Green Colonialism in China: Socialist Legacy and Kazakh Dispossession

This text by Guldana Salimjan examines indigenous (in particular Kazakh) dispossession by Han settler colonialism in the western province of Xinjiang, since the creation of the People’s Republic of China. In it, she denies the promises of Chinese multiethnic socialism and green development as narratives through which this dispossession is legitimized.

The People’s Republic of China is often overlooked as a settler colonial state, given its nation-building narrative steeped in rhetoric of anti-colonialism, revolution, and Third-World solidarity against Western imperialism. Yet, this narrative in fact legitimizes China’s violent annexation of Tibet, Xinjiang, and Inner Mongolia as a project of socialist liberation. And in doing so it masks a colonial political ecology in these regions under the guise of development. Autonomy as promised in the official titles and laws of these regions has been largely symbolic, with the central government consistently repeating empty slogans such as a “unified multiethnic family” that belies the genuine self-determination of these land-based peoples. Among the 55 “minority nationalities” officially recognized by the Chinese state are Kazakhs, along with Uyghurs, Tibetans, Mongols, and many others. Despite being given affirmative recognition, they are often perceived by settler state actors as needing modernization and economic development, and their traditional lifestyles are labeled as “backward.” This outlook underpins the Chinese colonial framework in the western borderlands such as Xinjiang.

In recent history, the Kazakh presence in China was the result of territorial expansion and conflict between the Russian and Qing empires during the 18th and 19th centuries. Many Kazakhs sought refuge from Russian colonization by migrating eastward into the Qing empire’s domains. The Qing rulers, keen to bolster their borderlands against Russian encroachment in Zungharia (today’s northern Xinjiang), granted Kazakhs pasturage rights in Ili Valley as a way to balance power in its own Central Asian colony. Most Kazakhs in China today reside in the Ili Kazakh Autonomous Prefecture (IKAP) north of Tengri Taw (Ch. Tianshan, sometimes translated as Celestial Mountains), covering an expanse comparable in size to New Zealand. Earlier generations, having survived imperial warfare, migration, and famine in both the Soviet Union and China, were able to maintain their nomadic pastoral traditions until recent times. The mobility required for pasture rotation as a way to manage and utilize land resources – sometimes called “nomadism” – was key to maintaining livestock herds in an arid environment and also shaped Kazakh political, social, and cultural outlooks. However, with the incorporation of their land into the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) in 1949, the Chinese Communist Party officials and the Han settlers they authorized brought about profound social and ecological transformations, altering the land Kazakhs had called home for generations.

Settler Colonialism with Maoist Thoughts ///
Seven decades of socialist development in Xinjiang have been marked by a relentless influx of Han migrant settlers, overwhelming the Kazakh population in the north. Since 1954, Han soldiers and laborers have been systematically dispatched and recruited to join the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps (XPCC), a soldier-farmer organization that has played a key role in agricultural settlement in the region.

Acting on Mao Zedong’s directive to “develop frontier regions, ensure social stability and ethnic harmony, and consolidate border defense,” the XPCC cemented its unshakable presence in Xinjiang.

These Han soldier-farmers and their so-called “land reclamation” work were human infrastructure that served both as a bulwark against China’s Communist rival, the Soviet Union, and against the natives that were dispossessed by the newly established regime. During the nationwide famine from 1958 to 1961, hundreds of thousands of rural Han people seeking refuge in Xinjiang also joined the XPCC, aided by the opening of the Lanzhou-Urumchi railway in 1959. By the onset of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in 1967, the XPCC had expanded to include 158 agricultural and animal husbandry regiments on former Kazakh pastures. The Han population in the Ili Kazakh Autonomous Prefecture grew more than 30-fold from 1949 levels by 1969, whereas Kazakhs only increased 1.3 times, losing their majority status as early as 1966. This demographic shift coincided with national imperatives for mass food production and preparation for potential conflict with the Soviet Union.

Maoist ideology and policies in Xinjiang undergirded the colonial framework that dismantled Kazakh political sovereignties to serve the interests of a settler socialist state. Employing class struggle rooted in critiques of capitalism, Maoist cadres reinterpreted Kazakh indigenous social structure, portraying traditional leaders as class enemies to justify their dispossession. In the early 1950s, amidst concerns of Kazakh resistance potentially disrupting the Soviet-Xinjiang trade in animal products, the Communist Party assured Kazakhs that there would be no class struggle directed at Kazakhs and pledged policies promoting ethnic unity and religious freedom. Through small scale cooperatives and joint state-private ranch management, the Chinese Communist Party garnered interest from Kazakh chieftains into co-developing animal husbandry. However, by the late 1950s, the Party reneged on its promise, classifying Kazakhs based on their perceived class status and condemning traditional leaders as “capitalist exploiters” and “herd lords.” Over time, this allowed cooperatives and communes to absorb land and labor from traditional leaders in the name of promoting class equality through communization, banning Islamic and cultural ceremonies as “backward” and “superstitious,” and subjecting individuals to labor quotas and production demands within the commune system. XPCC political commissar Wang Enmao openly praised communes for their role in assimilation, asserting, “they represent another step towards the eventual blending of all nationalities.”

