Carrie Gillon: This podcast episode is sponsored by the Social Life of Language, which is an open access educational YouTube channel designed to bring complex, theoretical academic work on language into the realm of public discourse in a way that is simple but never simplified.
Megan Figueroa: Hi and welcome to the Vocal Fries Podcast, podcast about linguistic discrimination.
Carrie Gillon: I’m Carrie Gillon.
Megan Figueroa: I’m Megan Figueroa, and here we are in 2024.
Carrie: 2024!
Megan: Who knows what this year’s going to be like?
Carrie: Who’s to say it starting off bad.
Megan: Yes. It’s already been quite the year, hasn’t It?
Carrie: Has been quite the year. Yeah. Let’s talk about your trip, so you went to the LSA and how was it?
Megan: Yeah. I went to the annual conference for linguists. It’s a huge nerd fest. It’s lovely to see all the linguists and to see some of our guests. It was really, really nice to run into our guests like Paul Reed, Nicole Holiday. Who else did I run into? Kendrick Calhoun, so seeing our guests was lovely, and then we were asked to do it together, but I went and hosted the 5-minute Linguist, which is an event that they do where linguists are basically trying to be good science communicators, and articulates their research in like jargon-free layperson friendly way, and it’s a big fun event.
It was really fun to host, and the winner talked about Filipino pop music which was fun, and I still have not listened to Filipino pop music, but I need to do that.
Carrie: Yeah, that sounds really cool.
Megan: I got to go to the Word of the Year, hosted by other, another guest and friend of the pod, Ben Zimmer, and actually 2 of our former guest, Kelly Wright and Jesse Greaser helped him out this year, so that was fun, and yeah, so you called it, I don’t know if you called it on like a bonus episode or an intro.
Carrie: I think it was an intro and I think I actually cut it out.
Megan: Oh, you did? So no one knows.
Carrie: I can’t even prove it, but you’re right I did call it, so the word of the year is in enshittification.
Megan: Yeah, and will you define it in case anyone doesn’t know what it is?
Carrie: Well, okay, so this comes from Cory Doctorow. The quote, here is how platforms die first. They’re good to their users, then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers. Finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then they die. I call this this enshittification.
Megan: The peak of unification is Twitter or X whatever, and that’s what he was referring to. Right?
Carrie: Actually, I’d have to look at the blog again. Let me look at it because it was about, I know Facebook, Google, TikTok. It might have been TikTok that spurred it on, so let me just double check. Yeah. TikTok, it was about TikTok.
Megan: That was about TikTok. Okay.
Carrie: Tiktoks and enshittification from January 21st of last year.
Megan: What a good word. Since you cut out the part where you called in enshittification being the word of the year, you also cut out the fact that I had never heard of it.
Carrie: That is true.
Megan: When you had introduced it to me, you’re the one who introduced it to me. I guess I haven’t been as like Capital O online as previous years because of the enshittification of all of these things. All of these platforms, so that’s where I learn all my new words is online obviously.
Carrie: Yeah. It was kind of a weird year. I feel like I’m online approximately the same amount. It’s just that obviously things have shifted, but yeah Twitter, I don’t even know why people are still on there. It’s the Nazi bar, you’re hanging out at the Nazi bar. There are other places now. I know it’s kind of scattered, we’re not all in the one same place, but in some ways it’s kind of nice, it’s less of a cacophony.
Megan: It’s true. It’s quieter. I’m over on Bluesky and I haven’t had any trolls yet. It’s all been very nice so far for me there. I do miss all my friends on Twitter though that I had accumulated, and linguist Twitter. I miss that. It was enshittified by just the whole thing. The platform being…
Carrie: Taken over by a White supremacist and burned to the ground. Yeah, so I’m mostly on Threads and unfortunately at some point, well actually it’s when they opened it up to Europe, suddenly there were a lot more trolls.
Megan: Oh really?
Carrie: Yeah, but the culture on threads is to block immediately.
Megan: That’s good. It’s the same on Bluesky too. Like don’t even question it just block. It’s better for your mental health. Better for everything.
Carrie: Yeah, so that’s good because I always thought the idea that you had to put up with trolls was really silly. I blocked early and often on Twitter as well, but now there’s more people who agree with me.
Megan: Yes people agree. You’re just ahead of your time. you’re ahead of your time on blocking and muting and all that.
Carrie: I guess so, so yeah.
Megan: Good for you.
Carrie: Yeah. Yay me.
Megan: Yeah. You’re good at protecting your mental health from things like that. I admire it.
Carrie: I guess that’s true. I just I’m like, what’s the point? This person is not, they’re not interesting. They’re saying the same thing as 5 million other people, so anyway I think we should remind people that we have a Patreon.
