a Post-Soviet phenomenon, but drug use is very deeply embedded in Kipchak Turkic culture so the nomadic northern Turks. Most people do not know this but cannabis comes from Kazakhstan originally, they are big drug users there. Once the Soviet Union collapsed the Chuy valley, which is just across the border in South East Kazakhstan became the drug producing capital of Central Asia.
Afghanistan was for opium but this place was for marijuana but also acted as a processing center for most of the drugs that come out from Afghanistan as you know, they were not processing opium into cocaine in Afghanistan, it would go to Chuy valley.
The thing with the Naiman tribe is that most of them came to Xinjiang in the 20s and 30s but some stayed behind in the Soviet Union and tribe is a very important thing in Kazakh culture so they already had these informal networks of trust, they've never met these people as they had been separated by a border for 50-60 years but they have their own... it's like being in a fraternity in America, you have like hand signs and all these code words. It's the same way with Kazakh tribes; they have their own symbol and their own battle cry.
With the Naimans I think it was either kabdagai or kabanbhai or something similar, it is their password so they quickly built networks to smuggle drugs.
In China it is very hard to get drugs, the Chinese port authorities are very smart and competent at getting rid of maritime shipments. The Chinese cook a lot of drugs like Fentanyl for example which they sent to the west but will absolutely not sell in China.
Interviewer: Ed Calderon, an ex-police officer who has dealt with the cartel in the past had said that Chinese scientists are coming to Mexico and setting up drug labs and manufacturing drugs.
Yes, exactly and for this reason that it is very profitable and in China it is impossible to stop the Kazakh smugglers because they have their own militia. Well, they are herders and nomadic so it is perfect.
You know, it is actually very funny that, there was this one guy on Kazakh youth wrestling team who's also from Xinjiang , he was a Kazakh not Uyghur so I was the only Uyghur on the team... well there was one Russian but we were in the minority there. So he told me that when he was a kid, he would watch his grandfather stuff like rolls full of drugs and marijuana up the asses of horses because they apparently have big anal cavities so it is very easy to smuggle drugs.
This presents a very difficult problem for the Chinese government to control and as the Xinjiang crackdown has progressed they have started clamping down on this but it is still on-going because there is no other way to get drugs into China.
2. So how does the recent, failed coup attempt in Kazakhstan affect the Xinjiang Drug trade?
Well, it doesn't.
The Wild Arman[Arman Dzhumageldiev], who is one of the big Kazakh criminal lord was taken out because he was an ally of Nursultan Nazarbayev, But I'm sure Tokayev has his own people.
Nazarbayev controlled this network of course as he was deeply affiliated with it and drug smuggling in general, he has connections with both the Soviet Mafia and the Kazakh in China.
But Tokayev is not going to put an end to it, since it is profitable and people are making money. Kazakhstan is basically a petrol state and oil has been very unpredictable in the past couple of years so they need insurance.
3. You mentioned that there isn’t an Islamism problem in Xinjiang, so the Urumqi riots in 2009 were because of Uyghur Nationalists?
Well, if you ask 10 people you’ll get 10 different answers.
The people were basically fed up with the state of affairs. As you know North Xinjiang is not the same as South Xinjiang. The South is mostly inhabited by Uyghurs and even though the Han control the South the Uyghurs do have some political power.
North Xinjiang is very different; there was almost no Uyghurs in the north before the People’s Republic of China. The PRC allowed immigration to the North.
Urumqi originally was a Mongolian City, many people don’t know this and with the Dzungar Genocide the city was depopulated. This was followed by a migration of Uyghurs, Hui and Kazakhs but the Uyghur immigration to North Xinjiang only started in big waves once the PRC established control over the region.
But the Uyghurs in Urumqi are mostly migrant workers, unlike in South Xinjiang where they are ordinary people, but here they are the underclass, the laborers like the Hispanic in America. They come and end up doing most of the manual jobs and things like that, so there’s lot of resentments which was made worse by the segregation in Xinjiang.
It is actually a very funny story, So I am Bi-sexual and there’s this gay bar in Xinjiang and it is segregated with the Han on one side, the Uyghurs on the other. It is very weird and the city is very segregated.
Everyone gets along, Han, Hui, Kazakhs and Mongol but the Uyghurs in Urumqi are singled out.
Interviewer: This sense of alienation was the main factor that led to the riots?
Yes and general resentment.
Nobody was shouting “Allah Akbar” or “Allah commands us to butcher the Han” they were just saying we want to kill the Han. This is why the riots happened.
