What The Riots In China Really Mean
Ethnic conflict has exposed the Communist Party's vulnerabilities
Gordon G. Chang
http://www.forbes.com/2009/07/08/uighur-riots-communist-party-opinions-columnists-china.html

This week, rioting left scores dead in Urumqi, the capital of China's troubled Xinjiang region. The latest official death toll is 156, but that number undoubtedly understates the count of those killed. The disturbances are accurately portrayed as ethnic conflict--Turkic Uighurs against the dominant Hans--but they also say much about the general stability of the modern Chinese state.

That state says the Uighurs are "Chinese," but that's not true in any meaningful sense of the term. The Uighurs are, in fact, from different racial stock than the Han; they speak a different language, and they practice a religion few others in China follow. Of the 55 officially recognized minority groups in China, they stand out the most.

The Uighurs are a conquered people. In the 1940s, they had their own state, the East Turkestan Republic, for about half a decade. Mao Zedong, however, forcibly incorporated the short-lived nation into the People's Republic by sending the People's Liberation Army into Xinjiang.

As much as the Uighurs deserve to govern themselves again--and they most certainly do--almost no one thinks they will be able to resurrect the East Turkestan state. They have even lost their own homeland, as Beijing's policies encouraged the Han to populate Xinjiang. In the 1940s, Hans constituted about 5% of Xinjiang's population. Today, that number has increased to about 40%. In the capital of Urumqi, more than 70% of the residents are Hans. In short, the Uighurs are no match for the seemingly invincible Han-dominated state.

Yet the riots of the last few days show just how vulnerable that Chinese state is, even in the face of apparently weak opponents. For one thing, according to one report, the disturbances came completely out of the blue for many. "There were no warning signs about the riots," said Tang Yan, a 21-year-old drug store employee who fled rampaging Uighurs in Urumqi. "No one expected it." What started as a silent, peaceful demonstration--over the failure of authorities to investigate the murders of Uighur factory workers in faraway Guangdong province--somehow turned into savagery in the streets of Urumqi's capital.

The chronology of events on Sunday is unclear, but it appears the gathering became a riot when police began to beat the protesters, even girls. There are, at this moment, so many grievances against the central government and the Communist Party that almost anything can spark an insurrection. And that's especially true when security forces overreact, as they appeared to do on Sunday.

Moreover, the disturbances, once they started, spread out from the capital city of Urumqi to remote Kashgar and possibly to Yarkand, Aksu, Khotan and Karamay as well. Beijing blocked the Internet and social networking sites after the demonstration turned violent. But in a modern society, even a centralized government cannot control every phone line and Web connection.

More important, the protests spread so fast because Uighurs throughout Xinjiang shared the same feelings about the Han authorities. Therefore, it's not surprising Uighurs reacted the same way when hearing of the events in Urumqi. When people realize that they're not alone, social order can break down. Citizens then feel the safety of numbers and so both lose fear and gain hope, especially if they are as desperate as the Uighurs have been for some time.

Consequently, people in oppressive societies can act in unison because, at some moments, enough of them think the same way. For the Uighurs, brutal oppression is the force binding one to the other. For others in China, the process of coming together is more subtle. "Ideas sometimes seep into people's minds almost imperceptibly and, over time, become embedded in a population's collective psyche," writes Jean Nicol, a psychologist and former South China Morning Post columnist.

As a result, people are more united--and stronger--than they appear. "I recall that my friends and I for decades were asked by people visiting from democratic Western countries, 'How can you, a mere handful of powerless individuals, change the regime, when the regime has at hand all the tools of power: the army, the police and the media, when it can convene gigantic rallies to reflect its people's 'support' to the world, when pictures of the leaders are everywhere and any effort to resist seems hopeless and quixotic?'" wrote Vaclav Havel, who knows something about how people under communist governments think. "My answer was that it was impossible to see the inside clearly, to witness the true spirit of the society and its potential--impossible because everything was forged. In such circumstances, no one can perceive the internal, underground movements and processes that are occurring."