Megan: Yes. It is so important.
Carrie: http://www.patreon.com/vocalfriespod. Yeah, and it’s very important because it is how we pay for our transcripts and for our editing.
Megan: Yes. Both are very important and make the show run .
Carrie: Yeah. Yes. Yes, and I just want to say, I think we’re down to fourteen episodes that have not yet been transcribed.
Megan: Oh, that’s fantastic, we’re almost there.
Carrie: Yes. At the moment I’m doing it one a month, but if we could just get a little bit more Patreons, we could probably do it a little bit faster and get this done.
Megan: It’d be really appreciate that.
Carrie: Yeah. It’d be great if we could in 2024, it was the year of every one of our episodes being transcribed.
Megan: Yes that’d be fantastic.
Carrie: It would. Yeah, and just as a reminder, we have stickers, we have bonus episodes and a mug.
Megan: So many bonus episodes, so lovely mug. Yeah.
Carrie: Those are your options for rewards if you choose to support us.
Megan: Carrie: Yeah and we do really appreciate you and you’re really helping out in Indie podcast.
Carrie: Yes, and you’re helping us yeah. Actually pay for the services that we need. This episode is interesting about something that well, I knew a little bit about, but…
Megan: I knew nothing about.
Carrie: I still don’t definitely learned a lot, so yeah. The Uyghurs in China and how they are treated.
Megan: Yeah. Yeah. This really opened up my eyes for sure, so yeah. I hope everyone enjoys. [music] I’ve got a really interesting podcast recommendation for you listeners today. Pretty Much Pop is a culture podcast talking about TV, movies, music games, podcasts, novels, comedy theater, and exploring why and how we consume these things. How does pop culture even work in a world that is so fragmented and connected? Where’s the line between trash and treasure? Pretty Much Pop brings together philosophers, artists, comedians, and other smart folks to attempt and ponder these questions.
Most of what people like is pretty weird when you think about it, so thinking about it is what Pretty Much Pop does. Find Pretty Much Pop, a culture podcast, wherever you listen to your favorite podcast, or find it at prettymuchpop.com. [music]
Carrie: Okay, so today we’re very excited to have Dr. Lee Moore, who’s an adjunct professor at the University of Oregon, where he teaches courses on Chinese film, Chinese popular culture, Chinese narrative, and Taiwanese literature and film. He also wrote an article on how learning Mandarin helped him realize that he was dyslexic, called a dyslexic learning Chinese, but he’s here to talk to us about the use of linguistic discrimination against Uyghurs to justify the use of concentration camps to de Uyghurise[?] them, so welcome.
Megan: Yeah, welcome.
Lee: Thanks so much for having me here.
Carrie: First, before we dive into all of this, how did you get interested in Mandarin and Chinese culture?
Lee: It sounds really bad, but I don’t have a very good reason. I started studying Mandarin actually after I studied Japanese, but I really enjoyed Mandarin much more, and then people kept giving me money to study Mandarin, and I promised myself I would stop when either A, I stopped enjoying it or B, people stopped giving me money, and that hasn’t happened, so I just kind of fell deeper and deeper in love with it, but the financial considerations were always a thing, so I got 2 scholarships from the US government to study Mandarin, and then I got a scholarship from the Taiwanese government, and then the University of Oregon gave me a scholarship when I started my PhD.
Carrie: Yeah. Money matters.
Megan: It does, it’s a big driving force for all of us.
Lee: That sounds very Philistine kind of thing to say, but money is important and that other condition is really important too. I never stopped loving it. I never stopped having fun doing it, and I continue to really love it. It’s a fascinating culture. There’s so much there to dig into with the history and the literature, and it’s quite different from dealing with other traditions, and one of the things I love about dealing with China is it is something that when you get a fair amount of knowledge about it. It’s something that when you’re walking around in the US most people don’t share that same experience with you.
It’s not like when you’re talking about French or some other kind of linguistic tradition where you have, compared to the Chinese textual tradition, it’s much, much shorter.
Megan: Right. That’s true.
lee: It’s fascinating because you have these different periods and you can deal with text from 3000 years ago. I can’t read the Jiaguwen and the sort of earliest form of Chinese script that we have that’s carved into turtle bones and found in central China, but you can still kind of like have this conversation with people who’ve been dead for 3000 thousand years and it’s not something that I think you can generally do for most other languages, I guess if you’re looking at pre-Egyptian or some of the Mesopotamian languages, you can still have that conversation with people who are dead from millennia, but for most languages people study.
