I've seen recently, the resurrection of questionable thirty year old scholarship out of the "think tank left". With Woke Global Times being the hubs that sent me down this rabbit hole. These people are obsessed with colonialism everywhere but in their own settler states.

An apparent feature of these think tank China watchers is the Xinjiang scholars' work centers around Xinjiang from Qing dynasty to present. Notable fixations are Qing unification and revolt against Qing to paint the PRC as an illegitimate sovereign and the inheritor of some kind of internal settler colonial project of Qing.

Like any imperialist analysis, multiethnic societies engaged in repression are called on to embrace pluralism and never accused of this internal colonialism or called to balkanize.

In other words, loosen up, Turkey -- you've won. With confidence gained from victory, treat ethnic diversity as a sign of strength. Emulate multicultural Western democracies, not Balkan tribal conquerors.

"Internal colonialism" as described in Gladney's Internal Colonialism and the Uyghur Nationality: Chinese Nationalism and its Subaltern Subjects is broadly the phenomena of a colonial core and periphery but within one nation state and the core and periphery are of different ethnic groups, forming a hierarchy.

Internal colonialism was found to be applicable to South Africa, Thailand, Sudan, Wales, Brittany, Quebec, Austria-Hungary, Scotland, Bangladesh, Cherokee Native Americans, Chicanos in America, the Palestinians in Israel...

This framework is just settler-colonialism but colonized people are your neighbors or within your borders if you're a former colony. It claims to extend the analysis of Lenin's The Development of Capitalism in Russia and Gramsci's Southern Question of the urban-rural divide between an ethnic minority peasantry and urban workers of a different ethnicity.

A brief context on the analysis that is claimed to bolster this theory. Gramsci's Southern Question referenced by Gladney describes the complex relationship between urban workers and rural peasants. It's important to keep in mind that most production is not of end products but of means of production. Urban workers are producing tools. The most modern and efficient of which are purchased by the rural petty bourgeois who can afford to do so. Their efficiency is the gradual consolidation and indenturing of the rural peasantry. This contradiction is to be ameliorated by the communists by turning the productive forces of the cities towards the peasantry. Land reform must be accompanied by the import of tools, infrastructure, and farming implements. They should also actively combat the chauvinism of urban, industrial workers towards the rural peasantry.

Of note is the concepts purported to be extended are describing a phenomena in prerevolutionary capitalist societies. But that hasn't stopped think tank scholar Gladney from attempting to apply this framework to socialist societies.

It is quite ironic that while the People's Republic was founded on an "anti-imperial nationalism" (Friedman 1994), in the current post-colonial world, at a time when most nations are losing territory rather than recovering them, China is busily making good its claims on Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the Spratleys. In spite of Beijing's claims to the contrary, the removal of the British colonial administration from Hong Kong in 1997 does certainly not mean its liberation. There is something that rings true when one states that Tibet is literally a colony of China, despite any definitional problems with the theory of internal colonialism.

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though the theory was later criticized and generally abandoned for being too general and too widely applicable, it was never applied to China

FPRI doesn't appear to be a bastion of great scholarship.

Sautman gives a fair rebuttal to these claims of superficial similarity to prerevolutionary capitalist Russia and literal settler colonies. Highlighting that the PRC has turned its productive forces outward towards the periphery. They do however note that there are some improvements to be made chiefly in rural and western development broadly in China as well as boosting educational attainment of minorities (the education is free and freely available but rural poverty and remoteness are barriers to access) as well as combatting Han chauvinism. Coincidently, combatting this seems to trigger Western press).

Seventeen years later we have this assessment from the UN. As China has developed, the gains have been shared with ethnic minorities. China has eliminated absolute poverty. They are respectfully advancing bilingual education to reduce inequity barriers among their non-Mandarin speaking population. They have and continue to meet head on, the shortcomings identified by Sautman in 2000.