ABSTRACT
The People’s War on Terror (Ch: fankong renmin zhanzheng) in Northwest China which began in 2014 has produced a time of historical shifts for Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims. As many as 1.5 million Muslims have been “disappeared” into a vast internment camp system, and millions more have had their daily lives reorganized by regular home inspections and checkpoints at jurisdictional boundaries. Turkic Muslims have been forced into an experience of what Gail Hershatter (2014) refers to as “campaign time”—periods in recent socialist pasts when state-directed paternalistic violence invaded nearly all aspects of daily life. Drawing on ethnographic observations and interviews with Uyghur, Kazakh, and Han individuals this chapter argues that Uyghurs and Kazakhs have entered a new iteration of temporal transformation: reeducation time. Unlike earlier historical moments of class struggle, the current campaign centers on an ethno-racial antagonism which attempts to replace Turkic Muslim family structure and knowledge systems through what the chapter defines as a state-directed “violent paternalism.” Ultimately, it shows that violent paternalism—in this case, an attempt to replace indigenous identities with Chinese national cultural values through banal processes of reeducation—produces a trauma-filled temporality where spaces of human autonomy and thought are limited yet not fully eliminated.