Certainly that for most languages people study, that’s not the case, and for most languages that are still in some form being used, that’s definitely not the case, so I think that’s one of the things that I find fascinating about China is you can talk with people who’ve been dead for several millennia.
Carrie: Absolutely, and the first time I heard about the turtle, the carvings into turtle shell, I found that really fascinating as well, but I was already doing my own thing in linguistics, so it didn’t pull me over, but I could see how that would though.
Megan: Yeah. I was going to ask to clarify in the turtle shell, they have carvings of this script.
Lee: What they did was, so this was a probably 1200 BCE, you had the Shang dynasty, and for a long time they did not know whether or not the Shang dynasty was actually a historical fact. We had no text remaining from the Shang Dynasty, so the Shang Dynasty I think runs about 1200 years before the common era, and even in China, this dynasty was attested to, but they had no written material from it. Then in the 1890s, you have some farmers who dig up these bones in Central China. They are turning them into medicinal product, a Chinese medicinal product called dragon bones.
They’re just grinding them down and claiming they have some sort of medical value. Chinese scholars are wandering around and they find these bones and they realize that they have something that looks almost like Chinese, and they eventually find the spot where they’re digging these up, and it turns out it’s the last capital the Shang dynasty, the capital is named, I think Yin, and it’s in modern day Hanen just outside of a city Kaifun, I believe, but you start to piece these together and what happened was the rulers would ask a question to the gods, and they would fire up these turtle shells.
They would fire them up until they had cracks that would break along the carpas, and then you would have these sort of scholarly figures who would read the carpas and divine what prognostication was, so should we attack our neighbor today, or should we wait for a week? Should I marry? And that kind of thing, and they would record that on the carpas of the turtle in a very archaic form of Chinese, so that’s the oldest thing that we have, and so it’s really just a dump site of these old turtle shells.
Megan: That is marvelous. Yeah, it’s marvelous.
Lee: In May I got to go back to one of my favorite muses. It’s a muse in Taipei that has some of these turtle shells, and it’s really awesome.
Megan: Oh, I’m so jealous. I would love to see something like that.
Lee: Actually Canada, I don’t know where they’re at, but Canada has more of these Jaiguwen remains than does the US Canada is outside of China and Taiwan, the leading reservoir of these things, and I think it has to do with a particular Canadian missionary who was there. I’m not sure where they’re located in Canada, but Canada has about eight thousand of these Jaiguwen texts.
Megan: I think I know which missionary you’re talking about, but I can’t remember his name.
Carrie: Oh, wow. Okay. I’m going to look that up.
Megan: Yeah, you have to go Carrie.
Carrie: Switching gears, so let’s get into some language stuff, so can you just give us a little bit, like as brief as possible? I know this is hard, but what is the linguistic situation in China broadly speaking?
Lee: You have Mandarin, which is to a certain degree, it’s an invented language, invented in the early part of the 20th century, but it’s based on northern Chinese dialects that have been collected. The Mandarin’s largely based off of the dialect around Beijing, and that has come to dominate today in mainland China, but you have lots of different topolect that in China they’re referred to as dialects, and I think from a linguistic standpoint, that would be a very controversial claim. Most Chinese folks do talk about Taiwanese, Cantonese as dialects, but they’re really topolects.
They’re mutually unintelligible, so you have a lot of folks in the south of China who are raised speaking the Southern Chinese languages, topolects and they have to learn Mandarin, and it’s quite a contentious issue because increasingly the state is trying to get rid of those in some form, so that’s in just the Chinese languages, and those languages are still quite vibrant. I don’t know, I don’t have exact numbers, but a hundred million people probably speak Cantonese, so this is not a small language.
Then you have these other non ethnically Han Chinese groups who are generally not related, they’re not kind of classified as Chinese ethnically, so you have the Uyghurs, you have the Tibetans, they speak languages which are completely outside of the Synetic language family, so Tibetan is distantly related to Chinese, but Uyghur is a Turkish language that has much more in common with Mongolian. I think there’s some debate about the Turkish language family, but it comes from that language family, so you have this variety of languages spoken, and Uyghur I think has maybe 8 million speakers in China.
You have a few more speakers outside of China in the former Soviet states, but Uyghur is interesting, and we can get into this because Uyghur as a separate language I think it’s a hard claim to make because my understanding, it’s essentially mutually intelligible with Uzbeki and some of the other Turkic languages, so there’s an instance in the 1990s where China is liberalizing, and you have the head of some particular government department from Xinjiang, where almost all of the Uyghurs in China today live.
You have the head of that department go to Turkey, and he’s speaking with someone in Turkey on television without a translator, and there are a lot of Uyghurs who are kind of like, “Why have we been told that Turkish is a totally different language from Uyghur when they’re mutually intelligible?”
