China’s Hanification of Xinjiang is Failing
On Saturday, March
1, more than 10 assailants slashed scores of people with knives at the Kunming
train station in Yunnan province in southern China in what state media said Sunday
was a terrorist assault by ethnic Uyghur (also spelled as Uighur) separatists from the far west. Twenty-nine slash victims and four
attackers were killed and 143 people wounded.
Most attacks blamed
on Uyghur (a Muslim, Turkic-speaking people) separatists take place in China’s oil-rich and ethnically sensitive far-western
Chinese province of Xinjiang (formerly known as East
Turkestan), where clashes between ethnic Uyghurs and members of China's ethnic
Han majority are frequent. But Saturday's assault happened more than 1,000 kilometers
to the southeast in Yunnan, which has not had a history of such unrest.
In July 2009, Xinjiang experienced violence
between Uyghurs and Han Chinese (China’s ethno-national majority). Media
reported that more than 100 people were killed and 800 injured from the
disturbance which broke out in the provincial capital, Urumqi. The disturbances
occurred after a year of rising tensions between the dominant Han Chinese
authorities and the Uyghur ethnic minority - the historical ethnic majority in
Xinjiang - who say they have been socially and economically marginalized by
Beijing's policies that introduce ‘domestication’ – or more properly
Hanification (Sinicization) – of the region.
On August 4, 2008, four days before the start of
the Beijing Olympics, two ethnic Uyghurs drove a stolen dump truck into a group
of some 70 Chinese border police – accused of brutally repressing the
indigenous people – in the town of Kashi in Xinjiang, killing at least 16 of
the officers. The attackers carried knives and home-made explosive devices.[1]
In recent months,
more than 100 Uyghurs have been shot and killed by armed police officers or
soldiers. Exile groups attribute much of the bloodshed to security forces who
they say have been given a green light to use excessive force, including
against unarmed protesters.[2]
The violence in
Kunming came at a sensitive time as political leaders in Beijing prepared for
Wednesday's opening of the annual legislature where the government of President
Xi Jinping will deliver its first one-year work report.
Learning the truth
about such incidents is difficult. Except for the government version of events,
the subject is off limits to the domestic news media. Foreign journalists
cannot freely report in the region.
The Saturday’s
violence, if it is truly done by Uyghur separatists, show that they could be
changing tactics and aiming to strike at soft targets elsewhere in China. The
use of rudimentary weaponry also shows that such attacks do not appear linked
to any global terrorist network.
Ethnic riots do not occur in vacuum. So the questions are what is fueling the separatist
movement in Xinjiang, a region which until recently had appeared like a black
hole in the Asian landmass? Why have some young Uyghurs, a minority group comprising
roughly half the population of Xinjiang province, lost trust in the state and
its institutions?[3] What causes have contributed to the
anti-Chinese campaign - both violent and non-violent – by young Uyghurs? Has the Uyghur unrest anything to do with
radicalization along religious line, the al-Qaeda variety that we have noticed
in some parts of the Muslim world in the post-9/11 era?
To understand the reason, the history of the
region can be our starting point. Just as Soviet Union had been formed from the
heterogeneous territories of the Russian Czarist Empire, what we call People’s
Republic of China (PRC) today is similarly inherited lands conquered by the
Manchu Qing dynasty before its collapse in 1911. Only in the 1760s the Qing
generals were able to conquer East Turkestan incorporating it as
Xinjiang (meaning: New Dominion), reflecting the imperial perspective; but
their rule was repeatedly broken. They lost the region to Ya’qub Beg (Bek) in
the 19th century. General Zou’s re-conquest did not survive the
collapse of the imperial court at the beginning of the 20th century, and full
control passed on to the Chinese only in 1949.
