Uyghur villages have been Sinicized in Xinjiang. Local communities have been displaced for state-sponsored infrastructure projects in Tibet. News editors have been convicted of sedition in Hong Kong. National elections have been smeared by P.R.C.-backed influence operations in Taiwan. Connecting all of these geographies is a battle over who is considered indigenous to the land, or the colonial forces that imposed their own sovereignty. Recent essays show that various groups in and beyond the P.R.C. are not only reflecting on these issues through historical and structural lenses, but also forging transnational solidarity with groups fighting similar anticolonial struggles.
In the Made in China Journal’s latest issue, Dawa Lokyitsang published an article titled, “Are Tibetans Indigenous? The Political Stakes and Potentiality of the Translation of Indigeneity.” Updated from its original publication in 2017, the article examines the different ways in which Tibetans have used the concept of indigeneity in relation to sovereignty and depending on who defines the term:
[C]ontestations over the political translation and meaning of indigeneity between settler states and First Nations’ anticolonial land-return movements highlight legal arguments over sovereignty. This is what my article stresses: that although indigeneity as a racial terminology was invented by settler-colonial imperial governmentalities in North America to take possession of First Nations territories and govern their bodies, Indigenous sovereignty movements have redefined and decolonised such racialised renderings to highlight their political potentiality regarding regaining sovereignty. This contestation is what I argue highlights the politicised nature of translating indigeneity.
[…] Rather than rejecting current understandings of indigeneity as defined by Indigenous sovereignty movements rooted in claims of sovereignty and decolonisation, Tibetans in exile were refusing indigeneity as defined by institutions such as the United Nations and modern governments, which framed indigeneity as backwards and tribal and rooted their politics in terms of rights rather than nationhood. This is what major Indigenous sovereignty movements stress: that their activism is often misconstrued as seeking civil rights from the settler state rather than challenging settler-state violations of national territorial treaties signed with First Nations peoples during the inception of settler-colonial states.
Another reason Indigenous movements and scholars have not completely thrown out the terminology is due to its salience in generating global solidarities between native peoples and their anticolonial stance against settler-state encroachment. Judging from its evolutionary trajectory, indigeneity has gone from being a colonial construct to a terminology operationalised by global Indigenous movements to advance solidarities and sovereignty claims against settler nations and capitalist institutions in cahoots.
[… I]ndigeneity is not just about categorising people symbolically, but also about leveraging international movements and creating strategic solidarities for native nations mobilising against the mechanics of settler governmentality. It is this political potential of indigeneity that civilian Tibetans are presently considering. [Source]
Kam Yam wrote an article in The China Story in June analyzing how Hong Kong’s judiciary is employing colonial-era laws to prosecute government critics in the name of “decolonizing” the city. He posed the question “[W]hat is the point of less ‘colonial’ language when the [National Security Law] itself replicates one of the oppressive aspects of British colonial rule? […] Colonialism in the name of ‘decolonisation’ has now come full circle.” Last month, JN at the Lausan Collective profiled “Three Villages: A Wang Chau Story,” a novel by Michael Leung that highlights land-justice struggles in Hong Kong’s New Territoriesand weaves a narrative of autonomous anti-eviction struggles against government-backed property developers across several rural villages. JN argued that “Leung’s turn to land justice and ecological framings of Hong Kong resistance broadens the scope of what we consider political actors as well as the grounds upon which such action can take place.” Here is JN’s reflection on the contradictions of indigeneity:
In exploring the question of human relationships and responsibilities to the land, Leung engages the contradictions that arise when the local category of “indigenous” is not coextensive with the identity of land steward, as it is in many other Euro-American settler colonial contexts. […] Notably, all of these settler societies have made genocidal self-indigenizing moves in order to assert their legal occupation of the land that they stole, which takes the form of claiming dominion over the mantle of liberty, anti-imperialism or anti-colonialism. By interrogating this contradiction in Hong Kong’s local context, Leung makes a material case that refuses local politics’ often insular, exceptionalist self-framing as well as Hong Kong protesters’ place amongst a global left, which is predisposed to see the city as a one-dimensional capitalist outpost.
[…] Because of Hong Kong’s artificial land “scarcity” driven by corporate profit-seeking and demands for increasing property valuation, the male descendants of these [elite] indigenous inhabitants [to whom the British gave legal preference over other indigenous groups without property] wield enormous power in a way that those in other European settler colonies do not. This indigenous class is widely acknowledged to be in deep collusion with police, triads, and property developers who join forces to evict villagers so that their land can be capitalized. In other words, this is yet another example of the continuity between colonialities that the PRC’s alleged “decolonization” of Hong Kong has been unwilling or unable to confront.