The Chinese regime can fail because, as we are seeing in Xinjiang, the Party is losing hearts and minds, and, as Havel suggests, a ruling organization is vulnerable when that happens. In most other parts of China, ethnic tensions are not a factor, but the Communist Party has other problems. Almost nobody believes in its ideology, and everyone can see its failings as a ruling organization. Outside of minority-inhabited areas, few actively oppose it, but few anywhere enthusiastically support it. The Party stays in place largely due to apathy, fear and a failure to imagine that China can be better.

So this is a dangerous time for the one-party state. For three decades, its primary basis of legitimacy has been the continual delivery of prosperity. In the current economic downturn, however, it has been arguing that it deserves to remain in power for other reasons. As the Party tries to change the basis of its support, it puts its future at risk.

There are tens of thousands of protests in China each year, and most of them have nothing to do with clashes between ethnicities. Mishandled like the one in Urumqi, however, almost any one of them can spread fast, from city to city and across vast regions. That's the most important lesson to be learned from the events in Xinjiang this week.

Gordon G. Chang is the author of The Coming Collapse of China.


Why China Has Clenched Its Fist in Xinjiang
Beijing's severe treatment of Uighurs – and Tibetans, too – may be an attempt to prevent a breakup similar to that of the Soviet Union.
By Peter Ford
http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/0708/p06s06-woap.html

This week's ethnic violence in Urumqi, the capital of China's far western Xinjiang region, rang a second warning bell for Beijing's policy toward minorities just 18 months after a similar outburst by Tibetans in March 2008.

There is little sign yet, though, that the Chinese government is prepared to loosen its iron grip either on Tibet or the restive Muslim Uighur people in Xinjiang, say experts on the two regions. That augurs further unrest, they warn. On Wednesday, President Hu Jintao cut short his visit to the Group of 8 summit to return home to tackle the crisis.

Chinese officials have blamed Sunday's riot in Urumqi, which left 156 people dead – apparently mostly ethnic Han Chinese – on Uighur exile leader Rabiya Kadeer. Last year they blamed the Dalai Lama for the violence in Lhasa.

"They are missing the main problem, which is the real concern among Uighurs about how they are treated by Chinese society," says James Millward, a Xinjiang expert at Georgetown University in Washington. "They are missing an opportunity to relieve the stresses that have arisen."

Both Uighurs and Tibetans formerly enjoyed autonomy, and resent an influx in Chinese migrants and influence over the last half century. Apparently to prevent a breakup similar to that of the multiethnic Soviet Union, some analysts say, Beijing clenched its fist in the early 1990s after years of relatively relaxed rule over ethnic minority areas in western China.

"The root cause of the trouble is the departure from China being a multiethnic empire to being a unitary nation state," argues Nicholas Bequelin, a Xinjiang scholar who works for Human Rights Watch in Hong Kong. "That began the endgame for minorities."

Uighur anger over this clampdown has long been simmering, making Sunday's violence surprising only for its scale, says Mr. Bequelin.

"The writing was on the wall and human rights groups have been warning about it," he says. "When a central state assimilates an indigenous territory very rapidly it creates tensions that lead to periodic blowback."

Han population now 40 percent of Xinjiang

Workers belonging to the Han Chinese majority (who make up 90 percent of China's population) have been pouring into the mostly Muslim Uighur region of Xinjiang, rich in oil and gas, for 60 years.

Pushed to move under Mao Zedong (China's ruler from 1949-76), and more recently pulled by economic incentives, the Han have gone from 6 percent to more than 40 percent of the autonomous region's population.

Tibet has experienced similar, if much-smaller-scale migration of Han Chinese.

The government's settlement policy is driven by security concerns, say foreign experts, and by a conviction in Beijing that Tibet and Xinjiang are integral parts of China.

That is not a view shared by local inhabitants, who "have competing identities that run counter to the way China tries to define them as Chinese minorities," says Elliot Sperling, a professor at the University of Indiana in Bloomington.

