Amnesty fears more Xinjiang executions
By Simon Lauder for PM
The recent execution of nine people over their role in violent ethnic clashes in north-west China in July has raised concerns for hundreds of others who were detained after the riots.
The executions were expected but Amnesty International says there was more secrecy surrounding them than usual.
Little detail was provided when the executions were announced yesterday by the state-owned China News Service.
It was reported that the men were convicted of violent crimes including arson and murder.
Violence in the provincial capital Urumqi erupted in July when protests by Uighurs and retaliatory attacks by Han Chinese led to about 200 deaths on the official count.
Dr Michael Clarke from Griffith University has studied separatist movements in China and says most of those executed were Uighurs while one was Han Chinese.
"Those charges of being convicted of arson and so forth, they're fairly ambiguous if you look at the Chinese criminal law," he said.
"It suggests a fairly political approach to dealing with what happened in July.
"It's interesting that some Chinese have been caught up in this, given that there was a wave of retaliatory violence by Han Chinese in the days that followed the unrest.
"That suggests the Chinese are at least attempting to appear to be even handed in their crackdown."
'Strike hard' campaign
The July clashes were sparked by the deaths of two Uighur factory workers but was underpinned by tensions over the distribution of wealth and labour in the resource-rich Xinjiang province.
The executions are just one element of a crackdown designed to prevent a repeat of the clashes.
University of Melbourne postgraduate student Tyler Harlan, who has travelled to Xinjiang a number of times, says the province is now the target of what's known as a "strike hard" campaign.
"I think that we will see perhaps not as much tension but a lot of Government involvement and perhaps raids in certain areas on certain groups," Mr Harlan said.
"[The campaign's] words mean a particular type of crackdown on religious extremism, on terrorism, on splitism, which are words that the provincial and central government have used to crack down on particular groups.
"For instance, they sometimes to go into mosques and close mosques at certain stages to limit groups that can organise."
The executions come just days ahead of the first trip to China by US President Barack Obama.
The White House has reacted to the news by urging China to ensure the legal rights of citizens are respected in accordance with international standards.
Closed process
Amnesty International's Asia-Pacific deputy director, Roseann Rife, says the executions and the trials that led to them have taken place in secrecy.
"We got a notice on October 30 that an appeal had been approved and the process then should have gone to the Supreme Court for a final review," she said.
"And it seems that in less than 10 days the review and the executions were both carried out. That is faster than usual."
Ms Rife says Amnesty is particularly concerned about reports that the trials were not open.
"Families were not notified. In fact we received reports that authorities told human rights lawyers in Beijing not to take up cases of anyone involved with the unrest in the Xinjiang Uighur autonomous region in July," he said.
"So we have serious concerns that these trials were fair and that they were not transparent and didn't meet international standards."
The executions are the first to take place over July's ethnic violence but Ms Rife says they are unlikely to be the last.
"The official numbers have varied but it could be up to several hundred people who still could remain in detention for activities surrounding this unrest," she said.
"And we're concerned that this may only be the beginning of the executions."
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/11/11/2739034.htm?section=world
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Sunday, September 20, 2009
Multi-faith Forum Focuses On Human Rights
Multi-faith Forum Focuses On Human Rights
By Cindy Chan
Epoch Times StaffSep 20, 2009 Facebook Digg del.icio.us StumbleUpon | |
Related articles: Canada > National
ONE FREE WORLD: Rev. Majed El Shafie, founder and president of One Free World International, speaks at the multi-faith forum on human rights held at Congregation Machzikei Hadas in Ottawa on Sept. 10. (Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times)
OTTAWA—A multi-faith expert forum is traveling across the country to call attention to human rights concerns facing various faith-based communities in Canada and abroad.
Co-organized by One Free World International (OFWI) and B’nai Brith Canada, the forum was held in Montreal, Ottawa, and Toronto last week and will take place in Vancouver on Sept. 24.
The idea took shape when several leaders from different faiths sat down together a few months ago and decided to begin coalition building to help each other’s communities that are facing persecution.
Among them were Rev. Majed El Shafie, president of OFWI, a Toronto-based human rights group that works for the rights of religious minorities worldwide, and Dr. Frank Dimant, Executive Vice President of B’nai Brith Canada, a national body that serves Jewish communities across the country.
Speaking at the Ottawa forum at Congregation Machzikei Hadas on Sept. 10, Rev. El Shafie told how OFWI came into being.
A Muslim from Egypt who converted to Christianity while in law school, Rev. El Shafie was persecuted and severely tortured after building an underground congregation and appealing for equal rights for Christians in the late 1990s.
He fled to Israel to escape execution and spent over a year in jail while Amnesty International and the United Nations investigated and intervened on his behalf. He eventually came to Canada, where he started OFWI.
UYGHURS FACING PERSECUTION: Mehmet Tohti, founder and past-president of the Uyghur Canadian Association, speaking on the Chinese communist regime's persecution against the Muslim Uyghur people in Xinjiang, China, formerly the Uyghurs' independent stat (Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times)
“When I came to Canada, my perspective was, just defend my own community—the Christian Egyptians. Later, I grew up and I thought, ‘I need to defend every Christian around the world,’” Rev. El Shafie explained.
“But later on, one day at three o’clock in the morning, I woke up and asked myself, ‘If somebody was crossing the street in front of me, and a car came and hit him, would I ask him first about his religion, or would I call 911 anyway?’
“This was when I started to defend every community and everybody that I can help and support.”
Echoing this sentiment, Mr. Dimant told the audience that human rights is an issue “not only for the Jewish community, but we have others who are suffering. . . . We want to bring their plight to the attention of our community.”
Other forum speakers included Li Xun, president of Falun Dafa Association of Canada; MP Pierre Poilievre, parliamentary secretary to Prime Minister Stephen Harper; Mehmet Tohti, founder of the Uyghur Canadian Association; and Iranian-Canadian human rights advocate Farnaz Farrokhi.
Slaves in Their Homeland
Mr. Tohti belongs to the Muslim Uyghur community in the Xinjiang region in northwest China, formerly the independent state of East Turkestan before the communist invasion in 1949.
He said the Uyghurs have become an ethnic minority who are “slaves” today in their homeland, a result of communist repression and large influxes of Han Chinese under the regime’s policy of assimilating his people.
All forms of telecommunication have been shut down since early July, when the human rights protests and violent suppression that occurred in the Xinjiang capital of Urumqi captured the world’s attention, Mr. Tohti said.
But “the bad news is coming,” as he has just received news that one of his younger brothers was in prison.
Illicit Organ Trade
Since the communist party took control of China in 1949, it has waged brutal campaigns against one group after another, Mr. Li said.
Introduced to the public in 1992, Falun Gong, also called Falun Dafa, had 70 to 100 million followers by 1999 when the regime launched its persecution.
MULTI-FAITH FORUM SPEAKERS: Four of the six speakers at the multi-faith forum on human rights in Ottawa on Sept. 10. (L-R) Rev. Majed El Shafie of One Free World International, Dr. Frank Dimant of B�nai Brith Canada, Li Xun of Falun Dafa Association of (Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times)
The regime orchestrates massive hate propaganda throughout China and abroad to vilify Falun Gong, a spiritual discipline that teaches “Truthfulness, Compassion, Forbearance,” Mr. Li said.
Following a 2005 China mission, U.N. Special Rapporteur on torture Manfred Nowak reported that two-thirds of the torture cases brought to his attention were Falun Gong.
Mr. Li noted that former cabinet minister David Kilgour and Winnipeg-based international human rights lawyer David Matas, legal counsel for B’nai Brith, conducted an investigation into the persecution in 2006-2007.
Their report, “Bloody Harvest,” detailed substantive evidence and concluded that the Chinese regime has been conducting large-scale organ harvesting from Falun Gong prisoners for an illicit organ trade.
“The Chinese government has yet to come clean and be transparent” after two U.N. requests for a satisfactory response, Mr. Nowak told The Epoch Times last month.
Chinese lawyers are another group suffering persecution. Gao Zhisheng, a Christian attorney and Nobel Peace Prize nominee, suffered extensive torture in 2007 after writing three open letters urging an end to the persecution of Falun Gong. Taken into custody again in February, his current whereabouts are unknown.
Connecting Aid to Human Rights
Rev. El Shafie said last year more than 165,000 Christians were killed because of their faith—about 80 percent in Muslim countries; 20 percent in communist countries like China, North Korea, and Cuba; and some in India.
He has travelled widely to conduct fact-finding missions and help those being persecuted, particularly in Asia and the Middle East.
Recently returned from Pakistan, he spoke about that country’s blasphemy law, which carries the death penalty for speaking against Islam, the Koran, or Muhammad. It is also a discriminatory law that has been used to intimidate and attack minorities including Hindus and Christians.
Noting other religious persecution in places like Egypt, Iraq, and China, Rev. El Shafie called on Canada to stop supporting countries that abuse people’s rights.
“Our aid to these countries needs to be connected to the improvement of their human rights,” he said.
Iran Nuclear Threat
Mr. Dimant said the Jewish people are facing a “very frightening” situation today.
“In 1932 and 1937, Hitler was not talking publicly about genocide and the Holocaust. Yet today, from reports in Iran, they are actually openly talking about a nuclear warhead being built to kill six million Jews. There is no attempt to disguise it.”
COMBATING ANTI-SEMITISM: M.P. Pierre Poilievre spoke at the multi-faith human rights forum in Ottawa about Canada's efforts to combat anti-Semitism. (Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times)
He also spoke of systemic discrimination against Israel and Jews in many parts of the world.
Mr. Poilievre highlighted Canada’s leadership in the fight against anti-Semitism.
Canada was the first country to withdraw from the Durban II conference in Geneva in April, a U.N. event intended to review progress toward the goals set in 2001 at Durban I to fight racism.
In 2008 Canada announced it would not participate because the “expression of intolerance and anti-Semitism” during Durban I was carrying over into preparations for Durban II.
The U.S., Netherlands, Germany, Australia, Israel, and other countries followed Canada’s lead.
Indeed, at Durban II, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad “poured verbal acid all over Israel and the U.S. and Europe,” said Mr. Poilievre.
Ms. Farrokhi tcalked about the persecution of Christians, Bahai’s, Jews, and other religious minorities in Iran.
With Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, “no longer can the Iranian government hide from the international community,” she said, pointing to the role social networking tools played in communicating with the world about the mass protests and suppression following the disputed election results in June that returned Ahmadinejad to power.
Ms. Farrokhi urged the audience to sign the World Jewish Congress online petition to boycott Ahmadinejad’s speech at the U.N. General Assembly in New York later this month.