Despite a harsh landscape and climate, “Xinjiang
has a rich past: sand-buried cities, painted cave shrines, rare creatures, and
wonderfully preserved mummies of European appearance. Their descendants, the Uyghurs,
still farm the tranquil oases that ring the dreaded Taklamakan, the world's
second largest sand desert, and the Kazakh and Kirghiz herdsmen still roam the
mountains,” writes Christian Tyler.[4]
The PRC calls it Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous
Region (XUAR) because of its Uyghur population. Mao tried to sell the
Marxist-Leninist thought to the ethnic problem. Not only did the CCP (Chinese
Communist Party) fail but Mao’s social engineering of the Turkis (Uyghurs) was
highly destructive and led to the widespread discrimination and segregation
prevalent today. The
Communists developed it as a penal colony, as a nuclear testing ground and
dumping ground for radioactive wastes (that is responsible for unusually high
birth defects and mortality rate amongst the inhabitants)[5]
and as a buffer against invasion, and as a supplier of raw materials and living
space for an overpopulated country.
Determined to end the push and pull of
centuries, Mao’s successors have resorted to Sinicization (i.e., Hanification)
of the region.[6]
They have changed the demography of the region by settling Han Chinese from
other parts. They have curtailed the region’s millennium-plus-years old rich
Muslim culture and are practicing widespread religious repression against the
ethnic Uyghurs. They have conducted forced abortion on Uyghur women. They have
closed down Qur’anic and Uyghur language schools to cut down their Islamic and
cultural ties with other Muslims. Because of the Mandarin-based educational
policy of the state, the Uyghurs can’t pass and find jobs in their own land. The
party-state has institutionalized discrimination based on Uyghur’s distinct
religion, habitus, physiognomy, language culture and socioeconomic status. In
so doing, they have only widened the gap between the settlers and the
indigenous inhabitants.
Consequently, what the PRC sees as its property,
the Uyghurs regard as theft by an alien occupier. In its revisionist
attempt, the Chinese government has tried to falsify history and portray the
Uyghurs as part of the great family of the Chinese nations and asserts that
Xinjiang has been an integral part of Chinese national territory since the
ancient times. Uyghurs reject such a mischaracterization of both their people
and their homeland maintaining that they are a distinct ethnic group with its distinct
history, geography, language, culture and tradition. They have neither accepted
Chinese occupation nor their incorporation into the Chinese nation-state.
Uyghurs have no political representation in the
PRC government. Top CCP party officials at all levels in Xinjiang have been
overwhelmingly Han Chinese. The text books present a very slanted history of
the region. Recorded expressions of dissent, criticism or discontent are
thwarted. All mass media, including electronic, are censored. Every poem, song,
short story, essay and novel must pass through a battery of censors before being
published, which can be banned later if deemed ‘harmful’ to the state. Uyghur
intellectuals face constant surveillance and imprisonment. On January 15 of
this year Professor Ilham Tohti, a Uyghur scholar who has taught at Beijing’s
Minzu University was taken away by police on unspecified charges. He was one of the few Chinese citizens willing to openly criticize the
government policies he said were alienating young Uyghurs: religious
restrictions, education policies that favor Mandarin over the Uyghur language
and economic development that disproportionately benefits newly arrived Han
migrants.
In 2009 Professor Tohti was held for around six weeks without charge during a
flare-up of violence in Xinjiang. Last year, he was barred from boarding a
plane in Beijing to accept a teaching position at Indiana University in an
episode that was criticized by the U.S. government and others.[7]
In the last few decades Beijing’s concerted Hanification
efforts (i.e., to Sinicize Xinjiang) have only planted unfathomed mistrust and widened
the animosity between the Uyghurs and the Han settlers. Tension has led to violence and
brutal reprisals.
The result is further
militarization of the Xinjiang region and establishment of aggressive global
network against the Uyghur separatists. In the mid-1990s, there were frequent security
searches and low-level operations named as
the “Strike Hard” campaigns by the Chinese security forces, aiming at
arresting known, suspected or potential violent separatists— a pattern that
would be repeated well into the next decade. Many of the Uyghurs were caught up
in these security campaigns. These operations did not make life easier for many
innocent Uyghurs, and instead radicalized them to vent their anger against the Han
Chinese settlers. Chinese intelligence agents are also suspected in the
mysterious death of many exiled Uyghurs.
In the post-9/11 period, the CCP leadership tried
to (1) associate the Uyghur separatist struggle for self-determination as
terrorism both to its Chinese people and global audience, and (2) pressure the
US to view the movement as an al-Qaeda linked terrorist organization in its
global war on terror. It was able to fool some but not all.
