China's Dangerous Delusion

Ng Han Guan / AP Photo Beijing’s response to the Uighur massacre is just like its reaction to last year’s Tibet uprising—self-denial and scapegoating. Until the party honchos realize their own abusive rule is to blame, they’ll face increasing challenges to their power.

The Communist Party has serious psychological problems dealing with reality and belongs on a psychiatrist’s couch.

When the worst violence in decades broke out in China’s far northwest on July 5, the Chinese government responded by falling back on a tried and trusted method: Sink into self-denial and push the blame on scapegoats, some as far away as the United States.

The Communist Party may gain in the short run by deflecting attention from its own failures, but in the long run the growing divide between Han Chinese and the country’s ethnic minorities is widening by the day.

The steadfast refusal even to consider that the violence may have been the result of decades of well-documented harsh misrule over the Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking Muslim people who are the majority in Xinjiang, means we can expect to see many more such incidents around China in the future.

The government was quick to blame the violence on the World Uyghur Congress, based in Washington, and its 62-year-old leader, Rebiya Kadeer, a former businesswoman in China and former member of the National People’s Congress who spent five years as a political prisoner before being exiled. A few days later, the official People’s Daily pointed a finger at the United States, saying it funded the WUC and other overseas Uighur organizations.

On Friday, a spokesman for the ministry of foreign affairs argued that government policy toward China’s 55 ethnic groups was praiseworthy, and he accused outside forces of being behind trouble.

“Last year it was the Dalai Lama, this year it’s Rebiya Kadeer,” he said.

The ministry spokesman emphasized that the trouble had nothing to do with ethnicity or religion, adding, “It’s a fight between us and separatist forces.”

When this reporter asked if there was concrete evidence of outside involvement, he replied simply that proof would later be released.

The government has a history of looking outside its own conscience when such problems emerge. In the past, it has attempted to pin blame for a number of violent incidents on the East Turkistan Islamic Movement. However, Xinjiang experts and Uighurs living overseas say the organization no longer exists, never had more than two handfuls of members, and the Chinese never offered evidence that the group was ever involved in terrorist attacks. They say the Chinese government inflates claims of organized terrorism as an excuse for cracking down on any dissenting opinion in the region.

The fact is that this most recent incident had nothing to do with Kadeer or the U.S. government. It was simply the result of decades of abusive Chinese rule.

The initial spark was the murder of two Uighur factory workers in Shaoguan, Guangdong Province, after word spread that a Uighur had raped a Chinese woman. The rape turned out to be a rumor, but it took the police two weeks to provide details and no arrests were immediately made. Meanwhile, news of the murders spread throughout Xinjiang via the Internet and anger mounted over the government’s inaction.