Now coming to the Han in Xinjiang, they are very different as well.
Most people do not know this but in the Urumqi riots, I think more Uyghurs died in sporadic violence by Han than the other way around. Usually when people think of Han Chinese they think of them as these very studious, very professional people and the reality is different.
If you go to real China it is like a Ghetto basically, not that dangerous but it is still a poor country and most people are not like the Chinese students overseas who are the elite in China.
In Xinjiang, a lot of the Han people were descendants of Bingtuan(Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps), which is a development company run by the PLA. During the PLA deployment there, they grew their own food and this is how this company was formed.
These companies started military colonies basically and a lot of the Han people in Urumqi are basically military colonists or their descendants and they are very violent people. During the riots they were provoked and decided to retaliate. So the riots turned into this 2 way massacre.
4. One of the things that stand out when talking about the Urumqi riots is the poor response from the PLA and PAP. Their inability to contain the chaos made Hu Jintao to leave the G20 summit and take personal charge of the situation.
Yes, the PLA is very incompetent when it comes to cracking down and people have known this since Tiananmen. The PLA is not like other armies, it is very different.
In the US army, if you are told this is your mission then you go and do it but the PLA is like… how do I put this… it is more like a decentralized force but also very spiritual in the sense that they really go hard into their own propaganda about “we are the real saviors of the people” and “we will defend the people” so they are very bad at cracking down. They like to hand out water bottles, do disaster relief and play Hero.
The PAP has gotten better but there is a lot of growing pains in its development and Urumqi riots were one of their biggest failures.
5. Coming back to the allegations of Cultural genocide is there really one happening or is it just larger national integration through the imposition of mandarin?
None of the above, Uyghur culture is very alive and well in Xinjiang. Most people are like “Oh how can you say this” and when I speak to white people it is worse, they tell me “Oh I’m so sorry that you are brainwashed”. These people don’t know what they are talking about.
There is no cultural genocide, Uyghur culture is as strong as it ever was and there is Uyghur TV shows, Uyghur Media, Movies, Music and everything.
There are traditional musicians performing in the streets and it is the same as it always was. The culture is not going away anytime soon, classrooms are still taught in Uyghur language and Mandarin is still a foreign language for most Uyghurs.
Interviewer: The messaging that comes out of the US and the West…
It is nonsense, but it is very easy nonsense. The west always had this weapon that is being rich and because of this you know they have asylum so you don’t have to do normal immigration process, you don’t have to be an “Alien of special talent” which was the angle I went for and you don’t have to be like an H1B or H1N like a lot of Indians, this is very difficult to do even though these people are very educated.
You can just say “I am oppressed by the Chinese government” and then you have instant citizenship, you don’t have to get a green card.
So there’s this entire army of willing liars. I obviously have many disagreements with the Chinese government but the truth is that all these stories are exaggerated because there’s an incentive to do so.
You cannot say “please give me asylum, I am fine but I just have certain political disagreements with the Chinese government, I don’t quite like their crackdown on terrorism, I think that it is a little bit extreme but as a whole they are fine”. You don’t get asylum saying this.
So it is completely false and you know the Xinjiang policy is very similar to black sites or prison camps in Iraq detaining suspected terrorists most of whom probably did nothing wrong. It is basically the same as any counter terrorism operation.
6. You’ve mentioned in the past that most of these Uyghur dissidents are unknown entities in China, even their local municipal councilor doesn’t know who they are.
Definitely, the government in Xinjiang is very bad and not like the rest of China, it can be best described as a mess. It is very decentralized so doesn’t much information on most people. You can easily be a dissident in Xinjiang.
When I was a child, most train stations in Xinjiang didn’t follow the law. They didn’t use Chinese time, they used the local time and this was like their act of Uyghur nationalism. You can protest and there are plenty of protests in Xinjiang.
What people don’t understand is that the vast majority of people in Xinjiang have complains about the Chinese government, at least the Uyghurs do, the other ethnic groups are okay with them but at the same time do acknowledge the second vision I mentioned, China as an Anti-Imperialist state, most Uyghurs are on board with this, the ones who still live in Xinjiang that is.
Most of us also know that compared to what the other Turkic people are dealing with it is not so bad in Xinjiang, there’s also this general suspicion of white people we all have because of the Russians.
Majority of the Uyghurs know that actions of the west supporting Uyghur human rights and stuff is a scam and we also know that if we actually rebelled they would abandon us and even if they didn’t they would not support us and would try to put us into their sphere of influence. The great game as it is called, the contest between the Qing, Brittan and Russia, the memory of it is still fresh in Xinjiang.
