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China's Dangerous Delusion
When university students in the city of Urumqi took to the streets to express their dissatisfaction, police arrived and violence broke out. Chinese officials say 184 people were killed and 1,680 were injured—mainly Han Chinese. Uighur sources counter that hundreds of Uighurs were killed after police allegedly opened fire.
It’s still unclear what really happened, but the murder of two Uighur factory workers would not have been enough to ignite such a reaction.
During my recent visit to Xinjiang, Uighurs told me of unprecedented and far-reaching restrictions on the practice of Islam. Imams, Muslim religious leaders, are hand-selected and controlled by the government, and some religious schools are banned. Uighurs in Hotan say there are hidden cameras at some mosques and that plainclothes police watch who enters these places of worship. Women, children, university students, and government officials are all banned from entering mosques.
University students told of government attempts to make them break the annual Ramadan fast, while government employees said they were prohibited from wearing a doppa, the popular Muslim hat. “I can’t even grow a beard,” a high-school teacher quietly confided to me.
The government has seized the passports of Uighurs, and it also restricts them from participating in the hajj, the annual Muslim pilgrimage to the Mecca. Throughout the older parts of the city of Kashgar, an admonition has been stenciled on the walls of houses in both Arabic and Chinese: “Unauthorized religious pilgrimages are illegal religious activities.”
Observers say the Chinese government is carrying out systematic cultural genocide. The Chinese government has launched a large-scale migration that has seen the ratio of ethnic Chinese rise from just 5 percent in 1949 to more than 40 percent today. Meanwhile, Uighur sources say several hundred thousand young Uighur woman have been forced to work in factories in eastern China. Teachers told me of a government decision to halt the teaching of the Uighur language in schools beginning in 2012. Earlier this year, the government went ahead with an unpopular plan to raze Kashgar’s colorful Old Town, a symbol of traditional Uighur culture that housed 40 percent of the city’s Uighur population.
No one who watches Xinjiang closely was surprised by what happened. As Uighur-American lawyer Nury Turkel wrote in a commentary last week: “Of course the Uighurs are fed up; they are living in an open prison.”
President Hu Jintao cut short his attendance at the G-8 summit in Italy to return to Beijing on July 7. But anyone hoping that Hu would calm the situation by admitting to mistakes, or deal with the issue in the spirit of the “harmonious society” that he’s always talking about, was surely disappointed. Shortly after his return, the nine-member Political Bureau Standing Committee, headed by Hu, responded with a harshly worded statement that promised “severe punishment” of the culprits involved in the incident in Urumqi.
Chinese media coverage of the violence has portrayed Uighurs in a very negative light, much as it did Tibetans during the disturbances in Tibet last year, fueling angry Chinese nationalist sentiments. 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.
This is all a bad omen.
China is facing growing unemployment, inflation, a dangerously widening gap between rich and poor, and increasing human-rights violations. Recent months have seen dozens of public protests, and not just from minorities. Chinese farmers, factory workers, taxi drivers, and the urban class are increasingly taking to the streets.
Unless the Communist Party abandons self-denial and its blind faith in brute force as its modus operandi for dealing with problems, it can expect to face an ever-increasing number of challenges to its rule. But it’s unlikely that this will happen any time soon. The Communist Party is in serious need of help.
Paul Mooney, a freelance journalist, has been reporting from Beijing since 1994.
John Talks Joe
Lloyd Grove is editor at large for The Daily Beast. He is also a frequent contributor to New York magazine and was a contributing editor for Condé Nast Portfolio. He wrote a gossip column for the New York Daily News from 2003 to 2006. Prior to that, he wrote the Reliable Source column for the Washington Post, where he spent 23 years covering politics, the media, and other subjects.
