The Predatory State and Coercive Assimilation : The Case of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang

This paper uses the predatory theory of the state to explain China’s recent violent assimilationist policies in Xinjiang directed at the region’s minority Muslim Uyghur population. The predatory theory highlights the importance of changes in constraints on political decision makers, and the perceived economic benefits of political violence directed at minority groups from the perspective of political decision makers, to explain why governments target minority groups. Three factors play an especially significant role in explaining the Xinjiang policies. These are (1) political centralization under Xi Jinping; (2) technological changes that reduced the costs of implementing predatory policing in Xinjiang; and (3) the perceived economic benefits from assimilation. While the economics literature sometimes describes the political economy of China’s growth miracle as the byproduct of a constrained Leviathan, this paper suggests that a model of predatory-state capitalism is more useful to understand how a cultural genocide can occur alongside economic growth