So we believe that anyone trying to incite Uyghur rebellion is just trying to make us their colony so there’s a lot of suspicion around dissent as well.
7. Did the War in Ukraine solidify or change this perception of the West?
Just a disclaimer before I begin, I have not been to Xinjiang since COVID and as I am an American, I am not allowed in and getting a Visa is very difficult. So I don’t have direct experience talking to people on the streets but I still keep in touch with people back home.
Weirdly enough, the Ukraine war has not resonated at all in Central Asia, nobody seems to care about it. There’s also this undercurrent of white nationalism supporting Ukraine and it is weird to think about.
This vision of this conflict being an East vs. West struggle has changed the opinions of many in Xinjiang and Kazakhstan, even though most hate the Russians many have started actually sympathizing with them. People are like… How do I put this… We are proud orcs, and embrace a lot of the stereotypes that we are given.
Most people in Xinjiang see Ukraine as the enemy, very strange how this works. The Russians were the enemy for a long time in Xinjiang but now that Russia is this weak power, people have shifted their suspicion.
In the same way that the western people are always obsessed with the Greek-Persian war and the East-West struggle. People in Xinjiang and Central Asia in general are obsessed with this struggle against the West, The ever changing West.
Persia is no longer a threat now the eastern threat for the West is China and now that Russia is no longer a threat the people in Central Asia are now suspicious of Western Europe.
Interviewer: So it is like an Asiatic unity in a sense.
Yeah so it is interesting, I think that there’s a racial undercurrent to it, same way you know there’s a racial undertone to the propaganda around the Ukraine war, from the Ukrainian side. They are defending western civilization from this eastern horde and they focus an absurd amount of attention on the Chechens, the Buryats, Tuvans and the minority troops in the Russian army when 99% of the Russian army is Russian.
People in Central Asia are very different and I noticed this when travelling around America and rest of the world, most people with the exception of China weirdly look up to white people because there’s the memory of colonialism.
People in China, you know as China was one of the few countries that were never overrun, they don’t really care either way and the people in Central Asia look down on white people because for majority of history it was the people from the nomadic countries conquering Europe so mostly Uyghur discussion about Ukraine has been memeing about the incompetence of both sides, it is this idea that white people cannot fight.
Most are pro-Russian but the Xinjiang left, the ones with the 3rd vision I mentioned are the only ones who are pro-Ukraine. They are assimilationists and want to conform to Han opinion which is pro-Ukraine.
Interviewer: It comes down to that Anti-imperialism.
Yes, it is the basic mentality of China in a sense, always rooting for the underdog. China is supposed to have really good relations with Middle Eastern nations but most Chinese people are incredibly racist against Arabs whenever they get beaten by Israel but when the America invaded Iraq they all against the invasion of Iraq. They just root for whoever is weaker essentially.
Interviewer: China was the only country that supported East Timor when the Indonesians invaded…
Personally I don’t know about that but I believe it… certainly that would be their preference. This is one of the things that I think is very interesting. China, people think is pragmatic. They see it as this stereotype of a technocratic dystopia but actually it is an ideological state. They just don’t understand the ideology. The ideology is not communism; they don’t care about this and that. Ideology since late Qing period has always been an iteration of Anti-Imperialism.
The CCP was just a means to an end and they were the first Chinese government that was actually good at war and now they are good at economy.
They see themselves as being alienated from rest of the world because back in the past they used to have neighbors that followed their culture and political model, now everyone has been converted to West’s ideology and culture so their instinct is always to back the weaker side as they see a lot of commonality there as they feel isolated themselves.
8. The CCP was the only government that was good at war as they focused more on the non-material aspects of warfare if I’m not mistaken.
Exactly
It is very interesting because there are like a connection between ancient European military writings and songs that focus a lot on morale and stuff so the writings of Mao were like a blast from the past.
It is like a pre-modern military doctrine that was modernized. Chinese way of war in my opinion was always like this and the European observers during the Taiping rebellion would make fun of the fact that the Chinese were more interested in the loud sounds that the guns made versus the killing power or that they would bang gongs very loudly and put up banners to convince the enemy that there were more men than there were, the Europeans say this as silly but it was only silly as you need both, tactical competence and the ability to manage morale. Chinese armies have always been good at managing morale as they were basically medieval armies when the Europeans came so for a long time they did not know the modern tactics.
