1. What is a minority?

Despite the colonial legacy of the last empire, the Chinese nationalists’ efforts to erase the “non-conforming” identities of so-called “barbarian” peoples, and the military invasion of the Republic of East Turkestan in 1949, the People’s Republic of China managed to position itself as a “victim of Western imperialism” and thereby sidestep the issue of decolonizing Uyghur, Tibetan, and Mongolian territories.Footnote ² The main peoples of these colonized regions are thus portrayed—even by scholars—as “Chinese minorities.”

Colonialism implies minoritization. The import of the concept of minorities from the European local context—where it first emerged—and from the North American reality—where it gained transnational momentum—requires a reconceptualization in light of recent Chinese history. So what is a minority?

The main characteristics of a minority are demographic (numerical inferiority) and social (subordination). The demographic criterion is insufficient, since women make up the numerical majority in most countries around the world, yet rarely enjoy equal status with men. The same applies to Black people who, despite being the majority in certain countries, still occupy a subordinate position.

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari conceive of the minority as emerging from a process of minorization, itself understood as divergence from a norm.Footnote ³ The majority and the minority are not defined by demographics, but rather by institutional power. The majority is composed of individuals whose choices are protected and relayed by institutions, namely habits, customs, and laws. These institutions form a dominant and homogeneous system that protects a small number of individuals—what Deleuze and Guattari call a segment. Society is therefore segmented according to a series of norms to which its members relate.

Being part of the majority means having the right to decide—a right shared among its members and exercised over others to minoritize them, to hinder their becoming, their fluidity, and to reduce their existence to their divergence from the norm—in short, to define them from the outside. This minoritization limits their capacity to act and portrays them as needing inclusion and integration, implying they must resemble the majority. Forced assimilation and the civilizing mission are the colonizers’ attempts to expand the boundaries of the majority and absorb members of those minoritized peoples deemed sufficiently distanced from their original culture and identity. Among minoritized groups, those who resist assimilation are labeled as “enemies” or “deviants.”

The use of the term “minority” is never neutral, as it involves assigning a particular social and political status to a group without its consent. This minoritization of colonized peoples constitutes an additional form of violence, especially toward their diasporas, who struggle both for recognition of their status as a colonized nation and for their right to self-determination—to decide their own fate.

2. Moving beyond neo-orientalism

Even scholars who call for a critique of the cultural imperialism that spreads and imposes the concept of minority—including Bourdieu and Wacquant—approach colonialism through a Eurocentric lens.Footnote ⁴ They view imperialism and colonialism as exclusively Western phenomena and cannot conceive of their existence elsewhere, particularly in Asia. This Eurocentrism, especially on the far left, leads them to reject anything supported by the United States. This blindly anti-American and anti-Western ideology, which I call “neo-Orientalist,” entails a defense of imperialism and colonialism by non-Western states and shows contempt for the peoples under their rule. It is perhaps one of the few ideologies shared by decolonial thinkers, the Western far right, and anti-Western voices from the Global South—all united in minoritizing peoples colonized by non-Western imperialism, especially Chinese. It is neo-Orientalist because it reproduces the same Orientalist gaze toward peoples still colonized by the “wrong” colonizers.

The People’s Republic of China, despite its colonial role in Tibet, Inner Mongolia, and East Turkestan, escapes decolonial critique by positioning itself as a victim of Western imperialism. The concept of “minority,” imported from a Euro-American context, is used to subordinate colonized peoples, deprive them of their right to self-determination, and assimilate them into a dominant norm. Colonized nations who refuse submission through minoritization are labeled as “enemies,” or—since the launch of the United States’ Global War on Terror in 2001—as “terrorists.”

3. The “scientific discourse” and consequences of the neo-orientalism

The consequences of labeling colonized peoples as “minorities” are devastating for the Uyghurs. Legal protections for minority groups defined by religion, ethnicity, or language have historically followed a liberal model of non-intervention, emphasizing civil and political rights to avoid the independence demands from the already formed nation-states. Yet as mounting evidence of a genocidal process has emerged in recent years, China continues its crimes with a sense of hyperpower and total impunity, dismissing all criticism under the pretext of “internal affairs.” Minoritization grants a totalitarian state the power of life and death over a people, making external intervention virtually impossible.

The resistance of the oppressed often leads to reprisals and counterinsurgency measures that can be genocidal. This resistance—by victims against dominant or colonial powers—is consistently portrayed as criminal, as a threat to national security. In the case of the Uyghurs, within the global context of the War on Terror, Uyghur resistance—whether real or imagined—is framed as terrorism. It is nearly impossible to find a news article or media report in the West about Chinese repression of the Uyghurs that does not mention the Chinese narrative of terrorist threat. This is the power of the Orientalist “regime of truth,” in which the colonizer claims to know the natives better than they know themselves and controls their discourse.Footnote ⁵ The colonizer is supported in this by knowledge authorities and institutions abroad, who adopt its vocabulary, narratives, and norms. Indeed, the colonizer holds the “scientific knowledge,” while the colonized cannot speak for themselves—and when they do, their voice is stripped of value and legitimacy.

This justification of colonial violence in public discourse is a form of “normative inversion.”Footnote ⁶ Today, it is more subtle and disguised, with Uyghurs officially labeled as both a “minority” and a “terrorist threat.” Normative inversion serves as the foundation for colonial powers’ claims to moral authority and exclusive political competence, despite their evident barbarity. Its aim is to deny the political legitimacy of challenges posed by the colonized—by criminalizing their struggles and denying their political agency and moral standing on racial grounds. As with Orientalism, intellectual and academic productions, under the guise of “scientific discourse,” play a crucial role in sustaining normative inversion, criminalizing resistance, and denying the political legitimacy of the colonized. In this way, scientific knowledge becomes a tool of domination, where the voices of the colonized are disqualified, rendered invisible, or ignored in service of a colonial narrative.

It is urgent to move beyond the Eurocentric lens in anti-colonial struggles and to recognize peoples colonized by non-Western powers. The Uyghurs, as the indigenous people of East Turkestan who have been subjected to settler colonialism by the People’s Republic of China since 1949, which has eliminated their indigenous sovereignty, have the right to live freely, without colonial tutelage. Scholars, journalists, and policymakers must stop reproducing colonial vocabularies and begin listening to the voices of the colonized. Decolonization requires a critical reassessment of the categories imposed by the colonial gaze and the ideologies that sustain them.