Carrie: I had no idea.
Megan: Uzbeki Turkish? No, I had no idea.
Lee: Yeah, there is obviously you’ve got the spectrum. They’re Turks are people of the country of Turkey, and it’s kind of confusing in terms of terminology because everybody in that region is oftentimes referred to as Turks, but it can also connote the people of the country of Turkey, but you have this wide spectrum of people who are speaking sort of a mutually intelligible language, but it a spectrum, but Uzbeki my understanding 90% understandable if you speak Uyghur and back and forth.
The scripts are interesting because the scripts are different, and we can get into that when we talk a little bit more about the specifics of linguistic, the sort of history of linguistic discrimination in the Uyghur lands, but just to bring into linguistic discrimination, the Uyghurs today, they’re struggling with concentration camps. Essentially the bitching has constructed large numbers of concentration camps. We don’t know the exact numbers, but 1 million people are probably have been put in these concentration camps.
I’ve heard numbers as high as 3 million, but I think 1 million’s, probably a much safer number, so you have 1 million people incarcerated at various periods of time in this system, and one of the things that I think doesn’t get discussed as much is how much language is a part of that, so one thing is that when I was traveling in Xinjiang in 2014 it was very hard to communicate with folks, because unlike other places in China you don’t have that much knowledge of Mandarin there, and one of the logics of this incarceration is to try and train Uyghurs to speak Mandarin, so the concentration camps start 2016, 20 17, something like that, and lots of Uyghurs are told you will not be let out until you can recognize three thousand Chinese characters.
Or one thousand Chinese characters, so they’re explicitly told that this is a linguistic issue for them. There are a variety of reasons you can get placed into the concentration camp, some of them religious showing too much interest in Islam, which sometimes just means visiting a mosque.
Carrie: You could be incarcerated for that.
Lee: Yes, yes, absolutely. Growing a beard, wearing a hijab, and the situation in terms of language is a part of that.
Megan: What is the official language policy in China and and how has it changed over time?
Lee: Officially, it hasn’t actually changed that much. With the founding of the PRC in 1949, China’s language policy was really good officially. All minorities are allowed to express themselves in their own languages. They’re allowed to have publishing houses, they’re allowed to do education in their native languages, but that has changed quite a bit as attitudes towards ethnic minorities have changed, so the early 1950s it was quite positive, and they largely fulfilled the constitutional obligations set out in the beginning of the PRC.
Then in the late 1950s, you have this period of closing where there was a crackdown, some on minority languages, including Uyghur. You had a brief period of opening up in the early 1960s, but by 1966, 1967, it largely became illegal to teach Uyghur for about 10 years. You have the cultural revolution. The way this was understood in terms of an ideological level learning Uyghur was considered a local nationalism, so that was something that could undercut the state, and everything is in Chinese. You have all the communist material being offered in Mandarin, so there was no need to continue speaking Uyghur, or to continue that tradition.
That was how it was presented. Maldais[?] in ’76 things start opening up. In the 1970s there is an interest in internationalizing China and connecting with the Middle East, so there are the folks in Beijing who are in charge, are concerned about their oppression, so they largely let Uyghur go back to speaking Uyghur, and it was not criminalized. In the 1990s you had some efforts at what was called bilingual education, but actually it was more of a monolingual, a focus on Mandarin, so students would be from third grade, they would be expected to increasingly learn in Mandarin, whether or not they spoke that in the home, and that process has largely continued in 2018, I want to say 2018, 2019.
You had particular counties in the Uyghur parts of Southern Xinjiang, so Hultan is an ancient silk road city that’s I think 96% ethnically Uyghur, and the school has banned the use of Uyghur entirely in the classroom, and you’re starting to see that happening in other places. I don’t think that’s completely the case, and as the Uyghur issue has become an issue that’s internationally important, there has been a crackdown on the information that we get out of Xinjiang, and so some of the things that I say are based off of very piecemeal information that we get.
Carrie: Why exactly in 2016 or 2017, whenever it was, did they switch from already kind of not great policy around language, to let’s put a million people in a concentration camp?
Lee: A good question. I don’t think we have a great answer. Xi Jinping took power in 2013, and it took him a bit of time to consolidate control, but in 2013 and 2014, there were several… and I know I’m using this controversial word, but there were several terrorist incidents that were led by Uyghur, so you had some Uyghur who were in the south of China who they attacked a train station, and knifed I think it was a several dozen people were attacked with knives, and then you had another group of Uyghurs who drove a small car into Tiananmen Square and I think killed several people.