Kuomintang was also pretty good at managing morale but what made the CCP different I think was the fact that they took learning modern tactics and war very seriously. There’s this good book called Where Chiang lost China by Harold Tanner about the development of communist tactics from 1947 to 1948.
![r/HistoryPorn - PLA soldier carrying a captured M1941 Johnson rifle in the Chinese Civil War. 1949 [400x604] [Colorized]](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F47701cd4-b4ce-426e-bab7-d07ebf11cfd7_400x604.jpeg "r/HistoryPorn - PLA soldier carrying a captured M1941 Johnson rifle in the Chinese Civil War. 1949 [400x604] [Colorized]")
They were very serious about tactical reform, training reform and looked at things like “How do we make soldiers better at these things” and there’s this book called China at war: 1901 to 1949 that makes this interesting point that the previous Chinese warlords and the Qing saw western technology as an artefact… like Chiang was obsessed with hording planes, How does he expect to shoot down the Imperial Japanese Army Air Force out of the sky… ridiculous you know. But he was obsessed with planes because if you want to be a powerful modern military you need planes… this was their thinking.
They did not focus on training but with morale I think they were quite okay.
Interviewer: Interesting and the PLA’s approach to counter-insurgency that helped them defeat the Kuomintang Islamic Insurgency was also a case where they focused more on spiritual and non-material aspects of war instead of things like having the best guns and equipment.
Yeah, this is one of the things why I think modern Chinese military doctrine is very ahead of the time as the literature backdrop of the Chinese army is very different than almost every other army. The PLA has very little foreign influence and it didn’t have any foreign observers since 1934 when it was almost completely destroyed and then reformed, they never had any foreign advice so they are completely different.
The literature backdrop of modern Chinese military literature is more like the European military literature before World War 1, it was a time when the Europeans were very good at counter insurgency but now they are pathetic at it. World War 1 really shifted the mindset, people became really cynical seeing legions of men who were very motivated getting cut down by modern weaponry so the paradigm shifted in European warfare to we need to focus on weaponry and firepower, because this is what wins.
I think it is fair to say that western armies have been in a state of decline since World War 1 for this reason, not just in unconventional war but conventional war as well. Korea is one example, where they should not have lost that war.
Vietnam is another example even the Malaya, they should not have lost that conflict but they did. Chinese military literature is similar to the 1800s European military writings in the sense that they were aware that you don’t win the battle when the enemy is completely destroyed; you win when you make him so depressed, so hopeless and so sad that he just gives up or runs away. This is why the Chinese are so good at counter insurgency because they just stay on these people’s tails, they do not give them a break and they are very aggressive while being willing to tolerate losses or inferior tactics.
While Americans in Afghanistan would call for air support or call for fire support at the first sign of resistance, this is very slow and seems like a better version of what the Iraqis did in the Iran Iraq War [Iraqi modus operandi was using heavy artillery bombardments at the first sign of Iranian resistance which led to situations where one battalion could effectively hold up a brigade or two and made the Iraqi advance very slow].
You cannot put pressure on the Taliban on this way and the Taliban had lots of breathing space. But the Chinese would never allow this and in a way this is one of the good points of their military doctrine and if you look at Systems Destruction Warfare.
They are very aware that maybe in theory the way to win is you concentrate all your forces in one decisive battle and all the firepower there but there’s this subconscious backdrop to their military thinking and literature which is “If your base is being constantly hit by missiles, even if it is not a lot of missiles at ones and is spread out but if there’s a constant threat against every single step of your kill chain then none of it is going to operate properly because everyone is going to be scared for their life all the time. They know that this is going to cause the system to breakdown and this is a higher level of thinking which the west lost after World War 1 but China is still good at.
9. How does the detention camp system work and what is the logic behind this approach?
It is overcorrection because for a long time they have had this low level nationalist insurgency, not like actual fighting but like Urumqi riots and stuff so they decided that they need to crush the will of the Uyghur nationalists like we discussed earlier about the morale aspects of warfare. This subconscious backdrop when you read stuff like Sun Tzu and the Military classics all of them talk about this stuff, this is how the Chinese think and there’s no need to even explain it for them.
So they said “There’s this resistance against us and we need to crush its will.”
What they did is, create some internet search filters and even set a quota for every county, number of people that need to be detained and set to these camps. There’s no system to it, I know I said earlier that it is similar to the prison camps in Iraq and Afghanistan but it is only similar in the sense that both are mass incarceration of mostly innocent people but the method is very different. It was not about people who were suspected of anything, it was just about crushing the willpower of the Uyghur nationalist movement and that they have done.