China's Backing of Rogue States
When talking about rockets launched by Hamas into Israel, weapons proliferation in Iran, genocide in Sudan, and U.N. resolutions blocked by Muslim countries, Mr. Tohti emphasized that “it is the Chinese government mostly supplying financial and military aid” to those countries and groups.
“It’s important for all of us to stand up against the Chinese government’s ongoing persecutions, not only Falun Gong practitioners, Tibetans, and Uyghurs, [but] its support of terrorist groups in the Middle East,” he said.
The next multi-faith forum on human rights will take place in Vancouver on Thursday, Sept. 24, 7 p.m., at GT Church, 3456 Fraser St. The event is free.
Friday, July 31, 2009
Brutal crackdown in Xinjiang
Brutal crackdown in Xinjiang
July 25, 2009
The Rafto Foundation strongly condemns the violent suppression of recent demonstrations in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, China, and expresses its strong concern for the fate of those who have fallen victim to the ensuing mass arrests.
The Rafto Foundation strongly urges Norwegian authorities and the international society to put stronger pressure on Chinese authorities to ensure that those arrested will receive fair treatment. There is a strong reason to fear that the arrested face mass executions, and the international society must demand from Chinese authorities that they abide by international human rights.
Brutal crackdown
On 5 July 2009 in Urumqi a peaceful protest against the authorities’ handling of the recent killings of Uyghur workers in a factory in Shaoguan was met with brute force by Chinese police. While it is impossible to obtain accurate numbers of killed and arrested, the Rafto Foundation have a strong reason to believe that the number of detainees is far higher than the 1 434 people mentioned by Urumqi Communist Party secretary, Li Zhi, on 7 July. International media report of more than 4 000 Uyghurs detained in overfilled makeshift prisons.
Ethnic tension
The Rafto Foundation expresses its concern for the heightened level of ethnic tension between Uyghurs and Han Chinese, and deplores all injuries and deaths in this conflict, irrespective of ethnicity.
While the unrest has been portrayed by Chinese official media as consisting of Uyghur provocateurs and Han Chinese victims, there is a strong reason for believing that only a fraction of the number of Uyghur victims has been reported. Reports from Xinjiang tell of frightened Uyghurs fleeing their homes in fear of the general lynching sentiment spreading in the cities, fuelled by the nationalistically charged reporting of the unrest in Chinese official media. However, the most urgent issue at this point is the arrested citizens’ imminent risk of express trials with no respect for due process, and the strong likelihood of mass executions.
No fair trial
Urumqi’s Communist Party secretary, Li Zhi’s statement on 8 July that "brutal criminals will be sentenced to death" raises strong concerns for swift executions with no fair trial for the unknown numbers that were arrested in the aftermath of 5 July. In addition, reports of Chinese human rights lawyers receiving intimidations and strong warnings of taking on any cases related to the unrests in Xinjiang highlights the willingness of Chinese authorities to deprive the arrested of their right to free counsel and a due legal process.
The Rafto Foundation urges Norwegian authorities to issue stronger condemnations of the violent crackdowns, and to raise its strong concern by the apparent wish of the Chinese authorities to take swift action, regardless of their human rights commitments guaranteeing the right to fair trial.
Marginalised minorities
The Rafto Foundation has since awarding the 2004 Rafto Prize to the Uyghur leader Rebiya Kadeer, at the time still imprisoned in Xinjiang, voiced its strong concern for the increasing oppression and marginalisation of Uyghurs in China.
The recent events come as a grim déjà vu 12 years after similar peaceful Uyghur protests were brutally struck down in the Xinjiang city of Ghulja, a massacre which also was followed by mass arrests, and which still has seen no independent inquiry. Many of the arrested are still imprisoned. The violent 5 July crackdown adds to the list of brutal oppression of Uyghurs, and adds to the hopelessness felt by Uyghurs in Xinjiang as well as in exile.
Norwegian authorities must apply stronger pressure
The Rafto Foundation reiterates its urgent call for the Norwegian authorities to immediately raise their concerns for the rights of those arrested after the 5 July unrest.
The Rafto Foundation also urges the international community to apply more pressure on Chinese authorities with regards to the marginalisation and suppression of their minorities’ rights.
http://www.rafto.no/?page=20&news=131&PHPSESSID=9543901234dd824a81b2120c3a36be6b
July 25, 2009
The Rafto Foundation strongly condemns the violent suppression of recent demonstrations in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, China, and expresses its strong concern for the fate of those who have fallen victim to the ensuing mass arrests.
The Rafto Foundation strongly urges Norwegian authorities and the international society to put stronger pressure on Chinese authorities to ensure that those arrested will receive fair treatment. There is a strong reason to fear that the arrested face mass executions, and the international society must demand from Chinese authorities that they abide by international human rights.
Brutal crackdown
On 5 July 2009 in Urumqi a peaceful protest against the authorities’ handling of the recent killings of Uyghur workers in a factory in Shaoguan was met with brute force by Chinese police. While it is impossible to obtain accurate numbers of killed and arrested, the Rafto Foundation have a strong reason to believe that the number of detainees is far higher than the 1 434 people mentioned by Urumqi Communist Party secretary, Li Zhi, on 7 July. International media report of more than 4 000 Uyghurs detained in overfilled makeshift prisons.
Ethnic tension
The Rafto Foundation expresses its concern for the heightened level of ethnic tension between Uyghurs and Han Chinese, and deplores all injuries and deaths in this conflict, irrespective of ethnicity.
While the unrest has been portrayed by Chinese official media as consisting of Uyghur provocateurs and Han Chinese victims, there is a strong reason for believing that only a fraction of the number of Uyghur victims has been reported. Reports from Xinjiang tell of frightened Uyghurs fleeing their homes in fear of the general lynching sentiment spreading in the cities, fuelled by the nationalistically charged reporting of the unrest in Chinese official media. However, the most urgent issue at this point is the arrested citizens’ imminent risk of express trials with no respect for due process, and the strong likelihood of mass executions.
No fair trial
Urumqi’s Communist Party secretary, Li Zhi’s statement on 8 July that "brutal criminals will be sentenced to death" raises strong concerns for swift executions with no fair trial for the unknown numbers that were arrested in the aftermath of 5 July. In addition, reports of Chinese human rights lawyers receiving intimidations and strong warnings of taking on any cases related to the unrests in Xinjiang highlights the willingness of Chinese authorities to deprive the arrested of their right to free counsel and a due legal process.
The Rafto Foundation urges Norwegian authorities to issue stronger condemnations of the violent crackdowns, and to raise its strong concern by the apparent wish of the Chinese authorities to take swift action, regardless of their human rights commitments guaranteeing the right to fair trial.
Marginalised minorities
The Rafto Foundation has since awarding the 2004 Rafto Prize to the Uyghur leader Rebiya Kadeer, at the time still imprisoned in Xinjiang, voiced its strong concern for the increasing oppression and marginalisation of Uyghurs in China.
The recent events come as a grim déjà vu 12 years after similar peaceful Uyghur protests were brutally struck down in the Xinjiang city of Ghulja, a massacre which also was followed by mass arrests, and which still has seen no independent inquiry. Many of the arrested are still imprisoned. The violent 5 July crackdown adds to the list of brutal oppression of Uyghurs, and adds to the hopelessness felt by Uyghurs in Xinjiang as well as in exile.
Norwegian authorities must apply stronger pressure
The Rafto Foundation reiterates its urgent call for the Norwegian authorities to immediately raise their concerns for the rights of those arrested after the 5 July unrest.
The Rafto Foundation also urges the international community to apply more pressure on Chinese authorities with regards to the marginalisation and suppression of their minorities’ rights.
http://www.rafto.no/?page=20&news=131&PHPSESSID=9543901234dd824a81b2120c3a36be6b
China Could Use Some Honest Talk About Race
China Could Use Some Honest Talk About Race
By HOWARD W. FRENCH
Published: July 31, 2009
SHANGHAI — When the city of Detroit erupted in some of the worst rioting in American history over a five-day period in July 1967, the Johnson administration responded by naming a high-level commission to investigate the incident and more generally to weigh in on the troubled issue of race relations in the United States.
The panel, known as the Kerner Commission, undertook to plumb three key questions: “What happened? Why did it happen? What can be done to prevent it from happening again?” And in a simple but powerful phrase that helped define the era, it concluded that “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white — separate and unequal.”
The Kerner Commission did not introduce the concept of minority civil rights in the United States. That movement began to gain critical mass in the 1950s, through direct citizen action by people like Rosa Parks, who refused to surrender her bus seat to a white person in Montgomery, Alabama, and was arrested and tried for her defiance of racism, sparking a 381-day boycott of public transportation by blacks in the city.
What the Kerner Commission did, rather, was signal recognition at the highest levels of American society that the United States had major racial problems, along with civil rights deficiencies that seriously marred our democracy. And recent events in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the country’s most prominent black academic, was suspected of burglary and arrested in his own house, demonstrate that questions of civil rights in America still preoccupy us.
This is the second year in a row of severe turmoil in western China, following the uprising that swept Tibetan areas in March of 2008. The events of recent weeks in China’s Xinjiang region, where were nearly 200 people died during unrest and a dozen members of the predominantly Muslim Uighur minority were killed by police (according to official figures), demonstrate if nothing else how China desperately awaits its own civil rights moment.
The Kerner Commission’s famous old questions would be a good place to start: What exactly happened and why? And an open and honest Chinese conversation about race, ethnicity, religion and identity is long overdue and would go a long way toward healing papered-over divisions that run deep in this society.
The response of the system here so far, alas, has shown no such willingness. The official media, operating in their mouthpiece of power mode, have rushed to certain conclusions about the events, namely that the trouble was instigated by “splittists,” and that sinister foreign forces were at work behind the rioting.
Openness and transparency about the events of Urumqi would be welcome but by themselves would only constitute a first step, no more. China has made great, and often insufficiently acknowledged strides away from totalitarianism in the last generation, but one area where the rigidities of the past linger on is in the politics of ethnicity.
China clings to the fiction that areas where ethnic minorities have historically predominated, places like Xinjiang and Tibet, with distinctive languages and cultures and lingering memories of self-rule, are “autonomous regions.” This, even as these areas are governed by local party leaderships appointed by Beijing and heavily dominated by members of the country’s Han majority. This, also, as Beijing floods these areas with Han economic migrants, for the purpose of settling and securing China’s rough western frontier, raising local living standards and to assimilate the local people into the ways of the Han.
Although this effort lacks in candor and transparency, not to mention the possibility of meaningful input from or consent by the locals, it would be wrong to conclude it is entirely undertaken out of bad faith. The materialists who rule China seem to genuinely believe that economic development is the answer to almost every question, and their favorite statistic relating to Xinjiang is the doubling of the region’s economy between 2002 and 2008.
