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8 Predatory biopolitics

Organ harvesting and other means of monetizing Uyghur ‘surplus’

Abstract

This chapter provides an analysis of the potential links between the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) mass incarceration and re-education of Uyghurs with a growing literature on state predation through organ harvesting. It attempts to theorize the political logic of organ harvesting from vulnerable, primarily prison, populations in China, and then reviews the evidence that Uyghur Muslims are now victims of this activity. The chapter adopts a biopolitical approach as the most effective lens through which to see the Chinese state’s relationship to the bodies of its subjects as this theoretical approach reveals the internal logic of coercive organ procurement in the context of large-scale political violence and the hyper-marketization of contemporary China. The chapter argues that organ harvesting can be located firmly within two dominant logics and stages of the CCP’s ruling legacy: revolutionary governance and what some scholars have termed ‘gangster capitalism’. Through these two dominant logics the state has turned its subjects into commodities and given the state’s adoption of an instrumental logic towards Uyghur bodies, whether by expropriation of the migrant labour force, settler colonialism, and forced intermarriages, it is plausible that Uyghur organs may now too have become commodities. The chapter concludes that there is thus an exploitative biopolitical logic that sustains organ harvesting that resonates with Karl Marx’s de-fetishizing critique of capitalism – i.e. that while it is the apparently natural character of the commodity form that obscures the forces that created it, it seems that it is the unnatural character of organ harvesting that conceals its cold rationality.

Abstract

This chapter provides an analysis of the potential links between the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) mass incarceration and re-education of Uyghurs with a growing literature on state predation through organ harvesting. It attempts to theorize the political logic of organ harvesting from vulnerable, primarily prison, populations in China, and then reviews the evidence that Uyghur Muslims are now victims of this activity. The chapter adopts a biopolitical approach as the most effective lens through which to see the Chinese state’s relationship to the bodies of its subjects as this theoretical approach reveals the internal logic of coercive organ procurement in the context of large-scale political violence and the hyper-marketization of contemporary China. The chapter argues that organ harvesting can be located firmly within two dominant logics and stages of the CCP’s ruling legacy: revolutionary governance and what some scholars have termed ‘gangster capitalism’. Through these two dominant logics the state has turned its subjects into commodities and given the state’s adoption of an instrumental logic towards Uyghur bodies, whether by expropriation of the migrant labour force, settler colonialism, and forced intermarriages, it is plausible that Uyghur organs may now too have become commodities. The chapter concludes that there is thus an exploitative biopolitical logic that sustains organ harvesting that resonates with Karl Marx’s de-fetishizing critique of capitalism – i.e. that while it is the apparently natural character of the commodity form that obscures the forces that created it, it seems that it is the unnatural character of organ harvesting that conceals its cold rationality.

Chapters in this book

  1. Front Matter i
  2. Dedication v
  3. Contents vii
  4. Figures and tables ix
  5. Contributors x
  6. Acknowledgements xv
  7. 1 Framing the Xinjiang emergency 1
  8. Part I: Context
  9. 2 Echoes from the past 35
  10. 3 The Kashgar Dangerous House Reform Programme 61
  11. 4 Settler colonialism in the name of counterterrorism 90
  12. Part II: Discourses and practices of repression
  13. 5 Pathology, inducement, and mass incarcerations of Xinjiang’s ‘targeted population’ 127
  14. 6 Two-faced 154
  15. 7 Corrective ‘re-education’ as (cultural) genocide 181
  16. 8 Predatory biopolitics 227
  17. Part III: Domestic and international implications
  18. 9 ‘Round-the-clock, three-dimensional control’ 275
  19. 10 The effect of Xinjiang’s virtual lockdown on the Uyghur diaspora 306
  20. 11 ‘Window of opportunity’ 327
  21. Index 355
The Xinjiang emergency
This chapter is in the book The Xinjiang emergency
https://doi.org/10.7765/9781526153128.00016

Chapters in this book

  1. Front Matter i
  2. Dedication v
  3. Contents vii
  4. Figures and tables ix
  5. Contributors x
  6. Acknowledgements xv
  7. 1 Framing the Xinjiang emergency 1
  8. Part I: Context
  9. 2 Echoes from the past 35
  10. 3 The Kashgar Dangerous House Reform Programme 61
  11. 4 Settler colonialism in the name of counterterrorism 90
  12. Part II: Discourses and practices of repression
  13. 5 Pathology, inducement, and mass incarcerations of Xinjiang’s ‘targeted population’ 127
  14. 6 Two-faced 154
  15. 7 Corrective ‘re-education’ as (cultural) genocide 181
  16. 8 Predatory biopolitics 227
  17. Part III: Domestic and international implications
  18. 9 ‘Round-the-clock, three-dimensional control’ 275
  19. 10 The effect of Xinjiang’s virtual lockdown on the Uyghur diaspora 306
  20. 11 ‘Window of opportunity’ 327
  21. Index 355
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