In terms of violence it’s actually quite low level, but I think that because there is this ethnic suspicion of Uyghur amongst Han Chinese, ethnically Chinese folks. You had the security state sort of kicked into action and there was this complete lockdown essentially of Uyghur over these relatively minor incidents, and not to discount any violence, but in terms of what maybe we are used to. In terms of China, there is a large amount of relationship violence that’s not addressed, but for whatever reason, this violence was seen as particularly dangerous as a threat to the state, and so they reacted in a… I can’t think of a better word, but an overly active way.
Like who responds to a couple of small incidents with concentration camps, but that’s what they did, and I use the term concentration camp. That is the language that initially before the Chinese state realized how big of an issue this was going to be, they used the term concentration camps in their language
Megan: That’s interesting that they didn’t realize that that was going to make people upset. Like concentration camps have a really long history, but a lot of people still think of like the Holocaust. Which obviously all of them are bad.
Lee: The Chinese authorities were almost completely caught off guard by the fact that putting 1 million people into concentration camps would be seen as not a good thing, but initially they were not trying to hide it, and then once it came out they did try and hide it, but it was really ham-handed sort of hiding. You can’t hide a million people in today’s world. There are satellites that are watching this, and they were able to trace this with construction contracts and things like that, but they still insisted that it wasn’t happening for a year or 2, and then they admitted that it had happened, but it was all done that now everybody was gone.
That they no longer had concentration camps. Those were I think considered labor education camps, and then they stated that everybody had been released, and it’s just kind of a lesson in bad public relations.
Megan: Is that where it stands right now that they’re saying that it’s ended?
Lee: They’re saying that it’s ended, there’s still a large number of people in camps, but they’re considered labor education camps. Other people have been sent to other parts of China to do what is maybe not consensual labor, but they are trying to reduce the numbers as far as I know of people in these camps. I think they have largely the concern in the US and the rest of the world has pushed them, but also they have achieved a lot of their goals in terms of forcing people to learn Mandarin, so I think that they’ve achieved their goals, but also they’re recognizing that it’s not doing them as much good as they thought.
Carrie: It’s interesting that they switched to labor camps or education camps, because both of those are still scary words or scary phrases.
Lee: It’s funny there are other things that are still going on. You have boarding schools. They have boarding schools where they take children away, so not only students whose student age children whose parents went to these concentration camps, those would be sent off to boarding schools where they were educated entirely in Mandarin, and were oftentimes physically punished if they spoke Uyghur, but they have other similar kind of programs that they’re quite open about.
They make the kind of connection between boarding schools in the US and Canada, and the indigenous history sometimes explicit. I’ve read accounts where officials will state the US and Canada did this exact same thing. You had your chance, now it’s our chance and it’s just like…
Megan: Yeah, and that worked out. I guess it worked out well in the ways that capitalism won, but man did it do so much damage and I don’t know. Do you really want to have that as part of your history?
Lee: Yeah, there’s just this kind of tone deafness in some of this discourse.
Megan: How has China used language to persuade others to support their de Uyghurisation efforts?
Lee: Are you saying in China or outside of China?
Megan: Outside of China?
Lee: The controversy, and this is one I want to try and say something where I think things in the US and in the wider Western world have been exaggerated. The Confucius Institute was a big controversy before the pandemic. There was these series of institutes of various sorts that were set up by the Chinese government that tried to train folks in language, and many in the US were concerned that these would be used to somehow repress discussion of issues like Uyghurs, or Tibetans or things like that, and I think that was largely overblown. I did not see any evidence of that.
The University of Oregon had a Confucius Institute that I occasionally participated in events related with them, and I saw no evidence of the kind of malfeasance that was being ascribed to them by American politicians, and I’m someone who’s very skeptical of Beijing and their intentions, but just to be honest, I don’t think that they have really used those institutes. The Confucius Institutes were used as language training centers, and I don’t think that they have really used language that much to try to distract from these issues in any particular way. Did that answer your question, Megan?
Megan: Yes.
Lee: I don’t know if that was the answer you were looking for.
Megan: Yes.
Carrie: I think the question was more like for a while China was trying to label them all as terrorists because they’re Muslims, and especially after 911, that was a really easy thing to key into, so it was more like using rhetoric to kind of persuade us.
Lee: Sean Roberts has this book, the War on the Uyghurs, that makes that argument that China used the US global war on terror as a way to both oppress Uyghurs, so they criminalized many of the things having to do with Islam as this campaign continues, lots of Uyghurs who even if they’re not in jail, if they’re operating as a public official or as a student, they are forced to eat work and other kinds of things, so it…
Megan: Wow. That’s disgusting.
