State territorialization throughshequcommunity centres: bureaucratic confusion in Xinjiang, China

The shequ community centres in Xinjiang, China, provided services, safety and employment to the community. Yet, their heavy-handed controls through administration and policing created fear and confusion. How did Uyghur citizens experience and navigate state bureaucratic power at the neighbourhood level in their everyday lives? How did banal state bureaucratic power manifest in the lives of urban residents, and how did they react? This paper draws on ethnographic fieldnotes and interview data collected over the course of 24 months between 2014 and 2017 in north-west China. In examining the politics of mundane and banal everyday state practices, it is found that state territorialization practices through the community centres shape daily life and social relations. Through encounters with community centres, ethnic minority Uyghur research participants experienced and perceived the state as irrational and arbitrary, on the one hand, and powerful and violent, on the other. Despite a rhetoric of safety and service, the fear and confusion of bureaucracy allowed for the limitation of citizen freedoms for ethnic minorities and the Uyghurs engaged in the process to navigate the system. This paper offers an example of the fragmentation of the state and structural violence of bureaucratic dispossession on a minority population in an illiberal context.