Their running the K against our aff not only makes structural racial conflict in China invisible but also masks a unique form of Chinese imperialism. Turns case.

Contrary to the Sinophobic as well as the Sinophilic reduction of China to Confucian values in Western media, the country is a site of plurality, and contestation with and within borderlands plays an important role in generating fear of instability (Duara 1995; Saxer and Zhang 2014; Smith Finley 2013). While categories such as ‘Han’ are themselves contested (Joniak-Lüthi 2015; Mullaney et al. 2012), and all ethno-nationalist identities are constructed, it would be problematic to assert that all voices matter equally in China. As Jacobs (2008, 586) points out, ‘Within this polyphony of voices, some speakers were capable of speaking louder than others.’ Some voices are allowed to be heard, while others are suppressed. For example, a Han Chinese Communist party leader pontificating in public about the effectiveness of state minority policy would be heard more loudly in China than an incarcerated Uyghur dissident intellectual. During the 2009 unrest in Xinjiang, protests by Uyghurs were met by a massive police crackdown, while protests by Han led only (and not immediately) to the removal of senior government officials. The representation of Uyghurs and Tibetans as separatists or terrorists has direct bearing on the life and livelihood of individual Uyghurs and Tibetans, while representation by Uyghurs and Tibetans of the Han majority as culturally threatening has very little significance for the majority. The security of the state is closely aligned to the security of the majority; Cliff (2012) highlights this in the case of Xinjiang. It is crucial to keep in mind these asymmetries while appreciating pluralities. The asymmetries disproportionately affect those considered minorities, for they carry the burden of being part of the nation while also being seen as subservient. As Gladney (2004, 367) highlights, the ‘rise in nationalist rhetoric in China may have the greatest implications for its internal colonial others, its subaltern subjects’. What is it about Xinjiang and Tibet that makes them sites of greater securitization and militarization? One conspicuous fact affecting Chinese national security is the territory– population disconnect. Han Chinese, the majority and the dominant ethno-national people, occupy only a portion of territory of the modern Chinese state; a significant part of the territory lies in the homelands of other ethno-national peoples, including Uyghurs, Tibetans and Mongols, many of whom contest the reduction of their status to being mere minorities within China. The disconnect between cartographic desires and the historical-cultural reality of Han Chinese nationalism was obvious from the very beginning of the twentieth century and has been a constant and significant source of insecurity for the Chinese state. The process of transformation of imperial China into a nation-state had already started in the Late Qing (Cosmo 1998; Leibold 2007; Perdue 2005) and continued with the Nationalists, Republicans and Communists. This explains Sun Yat Sen’s formulation of the five fingers of the Chinese nation – Han, Hui (the term then subsuming all Muslim peoples), Tibetan, Mongol and Manchu – and subsequent formulation of nationality policies by the Communists. Creating a unitary and stable single nation-state involved mixing the politics of recognition of nationalities for the purpose of managing difference, and the politics of securitization and repression for the purpose of denationalizing and depoliticizing difference (see Radnitz and Roberts 2013 for a discussion in the context of Xinjiang). Rather than accept the protests and demands of Uyghurs and Tibetans as political, the state invariably securitizes them as a threat to the stability of the nation’s body politic. While some have argued that this securitization generates more grievances (Holdstock 2015) and brings neither human security for the people affected nor stability for the state (Clarke 2010; Steele and Kuo 2007), there remains insufficient analysis of why China does what it does. Even when various explanations are provided, ‘the C word’ is missing, for the authors tend to take for granted the legitimacy of the Chinese nation-state. For instance, Purbrick (2017, 236) studies China’s ‘counter-terrorist efforts’ as part of ‘wider motivations relating to domestic stability, foreign policy, geo-political relations, economic growth, and nationalism’.