At best, this statistic is misleading, though. Most of the economic growth in Xinjiang is related to the expansion of the petroleum sector, which is overwhelmingly dominated by Han. Indeed the unrest there seems fueled in part by a sense of among Uighurs that they are losing ground economically to the Han in their own homeland.
I interviewed a Uighur barber in Urumqi two years ago who complained that the newcomers form their own social and business networks and often enjoy government support of one kind or another. This man, who had been trained in petrochemical engineering in Russia, said he had been unable to find a job in that booming sector. Han, he said, hire Han.
A new study, published in the China Quarterly by Brenda L. Schuster, reveals other gaps in the economic statistics. “In life expectancy, infant mortality, maternal mortality and morbidity, Uyghur people are much worse off than Han,” the report reads. It then speaks of how “group specific psychological stress and the socio-economic and demographic changes of the past 60 years could be major factors.”
Many African-Americans, particularly in urban areas, where health indicators persistently lag behind those of the general population, even at similar income levels, would readily recognize such stresses. China, meanwhile, clings to the old Maoist-era fable of the country as one big happy ethnic family, even as it labors hard in Xinjiang to discourage Islamic worship and otherwise dilute Uighur culture.
Two years of violence may not yet make a trend, but this myth has just become a lot harder to sustain, even among China’s Han majority, who may yet come to appreciate that respect for differences rather than forced assimilation is the better recipe for harmony.
E-MAIL pagetwo@iht.com
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/01/world/asia/01iht-letter.html
By HOWARD W. FRENCH
Published: July 31, 2009
SHANGHAI — When the city of Detroit erupted in some of the worst rioting in American history over a five-day period in July 1967, the Johnson administration responded by naming a high-level commission to investigate the incident and more generally to weigh in on the troubled issue of race relations in the United States.
The panel, known as the Kerner Commission, undertook to plumb three key questions: “What happened? Why did it happen? What can be done to prevent it from happening again?” And in a simple but powerful phrase that helped define the era, it concluded that “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white — separate and unequal.”
The Kerner Commission did not introduce the concept of minority civil rights in the United States. That movement began to gain critical mass in the 1950s, through direct citizen action by people like Rosa Parks, who refused to surrender her bus seat to a white person in Montgomery, Alabama, and was arrested and tried for her defiance of racism, sparking a 381-day boycott of public transportation by blacks in the city.
What the Kerner Commission did, rather, was signal recognition at the highest levels of American society that the United States had major racial problems, along with civil rights deficiencies that seriously marred our democracy. And recent events in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the country’s most prominent black academic, was suspected of burglary and arrested in his own house, demonstrate that questions of civil rights in America still preoccupy us.
This is the second year in a row of severe turmoil in western China, following the uprising that swept Tibetan areas in March of 2008. The events of recent weeks in China’s Xinjiang region, where were nearly 200 people died during unrest and a dozen members of the predominantly Muslim Uighur minority were killed by police (according to official figures), demonstrate if nothing else how China desperately awaits its own civil rights moment.
The Kerner Commission’s famous old questions would be a good place to start: What exactly happened and why? And an open and honest Chinese conversation about race, ethnicity, religion and identity is long overdue and would go a long way toward healing papered-over divisions that run deep in this society.
The response of the system here so far, alas, has shown no such willingness. The official media, operating in their mouthpiece of power mode, have rushed to certain conclusions about the events, namely that the trouble was instigated by “splittists,” and that sinister foreign forces were at work behind the rioting.
Openness and transparency about the events of Urumqi would be welcome but by themselves would only constitute a first step, no more. China has made great, and often insufficiently acknowledged strides away from totalitarianism in the last generation, but one area where the rigidities of the past linger on is in the politics of ethnicity.
China clings to the fiction that areas where ethnic minorities have historically predominated, places like Xinjiang and Tibet, with distinctive languages and cultures and lingering memories of self-rule, are “autonomous regions.” This, even as these areas are governed by local party leaderships appointed by Beijing and heavily dominated by members of the country’s Han majority. This, also, as Beijing floods these areas with Han economic migrants, for the purpose of settling and securing China’s rough western frontier, raising local living standards and to assimilate the local people into the ways of the Han.
Although this effort lacks in candor and transparency, not to mention the possibility of meaningful input from or consent by the locals, it would be wrong to conclude it is entirely undertaken out of bad faith. The materialists who rule China seem to genuinely believe that economic development is the answer to almost every question, and their favorite statistic relating to Xinjiang is the doubling of the region’s economy between 2002 and 2008.
At best, this statistic is misleading, though. Most of the economic growth in Xinjiang is related to the expansion of the petroleum sector, which is overwhelmingly dominated by Han. Indeed the unrest there seems fueled in part by a sense of among Uighurs that they are losing ground economically to the Han in their own homeland.
I interviewed a Uighur barber in Urumqi two years ago who complained that the newcomers form their own social and business networks and often enjoy government support of one kind or another. This man, who had been trained in petrochemical engineering in Russia, said he had been unable to find a job in that booming sector. Han, he said, hire Han.
A new study, published in the China Quarterly by Brenda L. Schuster, reveals other gaps in the economic statistics. “In life expectancy, infant mortality, maternal mortality and morbidity, Uyghur people are much worse off than Han,” the report reads. It then speaks of how “group specific psychological stress and the socio-economic and demographic changes of the past 60 years could be major factors.”
Many African-Americans, particularly in urban areas, where health indicators persistently lag behind those of the general population, even at similar income levels, would readily recognize such stresses. China, meanwhile, clings to the old Maoist-era fable of the country as one big happy ethnic family, even as it labors hard in Xinjiang to discourage Islamic worship and otherwise dilute Uighur culture.
Two years of violence may not yet make a trend, but this myth has just become a lot harder to sustain, even among China’s Han majority, who may yet come to appreciate that respect for differences rather than forced assimilation is the better recipe for harmony.
E-MAIL pagetwo@iht.com
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/01/world/asia/01iht-letter.html
Rebiya Kadeer a small but charismatic thorn in Beijing's side
Rebiya Kadeer a small but charismatic thorn in Beijing's side
Peter Alford, Rowan Callick and Michael Sainsbury | August 01, 2009
Article from: The Australian
UIGHUR leader Rebiya Kadeer has replaced the Dalai Lama as China's enemy No 1.
THE new No1 hate figure targeted by the ruling Chinese Communist Party arrives in Australia in a few days: Rebiya Kadeer.
Although the Dalai Lama is also due to come to Australia later in the year, Kadeer -- the charismatic 63-year-old president of the World Uighur Association -- has in the past month seized the Tibetan spiritual leader's place as China's Public Enemy No 1.
This has sent her global profile soaring, and attracted unprecedented interest in the Uighur cause.
Her hot-to-handle visit next week -- against which Beijing has protested in vain -- is further battering Australia's already rocky relationship with China.
And it points the way to future tensions between Beijing and democratic liberal countries more generally, as the Chinese government seeks to press its soft power globally, extending ever wider the circle of exiled leaders to whom it intends to provide no respite. Kadeer, who comes from Xinjiang, the Queensland-sized region of northwest China that is the home of the nine million Uighurs, lives in exile in Washington.
Last year it was the unrest and riots in Tibet, another huge region of western China, that saw the Dalai Lama blamed as a "splittist" manipulator of violent protests. This year the same mantle has been cast on Kadeer.
She has become a non-person in China, with articles that include her name being blocked by the "net police" even from the Google search engine.
What Kadeer describes as mere phone calls to her family in Xinjiang have been portrayed by Beijing as messages masterminding the inter-ethnic violence that caused about 200 deaths there a month ago.
Pan Zhiping, a researcher at Xinjiang Academy of Social Science, provides a sense of the outrage from Han Chinese, who suffered the initial casualties from the violence.
She told The Weekend Australian that Kadeer, who was one of China's wealthiest businesswomen before being jailed in 1999 for five years for political offences, "was not a good businesswoman, she just had a start-up and accumulated her money from tax evasion".
She says: "Ordinary Uighurs are not calling for independence, only so-called elite Uighur intellectuals. Rebiya was influenced by her husband, who was a third-class professor. These people agitated the street violence and manipulated extreme racism.
"She is rotten meat, the kind that only attracts flies. But she will have her verdict when the official investigation (on the riots) is finished -- lies can't be covered up. The human right she advocates are evil rights, murderers' rights." UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said on Thursday that while being "deeply saddened by the loss of life and violence" in Xinjiang: "I will have to look at the case for exact information ... (which) I do not have."
The only inquiry so far announced is being conducted by the Chinese central government. On a visit to Japan this week, Kadeer urged the establishment of an international commission to examine what she claimed to be the disappearance of 10,000 Uighurs in Xinjiang last month.
China's ambassador to Japan said during Kadeer's stay in Tokyo: "She is a criminal," and compared her to Aum Shinrikyo, the cult leader who unleashed sarin gas in the Tokyo subway in 1995.
Mamtimin Ala, the general secretary of the Uighur Association of Australia, the main hosts for Kadeer's week-long visit, said: "China has blamed her for the troubles in Xinjiang in order to externalise what is an internal problem -- a classic Chinese tactic, as it also does with the Dalai Lama, to whip up nationalistic fervour, brainwashing its own citizens.
"This also transforms perceptions among ordinary Chinese of the Uighurs into an evil people, an enemy within. As a result, reconciliation now seems almost impossible," she says.
After Kadeer this week gave the foreign correspondents' club in Tokyo a lengthy, graphic and doubtless highly partisan account of the violent riots on July 5, a reporter from China's People's Daily posed what he perhaps thought was a "gotcha" question.
"It sounds like you were there," he noted. "How could you have such detailed knowledge when at the time you were tens of thousands of kilometres away in Washington?" Kadeer allowed herself a hard little smile before answering.
The element of the case against her most quoted by China's state media is a telephone tap allegedly of her saying: "Something will happen in Urumqi."
Kadeer says she learnt of the gathering Uighur unrest, provoked by a security crackdown in Xinjiang and local anger over the June mob killings of Uighur factory workers in Guangdong, and called to warn her family.
She has four sons -- two imprisoned since July 5 -- a daughter, numerous grandchildren and a brother still in Xinjiang, and says family members are the usual suspects to be rounded up when trouble flares.
She does not deny being closely plugged into contemporary affairs in Xinjiang, which, like other dissident Uighurs, she prefers to call East Turkestan, even after five years in Chinese prisons and four years in US exile.
It's one of the reasons, she says, the Chinese authorities hate her so.