Interviewer: Is it similar to the laogai/laojiao system that Mao used in the past?
It is exactly like that but in a different province
Interviewer: So they are subjected to hard labour and ideological brainwashing?
Yes, they are made to write confessions. People always try to understand things from a pragmatic purpose like that Twitter account you linked @PLAOpsOSINT, very smart chap but there’s one thing I don’t think he understands about how China’s military and security apparatus thinks. His reasoning was that if you were put in a camp no one will trust you anymore and you were captured and cannot join the insurgency.
The issue here is that China doesn’t really care too much about the ones who are going and joining the insurgency in places like Syria to train because those people are not their problem anymore. The goal was breaking the spirit of Uyghur nationalism which they did successfully, this kind of actions do work.
10. You’ve mentioned in the past that the Chinese have this belief that improving the material conditions of people can create ideological shifts, which comes back to the Marxist Sociological understanding of Base and Superstructure.
Yes, this is one of the flaws in their backdrop. Backdrop is the right word I think. So we have discussed how morale is the background of any Chinese military discussion and they don’t even need to talk about it as everyone understands it.
Han people all understand, I think they understand that if you improve material conditions, career opportunities, you develop and build things; that to them is the hallmark of a functional society but they don’t understand that Turkic culture is very different and people don’t care about all that.
This is the major flaw in Chinese policy in Xinjiang and a reason why they needed to resort to these measures. I honestly think that if they just ran like Anti-Western/Anti-Russian propaganda 24/7 there would be no nationalism in Xinjiang because that message would resonate with the people of Central Asia. The Chinese thought “Oh we could build roads and everyone will be happy” but that did not happen.
Interviewer: So it is the same failure the Americans had in Afghanistan where they tried to bribe the people with better material conditions?
Exactly, and it is very interesting because I went to college during the Uyghur Crackdown in 2014 and whenever some professor took a class on Islamism, Afghanistan, Central Asia or Xinjiang I used to get invited to speak because I am from Xinjiang.
The people in these classes have a hard time understanding the different perspective; I explained that people in Afghanistan and Central Asia have a fundamentally different mind-set than people in most of the world, we don’t care about building things, we want to fight, and we want to destroy things not like in a bad way. We are simple people, and it’s entirely fine. It is fun to do wrestling or MMA and it is okay because it is a different way of living.
People just don’t understand this which is why many tragedies have happed, like the Afghan war happened because the Americans did not understand that the Afghan people did not want government, they did not get the idea of that.
11. In a sense this cultural difference and the mindset you mentioned the love of fighting etc., is a result of the anarchy and lack of centralized government that is there in places like Afghanistan and Central Asia where things like protecting your honor is important.
Exactly
I would say that Uyhgurs and Karluk Turks in general are the best, best as in like we are the most like everyone else. We do have sedentary order and society like Afghans but they are scary people and you don’t want to go there haha.
People who know Central Asia will tell you that Kyrgyzstan is another place to avoid; I don’t know why it is like this. I think it is that tribalism and lawlessness has a lot to do with it definitely but if you read the literature of these people… the only… well, the book in Kyrgyzstan is… The Kyrgyz are like the peak of this… Kyrgyz are by far the most violent people in the world just in my experience.
Their national Epic Manas is all about genocide, death, killing people and fighting even when it is stupid to do so. They praise this as a great thing, it is all about this. This is the backdrop that people there read and grow up with.
Interviewer: the difference in culture and mindset you mentioned is a very different perspective that what we are used to.
Yes, I’ve tried to translate a lot of these tribal stories because they are very interesting and there’s this myth that people don’t know about from Central Asia that Noah’s flood destroyed the whole world but spared Beijing. This is why there are so many Chinese people and this is even mentioned in the Epic of Manas. There’s so much interesting stuff like this in Central Asian folklore, it is all written down but not translated to English, and I think people would find it absolutely fascinating.
Interviewer: It would be like the translated works of ancient China which has amazed many. If you could so something like that for Central Asia it would have been amazing.
I’m kinda regretting not getting that PhD now.
12. How do you see the situation in Xinjiang moving forward?
It will be fine, it is already stopped. Most people don’t know this but most of the camps were shut down by 2019-2020 so it is fine now. Uyghur Nationalism has been crushed and you know I am to some extend obviously Uyghur nationalist, you cannot be a person and not be nationalist, I would consider that self-hating. I am resentful of the whole situation but you know, at the same time I recognize that Turkistan will never be independent.