Land Enclosure with Chinese Characteristics ///
Beginning in the early 1980s, China changed its political course and embraced the global capitalist market economy in the Reform and Opening Up era while retaining an ideological commitment to communism – to some, a seeming contradiction, but supported by theoretical innovations such as “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” Reform-era privatization fundamentally shifted the Mao-era collective grassland management, which evolved into a colonial project of land enclosure throughout two decades after pastoral reform was implemented in 1984. However, unlike early modern European land enclosure, determined by capitalistic relations of private property, Kazakh dispossession in the post-Mao era is a continuation of colonial socialist modernity. Modern Kazakh households were indeed contracted with plots of land to grow their family economy, but these contracts were time-limited usage rights since the land fundamentally remained state property. The ideologies of “modernization,” “production,” and family-unit labor-power organization were developed from the precedents established during Mao-era collectivization, even though land management shifted from common land to private usage. National and international aid, including World Bank-funded projects, facilitated the construction of infrastructures of land enclosure and sedentary animal farming – for example, fences, breeding stations, forage bases, and permanent livestock stalls. Such infrastructure had emerged in Mao era Inner Mongolia and then spread to Xinjiang, where it multiplied rapidly to serve the demand of domestic and global capitalism. From the 1990s to the present, all of these changes were supported by the findings state-run scientific advisory boards who decried indigenous pasture and livestock management practices of Kazakhs, Mongols, and Tibetans as unscientific and deleterious to the grasslands ecosystem.

Settler colonial societies around the globe rely on spatial constructs to carve up indigenous-held lands into discrete packets of private property, severing their ancestral connection to the land. The process of dispossession of indigenous lands by the US settler colony, for example, merged commodification (“propertization”) and land theft by settler colonizers. Robert Nichols describes how this dispossession occurs when proprietary relations are generated and negated simultaneously under certain structural conditions (2020). For Kazakhs, the structural conditions for their dispossession have been:

1. Limited usage rights for state lands made the land susceptible to state expropriation.
2. Epistemically hegemonic scientific development discourse and marketization reduced Kazakh historical, cultural, and spiritual ties to their land to merely an economic relation.
3. Unpredictable market fluctuations and environmental conditions shaped the value and quality of Kazakh land, making it easier for them to lose usage rights to larger capital holders, who were usually affluent Han investors from outside.
4. When Kazakh land users adapted to market rules and expanded their herd sizes within colonial enclosures, they ended up contributing to the environmental deterioration of their own lands, which again justified the state’s removal of Kazakhs.
   
   While the socialist legacy haunts the Kazakh post-socialist economy, state enterprises and the XPCC’s capitalist development proceeded unhindered. Both enjoyed unrestricted land and water usage for agricultural, industrial, and mining projects. Since 2000, the state’s “western development” agenda – an economic program focused on raw material extraction and industrial investment – has intensified the commodification of Kazakh land through the meat, dairy, agriculture, cashmere, mineral, gas, and oil industries. Mass profit driven activities including agricultural reclamation, extractive industries, and overgrazing eventually led to unprecedented degradation, desertification, deforestation, and water pollution in Xinjiang’s grasslands during the Reform era. Ultimately, the Kazakhs have borne the brunt of environmental deterioration. Since 2009, the Chinese state, under the guise of the paternalistic policy of “nomadic sedentarization,” positioned itself as a savior to “liberate” Kazakhs who had become environmental refugees on their own lands. Up until now, this project has permanently sedentarized the majority of herders who formerly led nomadic life for generations into settlement housing, and severed their and future generations’ connection to the land.
   
   
   Green Colonialism Meets the “War on Terror” ///
   The colonial politics of green development in China’s western regions today is inseparable from the systemic socialist and reform-era land dispossession of the 20th century. The structure of racialization and colonial ecology remains based on ethnic hierarchy and the epistemic violence of development. Globally, environmentalist initiatives are leading to a recolonization of indigenous territories. Examples include wind power development on Sami land, national parks and coercive conservation projects in Kenya and Tanzania, and the Inuit seal-hunting ban in the Arctic – all undertaken without regard for or in opposition to indigenous subsistence economies that rely on natural resources. Similarly, China’s national program of Ecological Civilization, initiated in 2012, designated the grasslands in Tibet, Inner Mongolia, and Xinjiang as an “ecological protective screen” crucial for China’s “ecological security.” The technology of colonial enclosures developed during the Reform era was repurposed through ecotourism development, perpetuating the colonial trope of preserving indigenous lands as “pristine wilderness.” This green development has blocked nomadic pastoralists’ access to land even more efficiently than in previous decades. However, the binary thinking of Global North/South often leaves China out of discussions of green colonialism.
   