That, and the fact she was once a poster-woman for ethnic integration in post-Maoist China, a self-made multi-millionaire and influential figure on policy towards the 55 minority nationalities -- who comprise 10 per cent of China's 1.3 billion population -- until radicalised by a violent suppression of Uighur unrest in 1997.
Beijing has sought to reposition her World Uighur Congress (WUC) rather than the shadowy East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM) as the main driver of Uighur violence, linking both to al-Qa'ida and international Islamic terrorism.
There is no reason to doubt the genuine repugnance among Chinese officials and representatives abroad that so soon after the killings of at least 192 people, mostly Han Chinese according to the official account, countries such as Japan and Australia are hosting visits by the strongest voice in the world for Uighur separatism.
It was notable this week in Tokyo how carefully Japanese officials and the ruling Liberal Democratic Party handled her visit -- a likely indicator of the sort of damage they feared to China relations.
But Kadeer got her visa and she got her LDP meeting, which suggests the governments of Japan -- and Australia, the US and other countries -- do not believe the Beijing narrative about her associations with Islamic terrorism.
ETIM is a UN-designated terrorist organisation -- originally on China's post-9/11 advice to George W. Bush's White House. Yet Kadeer has been given refuge in Washington since 2005 and granted visas by countries, including Australia, that are members in good standing of the coalition against Islamic terror.
In the post-Guantanamo world, the cloak of international legitimacy cannot be earned by simply designating separatist movements as associates of international terrorists.
In fact, many Americans find it harder to tolerate evidence recently produced that the Bush defence department allowed Chinese interrogators inside Guantanamo to question 22 Uighur terror suspects in 2002 -- though the same department flatly refused American congressmen and women access to camp inmates.
The US has refused Chinese demands to return them, and the last of them are now being relocated to third countries -- five at first to Albania, and now four to Bermuda and 13 to Palau, which recognises Taiwan rather than China diplomatically.
Kadeer told The Weekend Australian in Tokyo: "While I was in China I followed the Communist Party (line) and was obedient to the government.
"I know well when the Chinese government says something which is lies and which is truth. It knows if it stops the voice of Rebiya, it stops the voice of the Uighurs in the world."
Small, intense and unusually charismatic, Kadeer talks as if she embodies the Uighur spirit of independence, and particularly since July 5 that seems close to the truth.
The WUC, a confederation of Uighur exile groups, is passionate but thinly spread and seems not very well organised. When Kadeer came to Tokyo two years ago, soon after taking over the leadership, she attracted only scant media attention, and certainly not three official protests from Beijing.
But in the past 25 days, she and her cause have attracted more headlines and sympathetic interest than in the four years since she arrived in the US, after Bush secretary of state Condoleezza Rice's personal intervention with the Chinese led to her release.
Kadeer's name and cause are increasingly linked in international commentary with that of the Dalai Lama and Tibet.
And she is exploiting that association for all it's worth.
"Of course, I have chosen the way of the Dalai Lama, so I will travel all over the world, I will give true information about East Turkestan -- I want to become (like) the Dalai Lama, to bring my homeland to freedom and liberation," she says.
While disavowing violence, Kadeer now refuses to rule out shifting from her established position of seeking proper political and religious autonomy for Xinjiang within the People's Republic, to a campaign for full independence.
That decision, she says, will be taken by the WUC once its campaign for an independent UN investigation of the July 5 uprising and the subsequent Chinese crackdown is settled.
Kadeer, like the Dalai Lama, has put a large dent in what one pro-Beijing Uighur official recently called "the Great Wall of ethnic unity" allegedly bounding both the Han Chinese and the minority nations.
She is an opponent who came from inside the wall, who says policies she once supported and thrived under are now being turned to crushing the Uighurs.
She seems less inclined than the Dalai Lama, who fled Tibet 50 years ago, to moderate her criticisms of Beijing in order to foster a dialogue on autonomy. "I cannot wait 50 years," she says.
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25863570-2703,00.html
Peter Alford, Rowan Callick and Michael Sainsbury | August 01, 2009
Article from: The Australian
UIGHUR leader Rebiya Kadeer has replaced the Dalai Lama as China's enemy No 1.
THE new No1 hate figure targeted by the ruling Chinese Communist Party arrives in Australia in a few days: Rebiya Kadeer.
Although the Dalai Lama is also due to come to Australia later in the year, Kadeer -- the charismatic 63-year-old president of the World Uighur Association -- has in the past month seized the Tibetan spiritual leader's place as China's Public Enemy No 1.
This has sent her global profile soaring, and attracted unprecedented interest in the Uighur cause.
Her hot-to-handle visit next week -- against which Beijing has protested in vain -- is further battering Australia's already rocky relationship with China.
And it points the way to future tensions between Beijing and democratic liberal countries more generally, as the Chinese government seeks to press its soft power globally, extending ever wider the circle of exiled leaders to whom it intends to provide no respite. Kadeer, who comes from Xinjiang, the Queensland-sized region of northwest China that is the home of the nine million Uighurs, lives in exile in Washington.
Last year it was the unrest and riots in Tibet, another huge region of western China, that saw the Dalai Lama blamed as a "splittist" manipulator of violent protests. This year the same mantle has been cast on Kadeer.
She has become a non-person in China, with articles that include her name being blocked by the "net police" even from the Google search engine.
What Kadeer describes as mere phone calls to her family in Xinjiang have been portrayed by Beijing as messages masterminding the inter-ethnic violence that caused about 200 deaths there a month ago.
Pan Zhiping, a researcher at Xinjiang Academy of Social Science, provides a sense of the outrage from Han Chinese, who suffered the initial casualties from the violence.
She told The Weekend Australian that Kadeer, who was one of China's wealthiest businesswomen before being jailed in 1999 for five years for political offences, "was not a good businesswoman, she just had a start-up and accumulated her money from tax evasion".
She says: "Ordinary Uighurs are not calling for independence, only so-called elite Uighur intellectuals. Rebiya was influenced by her husband, who was a third-class professor. These people agitated the street violence and manipulated extreme racism.
"She is rotten meat, the kind that only attracts flies. But she will have her verdict when the official investigation (on the riots) is finished -- lies can't be covered up. The human right she advocates are evil rights, murderers' rights." UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said on Thursday that while being "deeply saddened by the loss of life and violence" in Xinjiang: "I will have to look at the case for exact information ... (which) I do not have."
The only inquiry so far announced is being conducted by the Chinese central government. On a visit to Japan this week, Kadeer urged the establishment of an international commission to examine what she claimed to be the disappearance of 10,000 Uighurs in Xinjiang last month.
China's ambassador to Japan said during Kadeer's stay in Tokyo: "She is a criminal," and compared her to Aum Shinrikyo, the cult leader who unleashed sarin gas in the Tokyo subway in 1995.
Mamtimin Ala, the general secretary of the Uighur Association of Australia, the main hosts for Kadeer's week-long visit, said: "China has blamed her for the troubles in Xinjiang in order to externalise what is an internal problem -- a classic Chinese tactic, as it also does with the Dalai Lama, to whip up nationalistic fervour, brainwashing its own citizens.
"This also transforms perceptions among ordinary Chinese of the Uighurs into an evil people, an enemy within. As a result, reconciliation now seems almost impossible," she says.
After Kadeer this week gave the foreign correspondents' club in Tokyo a lengthy, graphic and doubtless highly partisan account of the violent riots on July 5, a reporter from China's People's Daily posed what he perhaps thought was a "gotcha" question.
"It sounds like you were there," he noted. "How could you have such detailed knowledge when at the time you were tens of thousands of kilometres away in Washington?" Kadeer allowed herself a hard little smile before answering.
The element of the case against her most quoted by China's state media is a telephone tap allegedly of her saying: "Something will happen in Urumqi."
Kadeer says she learnt of the gathering Uighur unrest, provoked by a security crackdown in Xinjiang and local anger over the June mob killings of Uighur factory workers in Guangdong, and called to warn her family.
She has four sons -- two imprisoned since July 5 -- a daughter, numerous grandchildren and a brother still in Xinjiang, and says family members are the usual suspects to be rounded up when trouble flares.
She does not deny being closely plugged into contemporary affairs in Xinjiang, which, like other dissident Uighurs, she prefers to call East Turkestan, even after five years in Chinese prisons and four years in US exile.
It's one of the reasons, she says, the Chinese authorities hate her so.
That, and the fact she was once a poster-woman for ethnic integration in post-Maoist China, a self-made multi-millionaire and influential figure on policy towards the 55 minority nationalities -- who comprise 10 per cent of China's 1.3 billion population -- until radicalised by a violent suppression of Uighur unrest in 1997.
Beijing has sought to reposition her World Uighur Congress (WUC) rather than the shadowy East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM) as the main driver of Uighur violence, linking both to al-Qa'ida and international Islamic terrorism.
There is no reason to doubt the genuine repugnance among Chinese officials and representatives abroad that so soon after the killings of at least 192 people, mostly Han Chinese according to the official account, countries such as Japan and Australia are hosting visits by the strongest voice in the world for Uighur separatism.
It was notable this week in Tokyo how carefully Japanese officials and the ruling Liberal Democratic Party handled her visit -- a likely indicator of the sort of damage they feared to China relations.
But Kadeer got her visa and she got her LDP meeting, which suggests the governments of Japan -- and Australia, the US and other countries -- do not believe the Beijing narrative about her associations with Islamic terrorism.
ETIM is a UN-designated terrorist organisation -- originally on China's post-9/11 advice to George W. Bush's White House. Yet Kadeer has been given refuge in Washington since 2005 and granted visas by countries, including Australia, that are members in good standing of the coalition against Islamic terror.
In the post-Guantanamo world, the cloak of international legitimacy cannot be earned by simply designating separatist movements as associates of international terrorists.
In fact, many Americans find it harder to tolerate evidence recently produced that the Bush defence department allowed Chinese interrogators inside Guantanamo to question 22 Uighur terror suspects in 2002 -- though the same department flatly refused American congressmen and women access to camp inmates.
The US has refused Chinese demands to return them, and the last of them are now being relocated to third countries -- five at first to Albania, and now four to Bermuda and 13 to Palau, which recognises Taiwan rather than China diplomatically.
Kadeer told The Weekend Australian in Tokyo: "While I was in China I followed the Communist Party (line) and was obedient to the government.
"I know well when the Chinese government says something which is lies and which is truth. It knows if it stops the voice of Rebiya, it stops the voice of the Uighurs in the world."
Small, intense and unusually charismatic, Kadeer talks as if she embodies the Uighur spirit of independence, and particularly since July 5 that seems close to the truth.
The WUC, a confederation of Uighur exile groups, is passionate but thinly spread and seems not very well organised. When Kadeer came to Tokyo two years ago, soon after taking over the leadership, she attracted only scant media attention, and certainly not three official protests from Beijing.