Carrie: Oh my God.
Lee: That’s one aspect in terms of using the language of terrorism, that happened in definitely after 2001. Before you did not really have the Chinese state describing Uyghur as terrorists. They were describing them as spliters, which spliters is the English language term for a Chinese language term that just kind of means people who are trying to secede.
Megan: Separatists. It’s maybe how I would use it, but yeah.
Lee: Yeah. For some reason when you’re translating out of Chinese into English, they always use the term spliters. Separatists is the more natural English term. After 2011, that rhetoric changed, they became terrorists and there is fairly convincing evidence, but the Bush administration initially did not support labeling Uyghurs as terrorists, so the movement that’s most often considered the terrorist movement, but there is no group called the East Turkistan Independence Movement. There are some other groups that are kind of related to that, but the ETIM is the group that Beijing oftentimes labels as this mastermind of Uyghur terrorism.
That’s probably not true. That that group doesn’t really exist. It exists in very small cells that are no threat to anyone, but you had the Bush administration initially resisting labeling ETIM as a terrorist organization, and Jesse Helms, Senator Jesse Helms, who is a very controversial senator, I have to say I agree with him. He comes out and he says, these people, the Uyghurs China is trying to tell us that they are terrorists, but actually that seems like a pretty hard claim to make, but the Bush administration when it needed China’s support for the war in Iraq, it actually had to do a deal and this is circumstantial, but there is evidence that a deal was done.
The Bush administration reverses itself and it labels ETIM as a terrorist organization, and it essentially participates in this rhetoric of labeling Uyghurs as Muslim terrorist, because I think the connection to Islam makes it a very easy claim to make in the minds of a lot of bureaucrats. I’ve read US kind of global security folks writing in the mid 2000s who know nothing about China and Uyghurs, and they’re just essentially copying and pasting things that have been translated out of the Chinese sources.
This is definitely something that if you were doing anti-terrorism training in the New York Police Force in the mid 2000s, you would’ve read stuff about ETIM being a terrorist organization, but most of that I would say I’m highly dubious of that. Increasingly since this concentration camp became a global issue, the US has backed away from that discussion of Uyghurs in terms of terrorists, but for about 15 years that rhetoric definitely dominated us discussions of Uyghurs.
Carrie: Yeah. I definitely haven’t seen it more recently, which is nice.
Lee: It’s interesting though. It seems like one of the reasons that the US no longer does that has nothing to do with the Uyghurs, and this is the claim that a lot of people in Beijing make. They’re like, “Well, you used to like us and so you did support us in labeling the Uyghurs as terrorists. Now you don’t like us in Beijing, and so to get back at us, you have kind of erased this designation.” Which is funny the way global politics impinges on these discussions of terrorism, that really had nothing to do with the actual subjects themselves. I think that is a valuable observation. Why did we label them terrorists? .
Megan: Yeah. I think the fact the US labeled them as terrorists is definitely due to we needed their help. Or at least it’s very, very likely. The fact that it was changed, yes it’s probably because no longer need China’s support in that way. I don’t think it’s to get back at, I think it’s probably just well, that’s no longer functionally required, so why are we doing it?
Lee: Maybe, but if you look at the folks who are leading the charge against China on Uyghurs. Oftentimes it’s those who are the most suspicious of Chinese power, so there is this overlap of this kind of thing. Just to put my cards out, there almost no need to talk about anyone as terror or like the label of terrorist itself is highly problematic.
Carrie: Extremely.
Lee: There was never really any threat to almost anyone by Uyghurs. They had very little power. There were some Uyghurs who did go to Syria who joined IS, so it’s not something that we should completely dismiss, but the fact that certain people get labeled as terrorist and certain people don’t get labeled as terrorists, it makes that label for me too so problematic that it’s almost useless.
Megan: Also, was the number of Uyghurs who went to Syria greater than the number of Britains or Americans?
Lee: Probably not. No.
Megan: Probably not.
Lee: I think we don’t really know how many actually went, but it was I think fairly small. Certainly a huge number of British French and Americans went to Syria to fight with IS.
Megan: Yes, so this topic is something I did, I just had no idea about, and so this is like my layperson mind trying to wrap my head around what the linguistic situation becomes for the Uyghurs after their concentration camps. They want them to speak Mandarin and know Mandarin script, correct?
Lee: That’s correct. Yeah.
Megan: Basically so that they can understand the communist propaganda of the state propaganda, or I don’t know if that’s a wrong word to use, propaganda.