Xinjiang you know is the richest part of Central Asia now, it is developed and China has done a decent enough job there and there is opportunities there. It is like being a minority in America, not everything is perfect but at the same time there are opportunities to make a log of money. You have to be practical sometimes and the crackdown has already stopped and things overall are getting better in Xinjiang.
South Xinjiang’s growth has resumed after the crisis and in North Xinjiang the Kazakhs have finally fixed the overgrazing problem, it is very funny. They left the Soviet Union to preserve their traditional way of life and now they write laws saying that everyone has 200 acres of land and can’t leave it, so now there’s no ecological crisis anymore. So things are fine.
Interviewer: That’s interesting, because whenever there’s talk about China among westerns, Indians or anyone else who has an issue with China it is always presented like the country is always in perceptual crisis and these crisis can never be resolved.
It is very funny because in my experience it is never in crisis. The stock market crises for example, whenever I ask my Han Chinese friends they are like, “what do you mean? My Dad is fine and he didn’t lose that much money so it is okay”.
The funniest thing was when western media tried to project their own racism onto China and they were like “there’s so much black people in China that are being discriminated against” I was in College at that time and asked this black guy who had been to China what was it like there and he said “It was fine, it was okay”.
That’s the thing about distant places, it is so easy to lie… not lie… well obviously exaggerate things as nobody will correct you and Xinjiang is especially like this and there’s only probably 50,000 Uyghurs in America, there’s a diaspora in Turkey and Kazakhstan but really not in the west so nobody can correct the record on this. You can say something wrong and there’ll be no penalties for it.
Interviewer: You usually end up getting invited to a lot of these Chinese dissident events, organized by organized by groups like the Falun Gong if I am not mistaken…
Yes, and it is very funny I just met business associate today who is a Chinese dissident, well not from Xinjiang. He is like one of those rich people who fled. He’s Han Chinese and wouldn’t stop criticising the CCP and has this assumption that everyone from Xinjiang hates the government and is willing to join their crusade or something like this.
Interviewer: So it is at that point where the only credible opposition to the CCP are these weird cults and rich dissidents?
Yes, People all know about the Falun Gong and they are very influential in the west but Christian cults are a bigger problem and they have been since the Taiping rebellion. Peasants in China have it hard as the society is very competitive culturally and the reality is most of the country is not that rich. Still lot of people living like Middle Ages and these people don’t have much hope so they turn to Christianity.
Now that I’ve lived in America I can understand that Chinese culture would be very receptive to Evangelical Christianity, they are generally very wholesome people, family values and things like this so there’s certainly an appeal for Christianity.
They are the people that the government is most worried about because they have many tens of millions of followers probably.
Interviewer: So things are very bad from the CCP’s point of view.
But I don’t think they can organize a resistance, I would say the only credible opposition in China is probably... well there isn’t one as far as I am aware. Probably the military I suppose but Xi Jinping has better control over the PLA than previous leaders but they are a society within a society that has this weird blend of cult Maoism, a bastardised version of communism and leftism mixed with Anti-imperialism mixed with Militarism. They have their own culture and they are probably the only threat to the government.
Interviewer: But Xi Jinping has purged a lot of the Maoist elements inside the PLA and elevated a new set of young officers like Sr. Colonel Liu Mingfu and others.
Yes, he has very good control over the PLA compared to his predecessor like you saw in the Taiwan crisis recently, the previous Taiwan crisis China was a much weaker country and the generals grabbed Jiang Zemin by the lapels saying “we have to fight”. The response we saw recently was very measured and many saw it as a sign of weakness. I saw it as the first Chinese leader in decades that had real control, probably ever over the PLA because even Mao did not have real control, you know like Lin Biao tried to depose him in a coup so even Mao had real problems.
Xi Jinping, I don’t know how he does it but there’s probably be a book on it in a hundred years and I am not exaggerating, we only got to know about the inner workings of the Qing court today and there was a book published last year that completely rewrote the history of the reign of the empress dowager Ci Xi because people have only seen the records now so I think it will take a hundred years for us to know how Xi Jinping gained control over the military. I am sure it was a very game of thrones show worthy thing.
Interviewer: Jehangir, it was a pleasure having this conversation and thank you so much for this opportunity.
It was a pleasure, thank you.
With this our 2 part series on Xinjiang, its people, culture history and politics ends. I hope you have gained some insight into the complex nature of the region and its politics.