Not merely a question of nomenclature, the disjuncture of indigeneity and land stewardship in the Hong Kong context highlights the temporal question at the heart of many conflicts over who can claim indigeneity. “Who was here first”? Or, who was here longer after a certain arbitrary point in time? Indigeneity in Hong Kong shows that simply being on the land the “longest” (or there shortly before a land was leased, in the New Territories case) cannot be the sole basis of indigenous identity. Rather, the stories and practices of the village communities that Leung writes about make the argument that praxis and the processual, especially in creating environmentally just social infrastructure through action, matters most from an ecological perspective. [Source]
In the latest issue of the Funambulist, dedicated entirely to “Asian Imperialisms,” Guldana Salimjan wrote about how green development and Han settler colonialism legitimize the dispossession of Kazakh and other indigenous groups in Xinjiang. Salimjan traces the influx of Han migrant settlers via the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps (XPCC) through Reform-era land enclosures and the “War on Terror” to demonstrate how Kazakhs have been systematically erased from their homelands:
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. […] For Kazakhs, the structural conditions for their dispossession have been:
• Limited usage rights for state lands made the land susceptible to state expropriation.
• Epistemically hegemonic scientific development discourse and marketization reduced Kazakh historical, cultural, and spiritual ties to their land to merely an economic relation.
• 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.
• 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.[…] In this context of state violence legitimized by the rhetoric of national and ecological security and green development, [… W]hile 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. [Source]
In June, Yawen Li wrote an essay in the Made in China Journal about anticolonial internationalism in contemporary China. She described how certain Chinese writers’ coverage of anticolonial struggles in the Middle East demonstrates a structural and reflexive ethos, and how “individuals, platforms, and decentralised groups persist in exploring and practising the actions that ordinary people still can take for Palestine, despite the apparatus of de-politicisation and suppression.” In an adjacent context this week, a guest contributor for the Hong Kong Free Press described how individuals in Hong Kong are circumventing state oppression in order to express solidarity with Palestinians in their anticolonial struggle:
Last October, a talk on the “Gaza Humanitarian Crisis” by James Frankel, a professor in the Cultural and Religious Studies department of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, at the Hang Seng University was abruptly cancelled three hours before it was set to begin.
[…] Frankel, who has lived in Hong Kong for nearly a decade, says that the cancellation was indicative of a generally over-cautious approach when it came to political activity in the city. “[The expectation] is that we should avoid speaking about anything that’s controversial in the shadow of the protests of 2019,” he said.
[…] Some groups in Hong Kong said the authorities were supportive of their organising efforts.
[…] In the aftermath of October 7, Ada – who agreed to speak under a pseudonym – started an anonymous reading group with her partner to fill a “vacuum” for a space to “process grief or talk about what is happening in the world.” The group, made up of Hong Kong locals and expatriates, gathers on an almost weekly basis to read works by Palestinian authors and poets like Edward Said and Mosab Abu Toha.
[…] When asked whether they were concerned about their efforts, [a group of artists and environmentalists in their 20s who regularly organize similarly small-scale solidarity events] mentioned Palestinian poet Mohammed El-Kurd, and brought out a poster with one of his quotes painted on it in English and Chinese.
“We are free and unafraid. They cannot intimidate us,” it said. [Source]
In an essay for Broad and Ample Road titled “The Beginning of Our Displacement,” Jordyn Haime examined indigeneity beyond the P.R.C. in the context of Taiwan’s collective memory of its colonial past under Dutch, Qing, and Japanese occupations. This theme was on full display in a series of special events celebrating 400 years since Dutch colonizers arrived in Tainan, notably an opera titled “1624.” While these events attempted to frame a diverse and mutli-ethnic Taiwan that has overcome the trauma of martial law and Sinification and forged a united national identity, indigenous groups such as Pingpu people have criticized the country’s reluctance to fully decolonize its history:
[S]uch efforts to tell a more dynamic story of Taiwan’s history fall flat when the government continues to romanticize colonial periods, says Jolan Hsieh, a Siraya activist and Indigenous Studies scholar at National Dong Hwa University. “They romanticize that period because they want to go against Chinese ideology,” says Hsieh. “However, the people who are in charge of this whole idea are still coming from a Han Chinese perspective.”
[…M]ost Taiwanese know little of the immense suffering and violence that Indigenous Taiwanese endured in the making of their nation. They have little interest in engaging with this difficult history and what it might mean for Taiwan’s future. To confront that history would challenge established historical narratives that serve as the foundations of the current state and its political parties. As young Pingpu people, in a 2016 social media video about contested memories of Koxinga [a Ming loyalist pirate who helped expel the Dutch but also slaughtered indigenous peoples], say about the act of forgetting Indigenous Taiwanese history: “This is the violence of nationalism.”
[…] Revisiting history necessitates a holistic approach, Hsieh says, that will require all Taiwanese people to reflect on Taiwan’s history before 1624. But it also means creating the opportunity for Indigenous people to engage with their past within their own education systems. It means reviving languages and cultures that have been lost. Even more radically, Hsieh and Alak argue that proper reconciliation with Taiwan’s painful past can only be achieved by restoring the land rights and calls for self-governance of Indigenous nations. [Source]
