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

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We use the predatory theory of the state to explain China’s violent assimilationist campaign targeting the Uyghurs, a predominantly Muslim minority group in China that constitutes a majority of people in Xinjiang Province. Our analysis suggests that increasing political centralization under the leadership of President Xi Jinping, combined with technological changes that reduced the costs of implementing predatory policing in Xinjiang and increased the perceived economic benefits from assimilation, contributed to the choice of destructive cultural assimilation rather than respect for the rights and autonomy of Uyghurs in Xinjiang. While the economics literature sometimes describes the political economy of China’s growth miracle as the byproduct of a constrained Leviathan, this paper shows that a predatory theory of the state is more useful to understand how a cultural genocide can occur alongside economic growth.