In his well-researched book - The Uyghurs:
Strangers in Their Own Land - Gardner Bovingdon has shown that Uyghur
resistance to Chinese rule is prompted by nationalism and not Islam. China’s Nation-building
experiment has succeeded in her core province but not in peripheral regions
that were annexed and had very little in common with China. Simply put: in
spite of decades of programming, China’s nation-building project has miserably failed
in China’s far west – Xinjiang and Tibet. As much as the Chinese government is
trying to construct its aggressive nation-building the Uyghurs and Tibetans are
trying to deconstruct that myth through their resistance movement and in so
doing raising new claims of nationhood of their peoples.
Uyghurs will not be satisfied with anything less
than a substantial expansion of autonomy in Xinjiang, which allows them to get
educated in their own language and find jobs that are meaningful to support
their families, and allows them a bigger share of the regional administration
and economy. Sadly, China’s leaders show no sign of compromise, and in fact, appear
to do just the opposite further marginalizing the Uyghurs in their own land in
every respect. This Chinese policy is suicidal and absurd.
The world recognizes that if the people of one
nation do not want to co-habit in the same polity because of widespread persecution,
repression and discrimination, then partition should not be automatically
neglected as a viable solution. This might be one way to manage the Uyghurs’ (who
are a nation by any definition) legitimate demands for political space. But
the road is still wide open for a political solution: either separation or
consociation. The latter can be a good
model for China, if the Chinese leadership has the wisdom, sincerity of intent
and purpose.
Xinjiang desperately needs inter-ethnic peace
because there has already been too much blood shedding. The longer the global
community keeps silent on the question of the Uyghurs without adopting any
measures to seek justice for them, the stronger the polarizations would happen
along ethnic and religious fault-lines, particularly among the poor Uyghurs –
who already find them relegated in all aspects, and the nastier may be the
consequences for global peace and regional security, because such a global
indifference and/or impotence may persuade some Uyghurs to further radicalize
along powerful Islamic symbols, further swelling the links, which have hitherto
been weak, with transnational Muslim radicals who are not afraid of death.
The Uyghurs currently lack military or
organizational resources that would facilitate their legitimate struggles for
self-determination. The Chinese control appears complete and has succeeded in
denying all those tools and resources to reaching the Uyghur separatists. They
are also trying to strip Uyghurs of rhetorical weapons. Such an all-out policy
to squelching dissidence completely may prove imprudent and inane in our time
when nationalistic feelings are proving to be important.
Only time would tell how long China’s coercion
policy will succeed to stem nationalistic feelings of the Uyghur people. If PRC
is serious about nation-building it must change its failed strategy, which
relies on strong arm tactics of coercion and not on integration where Uyghurs
and other nationalities feel equal and welcome in this multi-national,
-religious, -ethnic country that refuses to learn from the Soviet and Balkan
experience.
[Dr. Imtiyaz who teaches political science at
Temple University, Philadelphia, USA, also contributed to this article.]
[1] China:
Signs of a Looser Militancy in Xinjiang. http://www.stratfor.com/memberships/120989/analysis/china_signs_looser_militancy_xinjiang.
[accessed 11March 2010]
[3]
Uyghurs claim that they comprise still the majority of the population in
Xinjiang: http://www.uyghuramerican.org/categories/About-Uyghurs/
[accessed 12 December 2009] The Chinese government estimates that some 40% Han
Chinese, totaling nearly 7.5 million of a total population of 18 million, now
live in the province
[4] Christian Tyler, Wild West China: The Taming of
Xinjiang, Rutgers University Press, N.J., p. 268, http://books.google.com/books?id=bEzNwgtiVQ0C&pg=PA222&dq=Joanne+Smith+and+Gardner+Bovingdon&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=4#v=onepage&q&f=false
[6] Christian Tyler, op. cit.
[7] James T. Areddy, China Detains Scholar
Challenging Its Treatment of Uighurs, The Wall Street Journal, January 17,
2014, p. A9.
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