China's Ethnic Tension Isn't Limited to Tibet
Published 04/9/2008 | Featured Articles and Highlights
The Wall Street Journal
By GORDON FAIRCLOUGH
April 5, 2008; Page A5
This outpost of the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps is home to nearly 20,000 ethnic Han Chinese, transplanted from China's eastern heartland to this arid border territory -- which is home to a large Turkic Muslim population.
Such settlements, combined with large infrastructure investments and, at times, heavy-handed measures to silence dissent, were supposed to cement government authority in Xinjiang. But a new protest by Turkic Uighurs and continued unrest in Tibetan areas illustrate the limitations of Beijing's approach to dealing with minorities.
Roughly 2.3 million Han Chinese, China's dominant ethnic group, now live in settlements set up by the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, an outgrowth of the People's Liberation Army forces that occupied Xinjiang in 1949. The Corps has built highways, railroads, power plants and universities.
Coupled with this drive for economic advancement is a second function: security. The Corps says its plays "an irreplaceable, special role" in "cracking down" on separatists. Members can function as an armed militia to work side-by-side with the army and police forces.
"The battle against ethnic separatism and invasion has never stopped," Zhao Guangyong, the Corps' vice secretary general, said in an interview. The Corps plays a "very important role in promoting national unity."
The Corps' dual duties reflect the central government's general approach toward ethnic-minority groups: Try to win them over with economic growth, while stamping out opposition to Beijing. In Xinjiang, that has meant restricting both religious freedoms and civil rights.
"It's a very volatile situation," says Nicholas Bequelin, a China researcher for Human Rights Watch, a New York-based advocacy group. "People feel their cultural identity is being threatened."
As China this past week sought to contain unrest in Tibetan areas following violent riots in Lhasa on March 14, it acknowledged for the first time that a protest had also taken place in Xinjiang.
On March 23 demonstrators in a market in the southern Xinjiang city of Hotan unfurled banners and handed out fliers urging their fellow Uighurs (pronounced WEE-gers) to join an independence movement, the government there says. Police moved quickly to silence what authorities described in a statement issued Tuesday as "a small group" of Uighurs trying to "trick the masses into an uprising."
Fu Chao, an official with the Hotan district administration, said the Uighur protesters had been inspired by events in Tibet and that they were calling for the creation of an independent Islamic state in Xinjiang.
Security in Xinjiang has been stepped up. Uighur activists say that as soon as protests started in Tibet, China began detaining suspected Uighur dissidents in an effort to prevent unrest from spreading to Xinjiang, which shares a long border with Tibet.
Tensions had already been building. Chinese officials say they arrested a Uighur woman last month who was part of a failed Muslim separatist plot to hijack a Chinese jetliner. In February, Chinese police also raided what they said was a meeting of Islamic terrorists and shot and killed two men and arrested 15 others near Xinjiang's capital, Urumqi.
China's state-controlled Xinhua News Agency reported Friday that fresh protests occured Thursday night in a Tibetan area of the southwestern province of Sichuan. Xinhua said one government official was injured in the unrest.
The International Campaign for Tibet on Friday released its own account of the incident, saying at least eight people were killed on Thursday in western Sichuan province after armed police fired on a crowd of several hundred monks and local residents. The protests took place outside the Tongkor monastery 60 kilometers from Ganzi town, the pro-Tibet organization said in a statement.
The statement said Chinese officials who were inspecting the monastery threw pictures of the Dalai Lama and told monks to denounce the spiritual leaders, who has been living as an exile in India since 1959. The monks objected and skirmishes broke out, the statement said.
When contacted, local government officials and residents declined or were unable to confirm details of the unrest..
Xinjiang is strategically critical for China. It accounts for a sixth of China's territory, and is an important oil-producing region and home to China's nuclear-weapons test sites. It also has more than 5,600 kilometers (3,480 miles) of borders with eight neighboring states.
The cause of Uighur human rights has drawn far less international attention than that of Tibetans. Tibet activists have gained a global following thanks in part to backing by celebrities and the charisma of the Dalai Lama, Tibetan Buddhists' exiled spiritual leader. Another factor, Uighur human-rights advocates say: Uighurs are predominantly Muslim. Since the September 11, 2001, terror attacks in the U.S., China has sought to portray its battle against Uighur-rights campaigners as a fight against Islamic terrorism.