Lee: I would say it’s less about communism, more about just kind of ethnic chauvinism. They want folks to think of themselves as a part of the Chinese nation, so in 1949 you have about 90% of China is ethnically Chinese, ethnically Han Chinese, but they are really under Mao. They try and de-emphasize nationalism. That’s not a part of communism. There are periods when nationalism becomes much more important, but in fact, Marxism is very much anti nationalists.
Marx himself argued that people who think of themselves as nations are really proletarians who are getting tricked by these elite bourgeoisie, into thinking them of themselves in a way that divides them from recognition of their interests, which should be like a kind of global proletariat. There are periods like the cultural revolution when you have essentially unacceptable to speak in Uyghur or to speak openly in Uyghur, but the thing that we’re seeing now as China moves from that sort of Marxist ideology, they’re still claiming to be Marxist, but they’re increasingly thinking of themselves as a preserver of the Chinese nation.
They become a nationalistic party. Daniel Bell, a scholar who was briefly the first foreign dean in a Chinese university, he has argued that the Chinese Communist Party should change its name to the Chinese Confucian party because they’re just so focused on nationalism, so I think one of the things that you’re seeing with this linguistic discrimination is they want them to be a part of that nationalism and they want them to stop seeing themselves as Uyghur, and to stop seeing themselves as Turks and to stop seeing themselves as connected with central Asian people, and to see themselves as a part of this Chinese polity.
Which is not just the PRC started in 1949. They want this imagined continuity to go back 2 or 3000 years to those Jaiguwen turtle bones. They want Uyghurs to see themselves as having been a part of the nation that was writing Chinese 3000 years ago in the Shang Dynasty. Of course all of these things are imagined in sort of Ben Anderson imagined community kind of way, but it’s a lot easier to imagine Uyghurs as this group of Turks who have for the past 1500 years, been a part of a Turkish speaking community. The kind of trying to connect them to Han Chinese nationalism is weird, but that I think that’s the the end game.
Carrie: One country, one language.
Lee: [foreign language] is the word in Chinese, so like one family, one ethnic group,
Megan: One China. It is not dissimilar to what I hear some people say in the United States. That’s for sure.
Carrie: Yeah. Nationalism is nationalism.
Megan: They tie language into it directly tight.
Carrie: Always. Always. Yeah.
Lee: The sort of English as a expected official language. When I hear that, I always wonder where do indigenous languages fit into that?
Megan: Right. Nowhere. Right.
Carrie: That’s the whole point of the boarding schools.
Lee: One thing I hadn’t mentioned that I think y’all as linguistics will find interesting is the history of Uyghur script and how it…
Megan: Oh yeah. I’d be interested in that.
Lee: Plays into discrimination, so Uyghur has a long tradition of having a written language as early, I think as, so the Uyghur there is a Uyghur empire in what’s today Mongolia. We’re talking 745 to 840 in the common era collapses, but you have a script. Uyghurs are one of the first groups to write down stuff in a Turkic language, so they create their own own script, and that script is actually used, so when Kublai Khan and Ghenghis Khan and others create the Mongol state, they’re using a version of Uyghur. With the rise of Islam and Uyghur culture, you increasingly switch from that indigenous Uyghur script, to something that is based off of Arabic.
An Arabic script, and that last from Islam really starts getting big amongst Uyghurs about a 1,000 years ago, and by 500 years ago everybody who we would today classify as Uyghur is a Muslim, and they’re identifying as Muslim, and interestingly the term Uyghur itself it disappears at that point because Uyghur as a term was associated very closely with a group of Turks who were Buddhist, and so by 1500, no one who is identifying as Uyghur. Everybody is writing their Turkic language in Arabic script in what is today Xinjiang in the Northwest corner of China.
Also, they’re not thinking of themselves as a separate unit. They don’t have a Uyghur imagined community. They’re just Turks who are circulating throughout Central Asia, so that’s the situation when we kind of get to these 2 modern empires from Moscow and Beijing, who increasingly are inserting themselves into Uyghur affairs in the 1930s and 1940s, there’s a relic based script for Uyghur that is promulgated in the USSR. In 1946 China initially says it’s going to support the Arabic based script, but Beijing in 1956 says actually, we’re going to have Cyrillic script for Uyghur.
Then in 1957, they’re like, “Sorry, we’re just kidding about that. We’re going to change that.” And then again in 1957 they changed back to Soleric, so you have this rapid change in what is the official position on which script Uyghur should be using. Relations between the USSR and China breakdown in 1959, so by 1960, they abandoned that script and they go to a Latin script for Uyghur, and then that does not really take hold or people are educated in that Latin script, but it’s not really very well supported by Uyghurs, and in the 1980s they transition to Arabic script.
