And the violence of settler colonialism is ongoing.

While outside China, among activists, politicians and academics, there is a distinct recognition of Xinjiang and Tibet as sites of conflict and violence, apologists for Chinese colonization argue that there is no ‘Xinjiang problem’ nor any ‘Tibet question’. Thus, the Chinese government insists that the ‘so-called “Tibet issue” is by no means an ethnic, religious and human rights issue; rather, it is the Western anti-China forces’ attempt to restrain, split, and demonize China’ (Information Office 2009a: 44–45). Similarly, they blame the World Uyghur Congress or the East Turkestan Islamic Movement for all the problems in Xinjiang. Yet Chinese state paranoia around internal dissent from the colonizing discourse and practice is high, and reflects a deep insecurity within the Chinese nationstate project (Topgyal 2016). As Callahan (2004, 209) argues, ‘Fragmentation constitutes one of the few political crimes left in China; the worst epithet is not capitalist or counterrevolutionary, but splittist.’ This fear of separatism is deployed by the state to justify securitization of life and militarization of place in Xinjiang and Tibet. Alleged (and in recent years sometimes real) acts of extremism, separatism and terrorism by Uyghurs and Tibetans are evoked as existential threats to the stability of the rising China. While it is understandable for the colonizers to seek to legitimize their territorial, political, social and religious control by using the tropes of paternalism and progress, as scholars of China and its occupied peoples, it is important for us to not be complicit. Rather than seeing colonialism as a thing of the European past, we should identify its present-day avatars and critique it. The articulation of the concept of coloniality of power offers the prospect of developing a global paradigm of the colonial relationship that will provide a deeper theoretical understanding of the powerful resistance that continues to emerge in subaltern communities and nations around the world. (Allen 2005, 10) While Uyghurs and Tibetans continue to resist as well as to accommodate to the colonial system, as scholars we have our own positionalities to consider. The question for scholars studying minoritized ethno-national peoples in general, and Uyghurs and Tibetans in particular, is our complicity, or not, with the Chinese nation-state’s political project of depoliticizing ethno-national identities to serve the colonial purpose of paternalistic and militarized control. If we question the claims of ethno-national peoples to their separate identities on the grounds that these are imaginary or imagined (e.g. Sautman 2000, 2006a), do we also ask the same questions of the Chinese nationalist project? If we argue that Uyghur or Tibetan nationalism is imagined but then take for granted Chinese sovereign claims over Tibet or Xinjiang that legitimize the use of dehumanization, securitization, militarization and violence over individual and collective Uyghurs and Tibetans, we are not neutral but siding with the powerful. The framework of colonialism thus remains useful and even vital to understand and critique present day practices.