But in the past 25 days, she and her cause have attracted more headlines and sympathetic interest than in the four years since she arrived in the US, after Bush secretary of state Condoleezza Rice's personal intervention with the Chinese led to her release.
Kadeer's name and cause are increasingly linked in international commentary with that of the Dalai Lama and Tibet.
And she is exploiting that association for all it's worth.
"Of course, I have chosen the way of the Dalai Lama, so I will travel all over the world, I will give true information about East Turkestan -- I want to become (like) the Dalai Lama, to bring my homeland to freedom and liberation," she says.
While disavowing violence, Kadeer now refuses to rule out shifting from her established position of seeking proper political and religious autonomy for Xinjiang within the People's Republic, to a campaign for full independence.
That decision, she says, will be taken by the WUC once its campaign for an independent UN investigation of the July 5 uprising and the subsequent Chinese crackdown is settled.
Kadeer, like the Dalai Lama, has put a large dent in what one pro-Beijing Uighur official recently called "the Great Wall of ethnic unity" allegedly bounding both the Han Chinese and the minority nations.
She is an opponent who came from inside the wall, who says policies she once supported and thrived under are now being turned to crushing the Uighurs.
She seems less inclined than the Dalai Lama, who fled Tibet 50 years ago, to moderate her criticisms of Beijing in order to foster a dialogue on autonomy. "I cannot wait 50 years," she says.
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25863570-2703,00.html
An old problem on China's new frontier
An old problem on China's new frontier
By Konstanty Gebert
WARSAW - Had the August 1991 putsch against Mikhail Gorbachev not failed, the riots and death recently seen in Xinjiang could have been taking place in Russia.
Instead of hearing about a crackdown in Urumqi, Xinjiang's capital, we might be reading about hundreds killed on the streets of Almaty, and columnists would be making comparisons to the bloody crushing of Ukrainian independence demonstrations in Lvov the previous year.
As with China today, there would have been some feeble international condemnation, and some speculation about possible links between Kazakh militants and exile groups, or Islamic fundamentalists. Experts would remind us that Kazakhstan had never been a country, and that Ukrainian claims to independence are historically dubious. Substitute Xinjiang for Kazakhstan and Tibet for Ukraine and you get the picture.
Armed Chinese soldiers in riot gear walk past ethnic Uighur men and a Han Chinese woman along a main street in the city of Urumqi in China's Xinjiang Autonomous Region . Pic courtesy Reuters.com
But that putsch, thankfully, ended as a farce. The decaying Soviet regime was unable to crush Russia's growing democratic movement - it would take Vladimir Putin to do that a decade later. By opting for the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, the Chinese Communist leadership set their country on a road starkly different from the one on which Russia subsequently embarked.
Though China's policies have brought about Pinochet-style economic growth, if on the scale of a country that is almost a continent unto itself, they have also ensured that there is in no freedom for anyone, including the Han majority. This, in turn, means that, while Kazakhstan and Ukraine are independent, Tibet and Xinjiang alternate between phases of violent agitation and bloody repression.
Though Russia today is autocratically governed, the introduction of a Chinese-style dictatorship seems hardly plausible, while GDP per capita was $15,800 last year, or almost three times that of China. Yet a majority of the Chinese population seems to support its' government's policies, including its brutal suppression of minorities and denial of democratic freedoms.
In fact, the latter seems to be the price paid for the success of the former. This is not a novel phenomenon. In 1863, the Russian democratic émigré thinker Alexander Herzen, commenting on the brutal crushing of the Polish uprising by the Tsarist army, wrote in his publication Kolokol that acceptance of violence on the streets of Warsaw meant the acceptance of violence on the streets of St. Petersburg. Oppression is a package deal. His comments cost him his Russian readership, and Kolokol had to close down.
When Herzen was writing his words, Moscow was not only busy successfully putting down the Poles, reasserting its rule there for another half-century, but also, together with China, carving up Central Asia, known then as Turkestan. The eastern part of the region fell under Chinese rule, and was renamed Xinjiang, or New Frontier.
Each time Chinese rule weakened, as in the 1930's and 1940's, short-lived East Turkestan Republics were established, with Russian support, only to flounder when Russia and China struck new deals. The leadership of the second East Turkestan Republic was presumably murdered on Stalin's orders, when the plane carrying it to Beijing for talks allegedly crashed in Soviet airspace.
Since then, East Turkestan has existed solely on paper, as a member of the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization (UNPO), a would-be competitor of the United Nations set up in 1991. In Xinjiang itself, the current agitation is more social than nationalist in character, and targets cultural oppression (Han Chinese by now make up half of the region's population) rather than expressing aspirations for independence. Yet the recent bloodbath there is almost sure to change that, as violence unavoidably breeds radicalization.
In the short and medium term, China's rule in Xinjiang and Tibet seems secure: the international community will not challenge a Security Council member state. Only its own citizens could do that, but Herzen's package deal seems to prevent that: just like the Tibetans, the Uighurs elicit not Han solidarity, but a braying for their blood - somewhat understandable, given that ordinary Han in Lhasa and Urumqi were made to pay with their own for China's misdeeds. In the longer term, however, the Chinese authorities have every reason to be worried: Xinjiang will grow to be a problem like Tibet.
Indeed, though the UNPO, to which both belong - alongside Assyria and the Buffalo River Dene Nation - has a vaguely Marx Brothers' air to it (one expects Freedonia, the mythical country of which Groucho Marx was prime minister, to be on the roster), six member states already have left it to join the UN, and Kosovo, now independent if lacking UN recognition, will eventually follow. Political maps are never carved in stone.
It is therefore safe to assume that not only obscure academics and correspondents, but officials in Beijing as well, are now busy studying the history of the Ghulja uprising and of Osman Batur's guerillas. Come to think of it: whatever happened to the Poles, whom Russia so successfully put down in 1863?
Konstanty Gebert is an essayist and author of ten books on Polish and European history. Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2009. Exclusive to the Sunday Times
http://www.sundaytimes.lk/090726/International/sundaytimesinternational-08.html
By Konstanty Gebert
WARSAW - Had the August 1991 putsch against Mikhail Gorbachev not failed, the riots and death recently seen in Xinjiang could have been taking place in Russia.
Instead of hearing about a crackdown in Urumqi, Xinjiang's capital, we might be reading about hundreds killed on the streets of Almaty, and columnists would be making comparisons to the bloody crushing of Ukrainian independence demonstrations in Lvov the previous year.
As with China today, there would have been some feeble international condemnation, and some speculation about possible links between Kazakh militants and exile groups, or Islamic fundamentalists. Experts would remind us that Kazakhstan had never been a country, and that Ukrainian claims to independence are historically dubious. Substitute Xinjiang for Kazakhstan and Tibet for Ukraine and you get the picture.
Armed Chinese soldiers in riot gear walk past ethnic Uighur men and a Han Chinese woman along a main street in the city of Urumqi in China's Xinjiang Autonomous Region . Pic courtesy Reuters.com
But that putsch, thankfully, ended as a farce. The decaying Soviet regime was unable to crush Russia's growing democratic movement - it would take Vladimir Putin to do that a decade later. By opting for the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, the Chinese Communist leadership set their country on a road starkly different from the one on which Russia subsequently embarked.
Though China's policies have brought about Pinochet-style economic growth, if on the scale of a country that is almost a continent unto itself, they have also ensured that there is in no freedom for anyone, including the Han majority. This, in turn, means that, while Kazakhstan and Ukraine are independent, Tibet and Xinjiang alternate between phases of violent agitation and bloody repression.
Though Russia today is autocratically governed, the introduction of a Chinese-style dictatorship seems hardly plausible, while GDP per capita was $15,800 last year, or almost three times that of China. Yet a majority of the Chinese population seems to support its' government's policies, including its brutal suppression of minorities and denial of democratic freedoms.
In fact, the latter seems to be the price paid for the success of the former. This is not a novel phenomenon. In 1863, the Russian democratic émigré thinker Alexander Herzen, commenting on the brutal crushing of the Polish uprising by the Tsarist army, wrote in his publication Kolokol that acceptance of violence on the streets of Warsaw meant the acceptance of violence on the streets of St. Petersburg. Oppression is a package deal. His comments cost him his Russian readership, and Kolokol had to close down.
When Herzen was writing his words, Moscow was not only busy successfully putting down the Poles, reasserting its rule there for another half-century, but also, together with China, carving up Central Asia, known then as Turkestan. The eastern part of the region fell under Chinese rule, and was renamed Xinjiang, or New Frontier.
Each time Chinese rule weakened, as in the 1930's and 1940's, short-lived East Turkestan Republics were established, with Russian support, only to flounder when Russia and China struck new deals. The leadership of the second East Turkestan Republic was presumably murdered on Stalin's orders, when the plane carrying it to Beijing for talks allegedly crashed in Soviet airspace.
Since then, East Turkestan has existed solely on paper, as a member of the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization (UNPO), a would-be competitor of the United Nations set up in 1991. In Xinjiang itself, the current agitation is more social than nationalist in character, and targets cultural oppression (Han Chinese by now make up half of the region's population) rather than expressing aspirations for independence. Yet the recent bloodbath there is almost sure to change that, as violence unavoidably breeds radicalization.
In the short and medium term, China's rule in Xinjiang and Tibet seems secure: the international community will not challenge a Security Council member state. Only its own citizens could do that, but Herzen's package deal seems to prevent that: just like the Tibetans, the Uighurs elicit not Han solidarity, but a braying for their blood - somewhat understandable, given that ordinary Han in Lhasa and Urumqi were made to pay with their own for China's misdeeds. In the longer term, however, the Chinese authorities have every reason to be worried: Xinjiang will grow to be a problem like Tibet.
Indeed, though the UNPO, to which both belong - alongside Assyria and the Buffalo River Dene Nation - has a vaguely Marx Brothers' air to it (one expects Freedonia, the mythical country of which Groucho Marx was prime minister, to be on the roster), six member states already have left it to join the UN, and Kosovo, now independent if lacking UN recognition, will eventually follow. Political maps are never carved in stone.
It is therefore safe to assume that not only obscure academics and correspondents, but officials in Beijing as well, are now busy studying the history of the Ghulja uprising and of Osman Batur's guerillas. Come to think of it: whatever happened to the Poles, whom Russia so successfully put down in 1863?
Konstanty Gebert is an essayist and author of ten books on Polish and European history. Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2009. Exclusive to the Sunday Times
http://www.sundaytimes.lk/090726/International/sundaytimesinternational-08.html
Thursday, July 23, 2009
Xinjiang, Tibet, beyond: China’s ethnic relations
Xinjiang, Tibet, beyond: China’s ethnic relations
Temtsel Hao, 23 - 07 - 2009
The interplay between local identity, state policy, and economic change is at the core of the violent events in Tibet in 2008 and Xinjiang in 2009. The Chinese government’s predicament in finding a workable policy in response is severe, says Temtsel Hao.