   Since 2017, under Xi Jinping’s leadership, China has intensified its campaign of “striking down hard on terrorism and religious extremism” in Xinjiang. This has resulted in vast internment systems and digital surveillance networks, with at least one million Turkic-speaking Muslims, including Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, and others being extralegally detained and subjected to ideological indoctrination and forced labor in the name of “counterterrorism” and “poverty alleviation.” Decades of racist portrayals of Muslim men as “savage” and women as “oppressed” in mainstream Han Chinese discourse have culminated in the so-called reemployment of “graduated trainees” (mostly previously detained Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Hui, Kyrgyz, Uzbeks, and Tatars) as wage workers in heavily policed industrial parks, producing goods for the global market labeled “Made in China.” The dehumanization of native Muslims in Xinjiang by the settler Chinese society mirrors the racialization and incarceration of colonized peoples elsewhere, as all settler colonial states create systems to “defend” private property from indigenous peoples. As the largest native populations in XUAR, Uyghur and Kazakh obedience has become fundamental to ensuring the safety and success of a Han settler society.
   
   In this context of state violence legitimized by the rhetoric of national and ecological security and green development, it is difficult for people within China or international allies to recognize, much less challenge, green colonialism in China, despite the striking similarities between the colonial technologies deployed in Xinjiang and those that led to the dispossession of indigenous people in the 19th century through the US national park system. While Kazakh herders were allegedly resettled for “overgrazing,” Han developers maintained access to and benefited from the land through political connections. For example, in 2011, a Han investor from Guangdong, Chen Gengxin, traveled to the Kazakh-populated Qarajon grassland in Ili Prefecture and was awestruck by its beauty. As a returned overseas Chinese student who had studied in the United States, he immediately thought of turning Qarajon into “China’s Yellowstone Park.” Shortly after, the Ili prefectural government implemented a grazing ban in Qarajon citing principles of ecological conservation, even though there was no sign of grassland degradation. Kazakh herders were expelled, resisters were arrested by the police, and they were cut off from the land they had relied on for generations. Local officials then transferred the land usage rights to Chen’s company, which managed Qarajon as the highest ranked (5A) international ecotourism site, where Kazakhs had to seek employment as janitors, cooks, or bus drivers.
   
   Refusal Across the Border ///
   Today, the XPCC dominates Xinjiang’s major industries of cotton, oil, and agricultural products, and continues to recruit new waves of Han settlers to the region as jail guards, assistant police personnel, and civil servants to support the settler colonial infrastructure in which Uyghurs and Kazakhs are incarcerated, whose lands were now cultivated by Han migrant workers who were given economic incentives to settle in Xinjiang. It maintains control over the narrative by attributing economic development and security in Xinjiang as the historical result of Han leadership in the socialist revolution. Kazakh and Uyghur land is legally termed as state property for capitalist development.
   
   

The incarceration, disappearance, or deaths of Uyghur and Kazakh traditional knowledge holders, intellectuals, and poets severely jeopardizes the continuity of their histories and memories within China.

Like many other instances of contemporary colonialism, Chinese settler colonialism is constantly evolving with changing circumstances, revamping old rhetoric as it synthesizes global racial capitalist concepts.

A glimmer of hope lies across the border, where Kazakh refugees from China have been testifying at Atajurt, a Kazakhstan-based human rights group whose name means “ancestor’s home” (ata means ancestor and jurt means heritage house and roots). The testifiers spoke about their family members’ experiences of internment, torture, threats, and economic blackmail by Chinese authorities. The volunteers translated their testimonies into Russian, English, Chinese, and Turkish and uploaded the interviews onto YouTube. In the Atajurt interviews and additional testimonies collected by volunteers, about 40% of the cases are related to land issues. As one activist puts it, the importance of Atajurt’s work is to dispel the atmosphere of fear: “Kazakh people in China have been too intimidated by the authorities and they stay silent.” For the first time ever, dispossessed Kazakhs are making themselves heard loud and clear on major social media platforms, which they did not have access to in China. They grieve and long for the land they have lost, the subsidies and retirement pensions withheld by the local government, and family members entrapped in the internment system and indefinitely separated by the border. The lack of institutional support and constant intimidation from China mean that Kazakh migrants from Xinjiang must form their own support network based on near or distant kinship or social relation that has emerged from shared experiences of pain and suffering, to care for each other, ensure survival, and refuse Chinese colonial erasure. ■