Forged souls, broken lives: China’s ‘soul-casting’ project in Xinjiang

The Chinese government’s ruthless crackdown on the Uyghur people has brought international attention to the widespread human rights abuses occurring in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region under the regime of Xi Jinping.

Less widely acknowledged is the extent to which Xi’s policies in Xinjiang reflect a broader project of social re-engineering – what Xi and Chinese Communist Party officials refer to as “soul-casting” (铸魂).

Casting the Nation

Xi demands Party officials zealously “forge” (铸牢) a consciousness of shared identity with the Zhonghua nation/race among China’s 125 million ethnic minorities.

The metaphor of forging or casting – illustrated by the ancient Chinese pictograph鑄 (zhù) – provides a powerful lens through which to understand how the fear of incompleteness is driving Party-state officials in China to solidify the souls of its citizens.

Just as the character depicts molten metal being poured into a sand mould, the CCP is melting down the heterogeneity of minority cultures and recasting them in Party-defined norms through forced assimilation and cultural erasure.

The task of “casting souls and educating people” (铸魂育人) is most onerous among the Uyghurs as they are believed to be furthest from the Han normative centre and subjected to the corrupting influences of Arab and Islamic cultures.

Xi has repeatedly spoken about the need for a “soul engineering...

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