The Racialization of Minoritized Populations in the Chinese Settler Colonial Capitalist Regime

China’s post-Mao reform since 1978 initiated the process of comprehensive capitalist transition, including the liberalization of population movement. Accompanying this process was the rise of ethnic nationalism, which replaced the Maoist-era proletariat internationalism as a new ideological orientation of the party-state. These factors jointly contributed to the surge of ethno-racial tensions in and beyond China’s non-Han borderlands. This study, drawing on cases of Xinjiang and Tibet, examines patterns of interaction among settler colonialism, capitalist development, and the racialization process of the minoritized peoples, specifically Tibetans and Uyghurs. It combines a range of primary sources, including open and internal documents of the Chinese party-state, newspapers, intellectual writings, and global and regional economic data.

This paper argues that the relationship between racism and capitalism in the case of post-Mao Xinjiang and Tibet can be characterized as “internalized,” rather than intrinsically internal or purely incidental. By analyzing the internalized imperialist political economic agendas of the Chinese state, this paper shows that the sustainability of its capitalist accumulation requires the stratification of the working classes through the naturalization of differential valuation of some populations over others. The development of capitalism in China, therefore, does not merely rely on the incidentally preexisting ethno-racialized relations. Instead, it “creatively” transforms these relationships into a combination of devaluation and appreciation across labor forces that it needs, by producing, alongside formal wage labor, a naturalized reserve army of unvalued, dependent, and/or unfree labor which are dispossessed from the now “free” lands and natural resources. To articulate this theoretical point, this paper presents a historical materialist analysis of the inherent racial logics underneath the ongoing political economic projects targeting Tibetan and Uyghur populations, ranging from multiple forms of dispossession to forced labor transfers.