You have this period of 30 years where the script changes 5 or 6 times, and so you have these people who are educated at different points, and you can just imagine how much linguistically that that is damaging to your training in this tradition, because it both cuts you off from this older Uyghur tradition where you could read texts that were written in Uyghur for the last 500 years. Suddenly you don’t have access to that, and then you’re essentially illiterate because if you were educated in that Latin script in the 1960s, and then they stop using that, you don’t have the training in the Arabic script.
There is this kind of question of the role that having a heavy-handed role for the state in language, I think is something that I oftentimes think about when I’m thinking about linguistic discrimination. It’s not official linguistic discrimination, but having a language policy that doesn’t take into account in the voices of those people who will be speaking, reading and writing that language is.
Carrie: Yeah. No, it really matters. The only thing I can think of in Canada’s at all similar is that Inuit used at least 2 different scripts, so Roman 1 and Syllabic and yeah, there’s like depending on which community you’re in, which one’s going to dominate, and I think they just recently decided they were going to go, is it full Syllabic or full Roman now? I don’t remember, but anyway. It’s really tricky, and I don’t think that China should be making that determination. It definitely should be an internal discussion among the people who are the language.
Megan: The language users. Yeah.
Lee: Because so I mentioned that Uyghurs today, the state allowed them to go to the Arabic script and most Uyghur, it’s hard to do surveys or anything like that, but my understanding is most Uyghur supported that change in the 1980s, but at the same time you had these Turkic speakers who have these mutually comprehensible languages in the Soviet Union. Soviet Union collapses 1991, and those Turkic speakers are switching from Cyrillic to Latin alphabets, and the Chinese state has recently been very supportive of the Arabic script.
Partially because they recognize that it separates the Turkic speakers in China from the Turkic speakers in Central Asia who are independent, and so there’s this kind of sense of divide and conquer, and I should point out, we’re not just talking about Uyghurs, Kazakhs, there are several million Kazakhs who live in China, so they use an Arabic based script too, so they can’t read or it’s difficult, there’s an extra layer for them reading Kazakh writings coming out of Kazakhstan, so there’s just all this kind of question of how boundaries affect languages.
I think fascinating, and I think the US Western media has done a good job of talking about what’s happening in Xinjiang to a certain degree, but I think the linguistic aspect has been ignored, and I think that’s a valuable contribution.
Megan: Yeah. Yeah. It’s harder for them I think because they don’t think about those kinds of issues that deeply, and we don’t talk about it enough, just generally in the media, so it’s not surprising that it’d be something they’ll be lacking.
Lee: There’s a great podcast that talks about it.
Megan: There’s a few, but so the National Inuit organization. They went to all Roman. I’ve learned so much from you. I’m sorry if I even seemed quiet because I was taking in everything. It really is a new subject for me, and I knew that today, that this morning when we’re going to learn a lot, and I hope that our listeners too, learned a lot, and I wonder if there’s anything our listeners can do to help.
Lee: I would check out Uyghur organizations, so there are several uighur han rights organizations that are out there. I forgot to mention this, I have a podcast, the Chinese literature podcast, and we’ve done some discussions of Uyghur poets, so the first Uyghur to use the term Uyghur, his name was Abdul Khalik Uyghur, so he styled himself as Uyghur, and he was the first person for 400 years to suddenly embrace the identity of Uyghur amongst the Uyghurs. He calls himself Uyghur, and he writes a poem in the 1930s that gets him executed. Actually it starts out with the line, oh, poor Uighur rise up or something, something to that nature, so there’s this interesting kind of history that hopefully I’ll be putting more out on the podcast.
Carrie: Yeah, that was my bad. I realized halfway through I was like, “Ah, I should have mentioned the podcast.” But I’m glad that you did.
Lee: I completely forgot too.
Megan: Yes. Yes. We’re into it as well obviously.
Lee: I’m not as good at marketing myself as I should be.
Carrie: Who is?
Megan: Neither are we. We just kind of hope that we get new listeners.
Lee: We’re scholars, we’re not supposed to do that.
Megan: That’s true. We were definitely not trained to do it, and the ones who were, we all know their names.
Carrie: Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
Lee: No comment.
Carrie: Anyway thank you so much.
Megan: Well, thank you so much. I learned so much from you.
Lee: It’s been awesome.
Carrie: That was great, and we obviously leave our listeners with one final message. Don’t be an asshole.
Megan: Don’t be an asshole.
Lee: Great final words.
Carrie: The Vocal Fries podcast is produced by me, Carrie Gillon, theme music by Nick Granon. You can find us on Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram @vocalfriespod. You can email us at vocalfriespod@gmail.com and our website is vocalfriespod.com.
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The Vocal Fries Pod 