23 - 07 - 2009
The ethnic protests and clashes in China's westernmost region of Xinjiang on 5-6 July 2009 and the following days have caused around 200 deaths. The deadly violence, mainly between the Uyghur (and Muslim) population and the Han Chinese - but also involving the security forces killing some protesting Uyghurs, in circumstances that are not yet clear - has shocked and polarised public opinion across China. They have also focused renewed attention on the sensitive and complex theme of the relationship between different ethnic groups in the People's Republic of China.
Temtsel Hao is a journalist based in London, working for the BBC World Service
Also by Temtsel Hao in openDemocracy:
"Dharamsala: forging Tibetans' future" (29 April 2009The argument can be heard on either side of the divide in Xinjiang that the political arrangements in the region don't match its socio-economic circumstances. Uyghurs are unhappy with the tokenism of "nationality policies", and demand more participation and more of a share in the Xinjiang economy and its social proceeds; Han Chinese are unhappy with what they see as official favouritism towards the Uyghurs, and seek to remove the guarantees of autonomy and special treatment that Uyghurs (and other ethnic minorities) are supposed to benefit from.
A balance of favour
The events of early July 2009 - which mainly, not not exclusively, occurred in Xinjiang's capital, Urumqi - reflect the deeper processes of rapid economic growth and social transformation during in the 1990s and 2000s. In particular, the national policies of China's leadership in opening the economy, creating new labour-market mechanisms, and encouraging internal-migration flows have had profound effects in this region (as elsewhere).
These processes have accompanied China's historic shift from a centrally planned to a market economy, which has made it the manufacturing centre of the world. Many have benefited, but there have also been great problems, including new development gaps - between urban and rural areas, coastal regions and inland/frontier areas, and prosperous and poor in the same places. In addition, there are huge insecurities: many people in China have lost the assurance of a lifetime job and the social safety-nets that they enjoyed a generation ago.
Also on Xinjiang in openDemocracy:
James Millward, "China's story: putting the PR into the PRC" (18 April 2008)
Henryk Szadziewski, "Kashgar"s old city: the politics of demolition" (3 April 2009)
Yitzhak Shichor, "The Uyghurs and China: lost and found nation" (6 July 2009)
Henryk Szadziewski, "The discovery of the Uyghurs" (9 July 2009)
Kerry Brown, "Xinjiang: China's security high-alert" (14 July 2009)
Dibyesh Anand, "China's borderlands: the need to rethink" (15 July 2009)In Xinjiang, this "uneven development" has in the eyes of many Uyghurs become institutionalised along ethnic lines to their disadvantage; the result has been that they have been increasingly marginalised in the region's economic life (see Kerry Brown, "Xinjiang: China's security high-alert", 14 July 2009).
The Uyghur intellectual and scholar Ilham Tohti - who was detained in the wake of the Urumqi events - has offered two examples. First, the Xinjiang production and construction corps is an all-embracing institution that brings together the communist party, government, army, farms, and factories; it has taken the best farmland in Xinjiang and diverted rivers from the upper streams to its further advantage. Second, Xinjiang has been supplying oil, coal, gas and cotton to more developed Chinese regions, yet locals have to pay higher prices for some of those products than are charged in inland Chinese areas.
Ilham Tohti argues that China's Xinjiang policy is worse even than "colonialism". When foreign capital comes to china or other less-developed countries, local people at least have the chance to be "exploited" in "sweatshop factories". But when China establishes state farms, businesses, and oil companies on its own territory, it imports large numbers of Chinese workers to the area concerned. Uyghur workers have in the main not been absorbed by state factories in Xinjiang; some though have been sent 4,000 kilometres away to work in factories in Guangdong province, where the deaths of two of them in a conflict with Han Chinese workers on 25-26 June 2009 played a role in the outbreak of the violence in Urumqi (see Henryk Szadziewski, "The discovery of the Uyghurs", 9 July 2009).
An ideological disguise
Chinese communist forces entered Xinjiang in 1949 and disbanded the republic of East Turkestan. Since then, under successive systems of effective local independence and regional autonomy, China has created a facade of equality between the "nationalities". In practice, however, the new China continues to implement some elements of an older "frontier strategy": that is, using large-scale Chinese emigration to consolidate the strategically important regions across its western frontier (see "China and its Continental Borders", China Perspectives [2008/3]).
Human Rights Watch estimates that Han Chinese in Xinjiang composed 6% of the entire regional population in 1949, but had become 40% by 2007. The current figure does not include either members of the Chinese military and their families, or unregistered migrant workers. In addition, the aforementioned Xinjiang production and construction corps is the largest ever of its kind; its control of farms, mines, factories, towns, schools, hospitals, police and courts makes it in effect an independent kingdom transplanted into Xinjiang (and, significantly, it is praised by Chinese media as a "deterrence to guarantee the state's unity").
The establishment of Chinese immigration and dominance in Xinjiang, however, took place under the disguise of an ideology that was at once "supranational" and "socialist". In the communist doctrine of "proletarian internationalism", nations and national sentiments - whether of the Chinese or non-Chinese peoples - are regarded as temporary, destined to disappear into a nation-less communist commonwealth at a higher level of development.
Also in openDemocracy on Tibet:
Tenzin Tzundue, "Tibet vs China: a human-rights showdown" (15 August 2006)
Gabriel Lafitte, "Tibet: revolt with memories" (18 March 2009)
Jeffrey N Wasserstrom, "The perils of forced modernity: China-Tibet, America-Iraq" (27 March 2008)
Donald S Lopez, "How to think about Tibet" (28 March 2008)
George Fitzherbert, "Tibet's history, China's power" (28 March 2008)
Dibyesh Anand, "Tibet, China, and the west: empires of the mind" (1 April 2008)
Robert Barnett, "Tibet: questions of revolt" (4 April 2008)
Wenran Jiang, "Tibetan unrest, Chinese lens" (7 April 2008)
Ivy Wang, "China's netizens and Tibet: a Guangzhou report" (8 April 2008)
Wang Lixiong, "China and Tibet: the true path" (15 April 2008)
openDemocracy, "Chinese intellectuals and Tibet: a letter" (15 April 2008)
openDemocracy, "Tibet scholars and China: a letter" (22 April 2008)
Chang Ping, "Tibet: looking for the truth" (8 May 2008)
Fred Halliday, "Tibet, Palestine and the politics of failure" (9 May 2008)
Woeser, "The Fear in Lhasa" (10 March 2009)
Tsering Shakya, "Tibet and China: the past in the present" (18 March 2009)
Temtsel Hao, "Dharamsala: forging Tibetans' future" (29 April 2009) The supranational policy and this associated ideology were equally against local ethnic nationalisms and manifestations of Chinese chauvinism, the latter including the oppressive policies toward non-Chinese peoples pursued by (for example) the pre-1949 Chinese warlords, the Manchu dynasty, and the Kuomintang. The legitimacy of Xinjiang's integration into China is based on the claim that the common interests of the toiling masses of Chinese and non-Chinese alike made unnecessary any demands for national self-determination by local non-Chinese peoples.
An ethnic revival
Since the late 1980s the supranational emphasis of Chinese nationality policy and theory has increasingly collided with the effects of China's market-reform policies. The older official ideology has little purchase on the emergent social realities, and the state's response has been to swerve to the right by emphasising statist cohesion and the idea of an all-inclusive Chinese nation. These notions need legitimacy, which is met in part by theories that have emerged to compete for prominence - among them the "Zhong Hua nation", the "descendants of Yan and Huang", the "people of the dragon", and other quintessences of "Chinese culture" and "Chineseness".
The period when China's official ideology has swung rightwards has coincided with the country's acquisition of tremendous economic strength and political influence in the international arena. The perception of a rising China is acutely felt at home. In particular, it acts to reinforce Han Chinese ethnic identity and nationalist sentiment; this in turn influences the internal ethnic relationship, by heightening the sense of insecurity felt by non-Chinese minorities facing economic marginalisation and cultural assimilation (see Robert Barnett, "Tibet: questions of revolt", 4 April 2008).
Two more positive factors intensify the process of a sharpening of ethnic identity in regions such as Xinjiang. First, many people in Xinjiang share close ethnic affinities with those in the five central Asian and majority-Muslim states - Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. These states, which emerged out of the collapse of the former Soviet Union, represent a powerful reminder to the Uyghur in Xinjiang of their distinct identity and potentially different political loyalty in relation to their Han Chinese neighbours.
Second, the past two decades have witnessed the spread of new communication technologies such as the internet and the mobile phone. These have facilitated new forms of discourse, organisation and information flows on the part of the Uyghurs and comparable peoples. The connections between people in Xinjiang and those across the border or in the wider diaspora are an important part of this (see Yitzhak Shichor, "The Uyghurs and China: lost and found nation", 6 July 2009).
At the same time, the creation of online networks also creates the possibility that false or malicious rumours can have nefarious effects in the real world; the Guangdong violence and that in Urumqi were characterised by the online fanning of hatred between Han Chinese and Uyghurs.
Much of this online orchestration of prejudice exploits pre-existing ethnic stereotypes. It is important to recognise here that these can work both ways. For example, at the national people's congress in Beijing in 2004, I witnessed the then Xinjiang governor Ismail Tiliwaldi react with visible irritation to a formulaic question from a Hong Kong journalist that invited his comment on the large number of common crimes allegedly committed by Uyghurs in Chinese cities. Tiliwaldi reminded the questioner of the need for balanced reporting, and added that ethnic population-exchange went in both directions.
The huge number of Chinese people who have migrated to Xinjiang in recent decades include many who have been through China's own prison system; some too are survivors of the many large state prisons scattered across Xinjiang's Gobi desert). Indeed, from the Manchu dynasty to 1949, Xinjiang played a role not unlike colonial-era Australia to Britain, as the enforced destination of many of its convicts. Members of local non-Chinese minorities complain about the high proportion of convicts among the Chinese immigrant population.
The emergence of deep divisions along ethnic lines - even when they fall, as they usually do, very far short of violence - suggests that much more than cosmetic repairs and propaganda spins will be needed if the fundamental problems in areas such as Xinjiang are to be addressed.
A quiet end
Today, many Chinese regard the old system of nationality-based regional autonomy as a proven failure. They criticise what they perceive as the central state's excessively benign policy towards ethnic minorities, claiming that this extends even to treating people as above the law. They blame especially the so-called "two restraints and one leniency" policy announced by the CCP in 1984, which enjoins leniency in restraining and prosecuting crimes committed by members of minorities.
