Theorizing Social Reproduction through China’s Internally Colonized Uyghur Community: The Need to Reconcile Exploitation and Oppression

In this paper, we explore social reproduction (SR) as a framework that illuminates the gendered division of labor, including who performs which types of labor and what counts as “real” labor, from a concrete location, that of women Uyghurs in China. SR was born of Marxist and socialist feminist thinking that sought to develop what was historically undertheorized within the larger traditions of Marxism and socialism, the role of unpaid daily labor under capitalism that sustains life. Marxist and socialist feminists argued for the importance of SR to productive economies which has been taken up by international relations (IR) feminists working in international political economy (IPE). From a feminist IPE perspective, connections among the household, local, national and international economies lead to porous boundaries, as well as between productive and reproductive work. We examine one aspect of SR, a household’s unpaid care and domestic work. While some feminist IPE works examine the global South, much of the SR literature has remained focused on the global North, especially studies examining unpaid caring and domestic labor. We ask: What can women Uyghurs’ social reproduction struggles tell us about SR? Specifically, we are interested in the embedded exploitation and oppression experienced by women Uyghurs as they carry out social reproductive labor. Exploitation is associated with class while oppression is linked with gender, race and ethnicity. SR is well positioned to illuminate both exploitation and oppression given that social reproductive labor is part of capitalist exploitation as well as feminized and largely performed by women globally. We view China’s Uyghur community as an exemplar of internal colonialism (colonization that takes place within the state) propagated by China’s Communist Party (CCP) through economic “development” and manipulation of national security measures to (minimally) enforce assimilation of Uyghurs to Han social practices. Internal colonialism expands world system and dependency theory inside the state as the exploitation of peripheral groups by the core. Internal colonialism allows us to highlight ongoing economic exploitation in the Uyghur homeland that the CCP justifies as bringing development to “backward” people. As a racialized periphery group, Uyghurs struggle with social reproduction under mass enforced labor, the extraction of resources and the removal of Uyghurs off the land in favor of Han migrants. We think that starting with China’s Uyghurs’ internal colonization by the CCP can construct ways of integrating exploitation and oppression embedded in SR by bringing in racial capitalism and intersectional feminism. By starting in the global South in a case of internal colonialism we seek to contribute to a broader debate that feminist IPE should pay closer attention to, that of the (in)compatibility of exploitation and oppression. This matters theoretically to IPE and holds critical implications for addressing intertwining violences.