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Sol Sanders Archive
Wednesday, July 8, 2009     FOLLOW UPDATES ON TWITTER

The Uighurs: Only the tip of China’s growing security crisis

Sol Sanders also writes the "Asia Investor" column weekly for EAST-ASIA-INTEL.com.

Pictures of the bloody rioting in Urumchi, the capital of what the Chinese have called Singkiang but even in recent times has been called variously Chinese or East Turkistan by others, have enormous implications for the Beijing regime. In the short run, the Chinese may in their own inimitable way suppress the outburst. But the wider implications for the Chinese Communist leadership were dramatized when President Hu Jintao canceled his participation at the G-8 meeting in Italy to rush back to Beijing.   

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As everything in one of the longest histories in the modern world, the Uighur “problem” for Beijing has an extensive history. The attempted domination of the minerals rich area [Singkiang means “new frontier” in the Chinese official Mandarin dialect] by Han Chinese goes back, fitfully, over centuries, with occasional independent local regimes — some recently with Russian/Soviet assistance. But Chinese rule has always been something of an anomaly; when it has been in Han Chinese hands, Singkiang has been a garrison state, largely secured through the efforts of Han Chinese military and their local puppets. [Official Beijing calls the region Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.]

But there has never been much of an effort to hide the mail fist with the kind of the overwhelming cloak of one of the world’s oldest civilizations, the Chinese. This has been true not only in the on and off Chinese control in the last century of domination by the Kuomintang Republic of China but by the Chinese Communists since they came to power in 1949. That pattern of conquest and domination has always included attempted government-sponsored colonization, often of demobilized soldiers, by the Han Chinese, including the Huihui, Muslim but ethnic Chinese from neighboring northwest China proper. During recent decades the growth of the ethnic Han Chinese community has almost overwhelmed the local Central Asian majority.

The blowup — which appears to have turned into a race riot with the Han Chinese majority in the Singkiang capital itself turning vigilante against the earlier Uighur violence. The fighting that has now occurred is along racial, ethnic and religious lines — the native Uighurs who with their ethnic cousins of other Central Asian Muslim peoples [Uzbeks, Tajiks, Kazaks and Mongols] living there still form the majority in the vast area [roughly the size of Iran] as a whole. The internecine feuds among these different peoples may have been parked for the time being in a mutual revulsion against the growing Han Chinese presence

Are the current events the beginning of the last gasp of another Chinese effort to assimilate the border region in that familiar long history of incorporation into the maw of Chinese ethnicity around the periphery of the Han Chinese? Or is it the beginning of a new and more successful struggle to overthrow the superior weaponry and brutal repression not only of the Communists but the Han Chinese and join the independent post-Soviet states of neighboring Central Asia?

Historians will know several hundred years from now.

But for the moment, one thing is clear: Beijing has failed to establish the kind of peace of the graveyard there that is the Communist style. And that becomes all the more puzzling and significant given the special iron boot relationship the People’s Liberation Army, as its Chinese forebears, has had with the region.

It also has implications — like the revolt in Tibet last year — for the regime itself. And that is more than just the theoretical threat to extensive Chinese nuclear weapons testing which is held in the Gobi Desert locations in the region.

Both President Hu Jintao and his technocratic prime minister Wen Jiabao have been semi-publicly warning Chinese Party cadre, and more significantly, the military, that new security threats are facing the regime. These are not the manufactured propaganda threats of Japanese revanchism which Beijing propaganda always conjures up, nor the often only slightly disguised beliefs/threats of conflict with the U.S. in the Western Pacific.

The new security threat comes from the dramatic impact the worldwide credit crunch and recession has had on the spectacular Chinese economic growth of the past two decades. It is the cliché of clichés, taken as gospel among Sinologists inside and outside China, that the present regime — denuded of its ideological base in all but the continuing Marxist-Leninist-Maoist gobbledygook — has placed all its bets on rapid overall economic growth. Old Communist nostrums of economic equality, clean government, bureaucratic efficiency have been thrown to the winds to get the spectacular increases in gross national product that have marked the last two decades. Disparities of income, urban versus rural, a Gucchi elite versus part-time urban workers living on the edge, unparalleled corruption in the local Party and government bureaucracy and at the highest levels — all now dog the system along with its spectacular growth manifested by the gleaming new coastal cities.

But with the near collapse of Chinese exports in the last quarter of last year and a continued decline over past records this year, even the [highly questionable] official growth rates have dropped into single digits. And they have dropped well below the 8 percent magic formula believed necessary for maintaining stability. Official Beijing and the cheering chorus at the World Bank and other international institutions and the world multinational community which has profited so much from turning China into the world’s workshop, keep optimistically forecasting recovery. But there are plenty of signs that it may elude them despite erratic efforts by the Beijing planners to throw “stimulus” and the old weapons of subsidies and currency manipulation at exports to reverse the downturn.