Now, the Tibetan protests and the pending Beijing Olympics, which are set to begin in August, are spurring Uighurs abroad to speak out -- and to explicitly link their aspirations to those of Tibetans. Thursday, hundreds of Uighur demonstrators gathered in Istanbul for an anti-China protest during the Olympic torch relay passed through the city.
"Tibetans and Uighurs both want to live in peace and freedom," says Rebiya Kadeer, president of the Uyghur American Association, a Washington-based advocacy group. "Both people should have the right to self-determination."
Ms. Kadeer, who was jailed by China for more than five years and now lives in exile in the U.S., says "power and prosperity" have been reserved for Chinese settlers in Xinjiang and Tibet, "while Uighurs and Tibetans have been pushed into poverty."
Xinjiang, which lies astride the ancient Silk Road trading corridor between east and west, has a long and complicated history of shifting peoples, rulers and religions. China's Qing dynasty annexed the area in the 1700s. During turmoil in China in the first half of the twentieth century, Uighurs and members of other ethnic groups twice declared an independent republic, known as East Turkestan. Then in 1949, Chinese Communist forces moved in.
Since then, many ethnic Han people have moved to Xinjiang seeking a better life. Roughly 30% of the Han people of Xinjiang live in areas administered by the Corps. In total, the Han population of Xinjiang grew by more than 600,000 between 2000 and 2006, according to the government.
The Han Chinese of the Corps, many of them descendents of Chinese soldiers ordered to settle the region, see themselves as heroic pioneers, battling an unforgiving environment and often hostile natives to bring civilization to their county's frontier. "It's just like the American West," says Zhu Yun, the top political officer of Unit 150, looking out past newly plowed fields as a cold wind blew in from the desert.
To many Uighurs, Han immigrants are viewed as alien interlopers taking their land, competing for resources and threatening to overwhelm their traditional culture.
Amid the sands of the Junggar Basin here, Unit 150's settlers have carved out thousands of acres of irrigated farmlands, where they grow cotton, grapes and wheat. They have built schools, a hospital and even a television station.
Down the road, the Corps has built its biggest installation, a city of 650,000 people, called Shihezi. Many have prospered. On the Shihezi's outskirts, Lu Liping and his wife, Zhao Yanli, toil on a 1.5-acre plot of land that they enrich with soil carried from a nearby river bank. This year, they are growing grapes, peanuts and cabbage.
Mr. Lu's father came to Xinjiang as a soldier in the People's Liberation Army and stayed on as a rancher on a collective farm. As a boy, Mr. Lu lived in a primitive earthen walled house. "You can see how I live now," he says, pointing to his yellow-painted home with tile floors.
Mr. Lu has done well enough to send his son to university in the east-coast city of Tianjin. His daughter works in a beauty salon in the provincial capital, Urumqi. His work, he says, "is important and good for the country."
Much of the Corps' activity is large scale. It grows 50% of the cotton and 70% of the tomato paste produced in the territory. It publishes 17 newspapers and runs radio and TV stations. It has about 1,400 commercial enterprises, including construction and transportation business, and is parent to 13 publicly traded companies. Annual output last year totaled about $6.2 billion, the Corps says.
Mr. Zhao from the Corps says it is "a very important support for the people Xinjiang" and that the Han Chinese who have migrated westward to join the Corps have brought with them "advanced technology and modern ideas" to Xinjiang.
Most Uighurs are happy that overall economic growth in Xinjiang has been strong. But some say the Uighur community has received few direct benefits from Corps work or from Han Chinese-run businesses.
"Uighurs are not of one mind about this," says Dru C. Gladney, a professor at Pomona College in Claremont, Calif., who studies Xinjiang. Some urban Uighurs, especially those engaged in trading, have seen significant benefits. Mr. Gladney also says many economic issues cut across ethnic lines. He says, for example, that Uighurs and long-term Han residents often share resentment toward new migrants.
Another source of friction is government restrictions on religious practice. Uighurs who work for the government or attend government schools are largely barred from attending services in mosques, Uighurs and human-rights groups say. The government also prohibits Uighurs from undertaking the pilgrimage to Mecca except as part of government-supervised groups.
Distrust continues between Uighurs and Han Chinese. One Uighur man working in Shanghai, when asked how Uighurs feel about government policy, said: "I can't tell you the truth. It would be illegal."
China's Ethnic Tension Isn't Limited to Tibet
ahh at times i always wonder why Indians are always obssesed with handful of commies in India