These attitudes fuel nostalgia for the "good old days" of the 1950s, when Xinjiang was under the iron reign of General Wang Zhen - notorious for his merciless handling of ethnic and religious affairs, including the massacre of large numbers of minority people. Even Mao Zedong criticised Wang Zhen for his "ultra-left" zealotry and later removed from his Xinjiang post.
Wang Lixiong recounted his personal experience in Xinjiang in his book Our West Region is Your East Turkistan. He encountered the sharp contrast of views expressed by the different nationalities about General Wang Zhen and to the Chinese warlord Sheng Shicai,who had ruled Xinjiang in the 1930-40s. The ethnic minorities in Xinjiang regarded Wang Zhen and Sheng Shicai as ruthless mass-killers; some even called Wang Lequan, the current Xinjiang party boss, "Wang Shicai". But most Chinese in Xinjiang see Wang Zhen and Sheng Shicai as national heroes who expanded and consolidated Chinese territory.
These attitudes influence political beliefs. Many influential Chinese figures - including Qian Xuesen, and other leading intellectuals and dissidents - have asked the Chinese authorities to re-examine the "favouritist" nationality policy. Some even have called for the cancellation of the existing nationality-based autonomous regions, and returned Xinjiang to its status as a Chinese province. The American model of "melting-pot" assimilation is widely regarded as the solution to China's ethnic problems.
Wang Lixiong too has more recently argued that China can do without the system of nationality-based regional autonomy, as long as individual rights are guaranteed under a democratic system. He says: "If individual rights are guaranteed, naturally the rights of ethnic groups consisting of individuals can be guaranteed; hence the nationality-based regional autonomy is no longer needed" (see Asia Week interview with Wang Lixiong, in Woeser's blog).
An impossible problem
A wider view, however, suggests that there is little empirical evidence in international history for the view of Chinese dissidents that democracy is something of a miracle solution to ethnic conflicts. Dibyesh Anand wisely comments that a "non-communist democratic China may not necessarily be more accommodative of minority interests" (see Dibyesh Anand, "China's borderlands: the need to rethink", 15 July 2009).
In theory, China historically incorporated non-Chinese regions not via the will of leaders or by naked conquest, but by forging agreements with local ethnic elites - either radical (in Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia) or conservative (Tibet). The basis of these agreements is a compromise between Chinese communist goals and non-Chinese nationalist demands for national autonomy or liberation. The pacts include the "seventeen-point agreement" and many other directives promulgated by Chinese communists and local non-Chinese communist and nationalist collaborators around 1949. The legitimacy of the nationality-based regional-autonomy system derives from these agreements (see James A Millward, Eurasian Crossroads: A History of Xinjiang [C Hurst, 2007]).
In another words, the major ethnic minorities of the autonomous regions consider that they joined the People's Republic of China in 1949 as groups - with their elites (revolutionary or conservative as the case may be) as their political representatives in the new system.
But after 1949, the ethnic elites within the system were gradually purged and replaced by more obedient ethnic cadres, who became the only legitimate representatives of their groups left within the system. China's lordly policy toward non-Chinese nationalism means that non-Chinese minority cadres have more worries than their Chinese counterparts about defending local interests (see Tsering Shakya, "Tibet and China: the past in the present", 18 March 2009).
Now, sixty years on from 1949, the nationality system may serve a legitimation purpose for China as a multi-ethnic state - but in practice it has lost its original meaning. China is at a crossroads: after decades of capitalist reform, state control - including the nationality system - is in deep tension with forces of unrestrained economic change.
In this respect, the call for American-style assimilationism to deal with non-Chinese minorities represents support for a market-forces solution: one that (it is argued) tends to break down regional and ethnic barriers, and replace ethnic relations with individually-based economic relations. The logic is that as a result the state's core character would change from a multi-ethnic one into a homogenous nation-state.
A tough choice
The way Chinese authorities have responded to the Xinjiang riots has been criticised by both the Chinese public and Uighur exile groups. It is Chinese authority's supranational (even ostensibly "neutral") stance - seeing the riots not as an ethnic incident but as a political one - that is scorned come by Chinese (for the "official" position, see Fu Ying, "Unity is Deep in China's Blood", Guardian, 13 July 2009).
For the Uyghurs in Xinjiang and other non-Chinese minorities, the great concern is how far Chinese authority can resist increasingly populist opinion and retain this limited neutrality. The answer to this question will affect how far and how much non-Chinese minorities can identify with the state. As China's society becomes more loose and state power recedes, government policy is more and more subject to social influences.
The Chinese authorities face a tough choice over how they maintain the state's legitimacy and deal with ethnic relations (see Tsering Shakya, "Tibet and China: the past in the present", 18 March 2009). If they seek to respond to growing Han Chinese ethnic nationalism by accelerating assimilation of non-Chinese groups, this would provoke the minority-nationalist causes with which the Chinese state found some accommodation in 1949: national self-determination and national liberation. But if they seek to amend and improve existing multi-ethnic arrangements to improve inter-ethnic relations in autonomous regions, they risk severe problems with Chinese business interests and popular opinions.
China has no easy way out. The fires of Lhasa, and now Urumqi, cannot be extinguished without the most intelligent and sophisticated policy mix. But even that might not be enough. Several genies are out of the bottle, and flying free. Welcome to the 21st century, China.
Temtsel Hao, 23 - 07 - 2009
The interplay between local identity, state policy, and economic change is at the core of the violent events in Tibet in 2008 and Xinjiang in 2009. The Chinese government’s predicament in finding a workable policy in response is severe, says Temtsel Hao.
23 - 07 - 2009
The ethnic protests and clashes in China's westernmost region of Xinjiang on 5-6 July 2009 and the following days have caused around 200 deaths. The deadly violence, mainly between the Uyghur (and Muslim) population and the Han Chinese - but also involving the security forces killing some protesting Uyghurs, in circumstances that are not yet clear - has shocked and polarised public opinion across China. They have also focused renewed attention on the sensitive and complex theme of the relationship between different ethnic groups in the People's Republic of China.
Temtsel Hao is a journalist based in London, working for the BBC World Service
Also by Temtsel Hao in openDemocracy:
"Dharamsala: forging Tibetans' future" (29 April 2009The argument can be heard on either side of the divide in Xinjiang that the political arrangements in the region don't match its socio-economic circumstances. Uyghurs are unhappy with the tokenism of "nationality policies", and demand more participation and more of a share in the Xinjiang economy and its social proceeds; Han Chinese are unhappy with what they see as official favouritism towards the Uyghurs, and seek to remove the guarantees of autonomy and special treatment that Uyghurs (and other ethnic minorities) are supposed to benefit from.
A balance of favour
The events of early July 2009 - which mainly, not not exclusively, occurred in Xinjiang's capital, Urumqi - reflect the deeper processes of rapid economic growth and social transformation during in the 1990s and 2000s. In particular, the national policies of China's leadership in opening the economy, creating new labour-market mechanisms, and encouraging internal-migration flows have had profound effects in this region (as elsewhere).
These processes have accompanied China's historic shift from a centrally planned to a market economy, which has made it the manufacturing centre of the world. Many have benefited, but there have also been great problems, including new development gaps - between urban and rural areas, coastal regions and inland/frontier areas, and prosperous and poor in the same places. In addition, there are huge insecurities: many people in China have lost the assurance of a lifetime job and the social safety-nets that they enjoyed a generation ago.
Also on Xinjiang in openDemocracy:
James Millward, "China's story: putting the PR into the PRC" (18 April 2008)
Henryk Szadziewski, "Kashgar"s old city: the politics of demolition" (3 April 2009)
Yitzhak Shichor, "The Uyghurs and China: lost and found nation" (6 July 2009)
Henryk Szadziewski, "The discovery of the Uyghurs" (9 July 2009)
Kerry Brown, "Xinjiang: China's security high-alert" (14 July 2009)
Dibyesh Anand, "China's borderlands: the need to rethink" (15 July 2009)In Xinjiang, this "uneven development" has in the eyes of many Uyghurs become institutionalised along ethnic lines to their disadvantage; the result has been that they have been increasingly marginalised in the region's economic life (see Kerry Brown, "Xinjiang: China's security high-alert", 14 July 2009).
The Uyghur intellectual and scholar Ilham Tohti - who was detained in the wake of the Urumqi events - has offered two examples. First, the Xinjiang production and construction corps is an all-embracing institution that brings together the communist party, government, army, farms, and factories; it has taken the best farmland in Xinjiang and diverted rivers from the upper streams to its further advantage. Second, Xinjiang has been supplying oil, coal, gas and cotton to more developed Chinese regions, yet locals have to pay higher prices for some of those products than are charged in inland Chinese areas.
Ilham Tohti argues that China's Xinjiang policy is worse even than "colonialism". When foreign capital comes to china or other less-developed countries, local people at least have the chance to be "exploited" in "sweatshop factories". But when China establishes state farms, businesses, and oil companies on its own territory, it imports large numbers of Chinese workers to the area concerned. Uyghur workers have in the main not been absorbed by state factories in Xinjiang; some though have been sent 4,000 kilometres away to work in factories in Guangdong province, where the deaths of two of them in a conflict with Han Chinese workers on 25-26 June 2009 played a role in the outbreak of the violence in Urumqi (see Henryk Szadziewski, "The discovery of the Uyghurs", 9 July 2009).
An ideological disguise
Chinese communist forces entered Xinjiang in 1949 and disbanded the republic of East Turkestan. Since then, under successive systems of effective local independence and regional autonomy, China has created a facade of equality between the "nationalities". In practice, however, the new China continues to implement some elements of an older "frontier strategy": that is, using large-scale Chinese emigration to consolidate the strategically important regions across its western frontier (see "China and its Continental Borders", China Perspectives [2008/3]).
Human Rights Watch estimates that Han Chinese in Xinjiang composed 6% of the entire regional population in 1949, but had become 40% by 2007. The current figure does not include either members of the Chinese military and their families, or unregistered migrant workers. In addition, the aforementioned Xinjiang production and construction corps is the largest ever of its kind; its control of farms, mines, factories, towns, schools, hospitals, police and courts makes it in effect an independent kingdom transplanted into Xinjiang (and, significantly, it is praised by Chinese media as a "deterrence to guarantee the state's unity").
The establishment of Chinese immigration and dominance in Xinjiang, however, took place under the disguise of an ideology that was at once "supranational" and "socialist". In the communist doctrine of "proletarian internationalism", nations and national sentiments - whether of the Chinese or non-Chinese peoples - are regarded as temporary, destined to disappear into a nation-less communist commonwealth at a higher level of development.