Even though it may have fed on this general drop in the economy, this Uighur uprising seems to have been one of those chanceful flashpoints of history. Long simmering resentment and bitterness — and exclusion as in Tibet from much of Beijing’s real and imagined development in the region — has seen the participation of thousands. A massive propaganda campaign directed by the Uighur diaspora in the U.S., Germany, Turkey, Central Asia, and Kazakhstan and the other Central Asian states, and official Chinese media themselves, have dramatized and fed the explosion.

It was originally triggered by the lynching in Kwangtung, south China proper itself, of two Uighur men accused of raping an ethnic Han Chinese woman where they were all employed in a toy factory. The unofficial violence against their “countrymen” was seen by the Singkiang Uighurs as another instance of prejudice and discrimination. What apparently was intended by its leaders as a peaceful demonstration in the Singkiang capital turned into mayhem. As this is written, it is unclear how much the Urumchi incidents may have been repeated in the more southwestern traditional — and conservative — Muslim cultural center of Kashgar. An old caravan stop on the northern Silk Road to the West, it is much too close to the troubled tribal areas of Pakistan, Afghanistan and Indian and Pakistan Kashmir for comfort — not only for Beijing but for Islamabad, Kabul, New Delhi — and Washington.

The fact that the Chinese despite an incredible network of tens of thousands of technocratic bureaucrats attempting to monitor and control the internet and other digital communications networks has not been able to close off news of the violence is significant. The Uighur underground, working against the physical isolation of Singkiang, appears to have captured the world’s digital networks [despite the Michael Jackson extravaganza] more effectively than the dissidents in Tehran. Again, this demonstrates a failure of the whole Beijing security apparatus. Mysteriously, Beijing has permitted a hundred or so reporters — including the foreign media — to go to Urumchi where, of course, they are largely limited to their hotel rooms and their inability to communicate with the Uighurs. Whether this was a gigantic security lapse or a plot in the leadership's always present competitors in the Party hierarchy isn't clear.

But Hu is particularly vulnerable in any repercussions inside the Chinese Communist Party elite at this failure of the regime’s machine for repression. His reputation and relatively rapid trajectory into leadership was in large part based on his service as gauleiter in Tibet, his reputation for using unprecedented cruelty to suppress an earlier outbreak of Tibetan dissidence.

As remote as the idea might be to foreigners and the world media, the threat of “splittists” — regional, ethnic, religious, and linguistic opposition to the Communist regime in Tibet, Singkiang, Inner [Chinese] Mongolia, and among the tribals in southeast China — is a real one for Beijing’s rulers. China’s history of strong central government cracking under regional antagonisms is a long one. The fact that a former collaborator of the regime, Raviya Kadeer, once an inordinately successful business woman in Urumchi and an appointee to high Communist Party and state offices of the regime, now is a leader the diaspora opposition from Washington is, whatever else, another piece of evidence of the failure of the regime’s security apparatus. Beijing has held Kadeer's extensive gamily and clan as hostages.

Never mind that the Obama Administration — with a considerable legacy from the Bush Administration — has twisted itself into a policy pretzel with the disposition of the small Uighur complement among the Guantanomo battlefield combatants. Indeed, the penetration of the international Islamofascist network among what has in the past been a largely secularized Uighur nationalist movement is apparently disputed, even among those experts who know these movements well.

But it seems only common sense to assume that the increasing tempo of the conflict, now, and the brutal Chinese repression will radicalize at least some of the Uighur dissidents and move them toward Muslim fanaticism — if it has not already done so. There is a tradition of rebel Uighrus escaping into Central Asia.

It is an interesting footnote that twice now outbursts have taken place in Urumchi after the official visit of government officials from Turkey. Ankara's foreign minister was recently there enroute home from a kowtow visit to Beijing, apparently to help the Chinese with their Uighur problem. But Turkey’s longtime sympathy — and attempt of exploitation of its linguistic and ethnic connections to the Uighurs along with other Central Asians with Turkish linguistic if Persian cultures — has been fading. Ankara's ostensible moderate Islamic regime of Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan has turned its attention more to the Mideast, Arab-Muslim politics, the Russians and the Chinese, in its rather frantic new multidimensional foreign policy strategies. That perhaps limits Turkey’s ability — one of the few voices on the outside with some credibility for historic and traditional reasons — to moderate the conflict from the Uighur side. The other Central Asian regimes, with their overwhelming fear of Muslim-led revolt and seeking economic as well as political accommodation with Beijing, won’t be much help either.

So the Obama Administration, besotted with the notion that all issues can be settled through diplomatic and cultural engagement, has a new problem at its doorstep. And it is one that has implications vastly further than the fate of the Uighurs themselves.


Sol W. Sanders, (solsanders@cox.net), is an Asian specialist with more than 25 years in the region, and a former correspondent for Business Week, U.S. News & World Report and United Press International. He writes weekly for World Tribune.com and East-Asia-Intel.com.

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