Amateur Hour at the White House
Leslie H. Gelb, a former New York Times columnist and senior government official, is author of Power Rules: How Common Sense Can Rescue American Foreign Policy (HarperCollins 2009), a book that shows how to think about and use power in the 21st century. He is president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Going Rogue: The Index
Christopher Buckley's books include Supreme Courtship, The White House Mess, Thank You for Smoking, Little Green Men, and Florence of Arabia. He was chief speechwriter for Vice President George H.W. Bush, and is editor-at-large of ForbesLife magazine. His new book is Losing Mum and Pup, a memoir. Buckley's Daily Beast column is the winner of an Online Journalism Award in the category of Online Commentary.
I suggest you stop MEDDLING in CHINA's AFFAIRS................it is none of our business. Leave China alone.................We do not need another enemy.
Gee, isn't harmony a wonderful thing?
While this is certainly a mess, I doubt the Uygur-Han conflict can be avoided even if China has a democratic government. Not everything is because of CCP. Chinese have been fighting for the influnce in central Asia for thousand of years, this is essentially a continuation of that. Whatever government in Beijing, they will not let Xinjiang secede, this is nothing unique to CCP.
You might be under-estimating the capability of the CCP government. Afterall, they led a 30 year continuous economic growth that would impress any governments. They do know a few things on how to manage China. While some might think the riots are failures of CCP policy, many in Chinese government would think this conflicts are unavoidable due to the accelerated pace of integration into China. One can not ignore the fact that the current Chinese government has done a rather decent job of economical development.
As the Xinjiang expert Dru Gladney said, unless China implodes, Xinjiang will stay in China and the integration would continue, whatever party runs China.
> Afterall, they led a 30 year continuous economic growth that would impress any governments.
Of course it helps to look at the 60-year story. If you take one of the world's smallest and weakest economies and then drive it into the ground, killing tens of millions of citizens in the process, it would be pretty difficult not to engineer some kind of improvement e.g. by the simple process of actually allowing a few people to start private businesses. When your economy is so miniscule growth doesn't amount to much and isn't hard to achieve. They really deserve credit for this? Just about any one else running China would have avoided the first 30 years, not murdered tens of millions, and promoted economic growth from the start, which given China's astonishingly low labour costs would hardly have been difficult.
Furthermore, China's growth, while it does exist, is nothing like as great as is publicised. The sole source of statistics is the government itself, and it lies consistently. The statistics themselves are internally inconsistent, and economists simply discount 2% of growth to start with, and work down from there. But even that growth that does exist has its benefits distributed with a lack of equity hardly paralleled anywhere else in the world, and the disparity between the rich and the poor is now even wider than it was when the so-called party of the people took power.
None of this is 'a decent job of economical [sic] development' by any usual measure. It is, in fact, a nightmare.
Amongst the several hundred million losers are the Uighur people, who in addition suffer from having their homeland occupied by alien people with zero tolerance for them, who repress and suppress them and their culture at every turn.
Unfortunately it's rare that a democracy campaigner (with the exception of the nearly forgotten Wei Jingsheng) would even consider anything other than continued Han occupation of Xinjiang (and Tibet, or dropping claims over Taiwan), suggesting a limited understanding of the word 'democracy'. That doesn't mean that China should not move towards democratic government of a better kind, or that democratic government within East Turkestan would not benefit its natives.
Unfortunately this seems very unlikely to happen.
Do be serious.
China considers the US an enemy, and has for sometime. Granted, the US earned it in the 19th century, and again in the 20th, but then, China has earned the appellation from the US several times over. Ultimately, the US is China's enemy, not through an active conflict, but through the dichotomy of rule of law, individual rights and democratic power and the rule by despots, capricious and self-serving.
China is an insular country, and though it gave up rule by emperors for rule by Communists, it did not give up the idea that China is the Middle Kingdom, better than all others on earth by divine right.
Divinity dos not make mistakes and has no need to search its conscience.
There is the rule of China in a nutshell.
" Divinity dos (sic) not make mistakes and has no need to search its conscience"...Sounds like any republican talking about Rush Limbaugh.
No one should be under the illusion that the Uiguhrs can win. The ChiComs will crush them they way they crushed the Tienamen protests. The Han outnumber everyone else in China by at least 15:1. What's more, then China crushes them, we won't even know until long after the fact.
Thank you.
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