Also in openDemocracy on Tibet:
Tenzin Tzundue, "Tibet vs China: a human-rights showdown" (15 August 2006)
Gabriel Lafitte, "Tibet: revolt with memories" (18 March 2009)
Jeffrey N Wasserstrom, "The perils of forced modernity: China-Tibet, America-Iraq" (27 March 2008)
Donald S Lopez, "How to think about Tibet" (28 March 2008)
George Fitzherbert, "Tibet's history, China's power" (28 March 2008)
Dibyesh Anand, "Tibet, China, and the west: empires of the mind" (1 April 2008)
Robert Barnett, "Tibet: questions of revolt" (4 April 2008)
Wenran Jiang, "Tibetan unrest, Chinese lens" (7 April 2008)
Ivy Wang, "China's netizens and Tibet: a Guangzhou report" (8 April 2008)
Wang Lixiong, "China and Tibet: the true path" (15 April 2008)
openDemocracy, "Chinese intellectuals and Tibet: a letter" (15 April 2008)
openDemocracy, "Tibet scholars and China: a letter" (22 April 2008)
Chang Ping, "Tibet: looking for the truth" (8 May 2008)
Fred Halliday, "Tibet, Palestine and the politics of failure" (9 May 2008)
Woeser, "The Fear in Lhasa" (10 March 2009)
Tsering Shakya, "Tibet and China: the past in the present" (18 March 2009)
Temtsel Hao, "Dharamsala: forging Tibetans' future" (29 April 2009) The supranational policy and this associated ideology were equally against local ethnic nationalisms and manifestations of Chinese chauvinism, the latter including the oppressive policies toward non-Chinese peoples pursued by (for example) the pre-1949 Chinese warlords, the Manchu dynasty, and the Kuomintang. The legitimacy of Xinjiang's integration into China is based on the claim that the common interests of the toiling masses of Chinese and non-Chinese alike made unnecessary any demands for national self-determination by local non-Chinese peoples.
An ethnic revival
Since the late 1980s the supranational emphasis of Chinese nationality policy and theory has increasingly collided with the effects of China's market-reform policies. The older official ideology has little purchase on the emergent social realities, and the state's response has been to swerve to the right by emphasising statist cohesion and the idea of an all-inclusive Chinese nation. These notions need legitimacy, which is met in part by theories that have emerged to compete for prominence - among them the "Zhong Hua nation", the "descendants of Yan and Huang", the "people of the dragon", and other quintessences of "Chinese culture" and "Chineseness".
The period when China's official ideology has swung rightwards has coincided with the country's acquisition of tremendous economic strength and political influence in the international arena. The perception of a rising China is acutely felt at home. In particular, it acts to reinforce Han Chinese ethnic identity and nationalist sentiment; this in turn influences the internal ethnic relationship, by heightening the sense of insecurity felt by non-Chinese minorities facing economic marginalisation and cultural assimilation (see Robert Barnett, "Tibet: questions of revolt", 4 April 2008).
Two more positive factors intensify the process of a sharpening of ethnic identity in regions such as Xinjiang. First, many people in Xinjiang share close ethnic affinities with those in the five central Asian and majority-Muslim states - Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. These states, which emerged out of the collapse of the former Soviet Union, represent a powerful reminder to the Uyghur in Xinjiang of their distinct identity and potentially different political loyalty in relation to their Han Chinese neighbours.
Second, the past two decades have witnessed the spread of new communication technologies such as the internet and the mobile phone. These have facilitated new forms of discourse, organisation and information flows on the part of the Uyghurs and comparable peoples. The connections between people in Xinjiang and those across the border or in the wider diaspora are an important part of this (see Yitzhak Shichor, "The Uyghurs and China: lost and found nation", 6 July 2009).
At the same time, the creation of online networks also creates the possibility that false or malicious rumours can have nefarious effects in the real world; the Guangdong violence and that in Urumqi were characterised by the online fanning of hatred between Han Chinese and Uyghurs.
Much of this online orchestration of prejudice exploits pre-existing ethnic stereotypes. It is important to recognise here that these can work both ways. For example, at the national people's congress in Beijing in 2004, I witnessed the then Xinjiang governor Ismail Tiliwaldi react with visible irritation to a formulaic question from a Hong Kong journalist that invited his comment on the large number of common crimes allegedly committed by Uyghurs in Chinese cities. Tiliwaldi reminded the questioner of the need for balanced reporting, and added that ethnic population-exchange went in both directions.
The huge number of Chinese people who have migrated to Xinjiang in recent decades include many who have been through China's own prison system; some too are survivors of the many large state prisons scattered across Xinjiang's Gobi desert). Indeed, from the Manchu dynasty to 1949, Xinjiang played a role not unlike colonial-era Australia to Britain, as the enforced destination of many of its convicts. Members of local non-Chinese minorities complain about the high proportion of convicts among the Chinese immigrant population.
The emergence of deep divisions along ethnic lines - even when they fall, as they usually do, very far short of violence - suggests that much more than cosmetic repairs and propaganda spins will be needed if the fundamental problems in areas such as Xinjiang are to be addressed.
A quiet end
Today, many Chinese regard the old system of nationality-based regional autonomy as a proven failure. They criticise what they perceive as the central state's excessively benign policy towards ethnic minorities, claiming that this extends even to treating people as above the law. They blame especially the so-called "two restraints and one leniency" policy announced by the CCP in 1984, which enjoins leniency in restraining and prosecuting crimes committed by members of minorities.
These attitudes fuel nostalgia for the "good old days" of the 1950s, when Xinjiang was under the iron reign of General Wang Zhen - notorious for his merciless handling of ethnic and religious affairs, including the massacre of large numbers of minority people. Even Mao Zedong criticised Wang Zhen for his "ultra-left" zealotry and later removed from his Xinjiang post.
Wang Lixiong recounted his personal experience in Xinjiang in his book Our West Region is Your East Turkistan. He encountered the sharp contrast of views expressed by the different nationalities about General Wang Zhen and to the Chinese warlord Sheng Shicai,who had ruled Xinjiang in the 1930-40s. The ethnic minorities in Xinjiang regarded Wang Zhen and Sheng Shicai as ruthless mass-killers; some even called Wang Lequan, the current Xinjiang party boss, "Wang Shicai". But most Chinese in Xinjiang see Wang Zhen and Sheng Shicai as national heroes who expanded and consolidated Chinese territory.
These attitudes influence political beliefs. Many influential Chinese figures - including Qian Xuesen, and other leading intellectuals and dissidents - have asked the Chinese authorities to re-examine the "favouritist" nationality policy. Some even have called for the cancellation of the existing nationality-based autonomous regions, and returned Xinjiang to its status as a Chinese province. The American model of "melting-pot" assimilation is widely regarded as the solution to China's ethnic problems.
Wang Lixiong too has more recently argued that China can do without the system of nationality-based regional autonomy, as long as individual rights are guaranteed under a democratic system. He says: "If individual rights are guaranteed, naturally the rights of ethnic groups consisting of individuals can be guaranteed; hence the nationality-based regional autonomy is no longer needed" (see Asia Week interview with Wang Lixiong, in Woeser's blog).
An impossible problem
A wider view, however, suggests that there is little empirical evidence in international history for the view of Chinese dissidents that democracy is something of a miracle solution to ethnic conflicts. Dibyesh Anand wisely comments that a "non-communist democratic China may not necessarily be more accommodative of minority interests" (see Dibyesh Anand, "China's borderlands: the need to rethink", 15 July 2009).
In theory, China historically incorporated non-Chinese regions not via the will of leaders or by naked conquest, but by forging agreements with local ethnic elites - either radical (in Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia) or conservative (Tibet). The basis of these agreements is a compromise between Chinese communist goals and non-Chinese nationalist demands for national autonomy or liberation. The pacts include the "seventeen-point agreement" and many other directives promulgated by Chinese communists and local non-Chinese communist and nationalist collaborators around 1949. The legitimacy of the nationality-based regional-autonomy system derives from these agreements (see James A Millward, Eurasian Crossroads: A History of Xinjiang [C Hurst, 2007]).
In another words, the major ethnic minorities of the autonomous regions consider that they joined the People's Republic of China in 1949 as groups - with their elites (revolutionary or conservative as the case may be) as their political representatives in the new system.
But after 1949, the ethnic elites within the system were gradually purged and replaced by more obedient ethnic cadres, who became the only legitimate representatives of their groups left within the system. China's lordly policy toward non-Chinese nationalism means that non-Chinese minority cadres have more worries than their Chinese counterparts about defending local interests (see Tsering Shakya, "Tibet and China: the past in the present", 18 March 2009).
Now, sixty years on from 1949, the nationality system may serve a legitimation purpose for China as a multi-ethnic state - but in practice it has lost its original meaning. China is at a crossroads: after decades of capitalist reform, state control - including the nationality system - is in deep tension with forces of unrestrained economic change.
In this respect, the call for American-style assimilationism to deal with non-Chinese minorities represents support for a market-forces solution: one that (it is argued) tends to break down regional and ethnic barriers, and replace ethnic relations with individually-based economic relations. The logic is that as a result the state's core character would change from a multi-ethnic one into a homogenous nation-state.
A tough choice
The way Chinese authorities have responded to the Xinjiang riots has been criticised by both the Chinese public and Uighur exile groups. It is Chinese authority's supranational (even ostensibly "neutral") stance - seeing the riots not as an ethnic incident but as a political one - that is scorned come by Chinese (for the "official" position, see Fu Ying, "Unity is Deep in China's Blood", Guardian, 13 July 2009).
For the Uyghurs in Xinjiang and other non-Chinese minorities, the great concern is how far Chinese authority can resist increasingly populist opinion and retain this limited neutrality. The answer to this question will affect how far and how much non-Chinese minorities can identify with the state. As China's society becomes more loose and state power recedes, government policy is more and more subject to social influences.
The Chinese authorities face a tough choice over how they maintain the state's legitimacy and deal with ethnic relations (see Tsering Shakya, "Tibet and China: the past in the present", 18 March 2009). If they seek to respond to growing Han Chinese ethnic nationalism by accelerating assimilation of non-Chinese groups, this would provoke the minority-nationalist causes with which the Chinese state found some accommodation in 1949: national self-determination and national liberation. But if they seek to amend and improve existing multi-ethnic arrangements to improve inter-ethnic relations in autonomous regions, they risk severe problems with Chinese business interests and popular opinions.
China has no easy way out. The fires of Lhasa, and now Urumqi, cannot be extinguished without the most intelligent and sophisticated policy mix. But even that might not be enough. Several genies are out of the bottle, and flying free. Welcome to the 21st century, China.
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