On September 2, at the 2023 American Political Science Association Annual Meeting in Los Angeles, CA, Dr. Adrian Zenz, VOC China Studies Director, presented to 1,000 top scholars in the political science field the findings of his latest paper titled Masterminding Mass Internment: Policy Experimentation and the Evolution of Xinjiang’s ReEducation Campaign. Dr. Zenz’s paper argues that Beijing’s campaign of mass internment in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region that began in 2017 evolved through a creative local policy experimentation process, resulting in an “innovative repression” solution to what the state has framed as a major national security threat. Amid significant top-level steering by the central government and despite the campaign’s extreme political sensitivity, Beijing used a form of “policy experimentation under hierarchy” to catalyze the localized development of mass “deextremification” in dedicated re-education internment facilities.
While the scholarship on Chinese political science disagrees about the extent to which local policy experimentation continues under Xi Jinping’s more centralized approach to governance, the Xinjiang case indicates how contemporary Chinese policy experimentation can enable an “innovative totalitarianism” that facilitates the development of next-generation repressive securitization strategies.