Security the 'guiding principle' of Beijing's policy

But with a rising Han population – and military garrisons – reinforcing frontier security, and security "the absolute guiding principle" of Beijing's policy toward minorities, says Wenran Jiang, who teaches at the University of Alberta in Canada, "there is no doubt ... that any means will be used to crush any aspirations to separatism."

That is bound to cause friction with "national groups fully conscious of having had states ... within living memory," warns Professor Sperling, a Tibet scholar. China enjoyed no authority before 1951 in areas of Tibet under the rule of the Dalai Lama, he points out, and Xinjiang was briefly the independent republic of East Turkestan between 1945 and 1949, when Mao's troops took over.

Minorities left out of economic development plan

The tensions have been worsened because although breakneck economic development has made Xinjiang richer, most of the benefits have gone to the Han, Uighurs complain. Tibetans harbor similar resentments, says Robbie Barnett, a Tibet expert at Columbia University in New York.

"The focus was all on GDP growth, with no capacity building" for less educated and less skilled rural Tibetans and Uighurs, he points out. "It was one-size-fits-all development."

"The undeveloped Xinjiang minority group areas were not included in the development plan" that built oil and gas wells with imported labor and planted cotton farms tended by demobilized Chinese soldiers, wrote Ilihamu Tuheti, a Uighur professor at Beijing's Nationalities University, on his blog.

Unusual crackdown on 'state security' offenses, religion

After Beijing began cracking down in the 1990s, officials began demonizing the Dalai Lama as a "splittist." Uighurs found themselves unable to voice the slightest complaint without being branded traitors. During the first years of this decade, according to Bequelin, nearly 10 percent of prisoners in Xinjiang were serving sentences for state security crimes. The corresponding ratio for the whole of China was 0.005 percent.

In both Tibet and Xinjiang, the authorities have cracked down on religious practice in a manner unheard of elsewhere in China. No government employee in either region is allowed to attend religious services, for example, and no young men under 18 are allowed to attend a mosque in Xinjiang.

"The Uighurs [ethnically related to other peoples of Central Asia] have a Turkic identity that the Chinese are trying to smother because it has transnational elements to it" that could threaten Chinese security, says Sperling.

Debate in Communist party about tactics, policy?

He is pessimistic about the Uighurs' cultural future. The Chinese government, he says, "believes that Sinicization is inevitable in the tide of history. But it is not going to happen without friction because it involves marginalizing people in their own area."

The way in which officials instantly blamed exiles for instigating Sunday's violence, he adds, "does not suggest much soul searching" about government policy toward minorities. Nor, 18 months on, has Mr. Barnett seen any signs of changed policy in Tibet.

"The Chinese have time, power, resources – everything is on their side," agrees Bequelin.

Others see signs of a debate within the ruling Communist party. "The first thing the authorities need to do is to actually acknowledge the problem" says Professor Jiang. He believes that "more thoughtful" leaders will seek a "more sophisticated" response to Sunday's unrest than a further crackdown.

That does not yet seem to be the case. "If the minority groups in Xinjiang are poor and backward, it is difficult to maintain peace and stability there" wrote Professor Tuheti prophetically on his blog last August.

Wednesday, the professor was reported to be under arrest.


China Says U.S. Dissident Sparked Xinjiang Unrest
By JAMES T. AREDDY
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124692332979002823.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

China's government charged that Rebiya Kadeer, a millionaire-turned-dissident based in Washington, masterminded the riots that began Sunday in the city of Urumqi and have left at least 156 dead.

Mrs. Kadeer has worked since being released from a Chinese jail in 2005 to lift the profile of her ethnic group, the Uighurs, who populates the Xinjiang region of northwestern China.

China's official Xinhua news agency said police have evidence that the separatist World Uyghur Congress, led by Mrs. Kadeer, masterminded Sunday's rioting. The report said police in recent days had intercepted telephone calls from Mrs. Kadeer to her younger brother predicting, "something will happen in Urumqi."

In a telephone interview Monday from Washington, where she has worked since being exiled from China after her release, Mrs. Kadeer said she champions self-determination for the Turkic-speaking Muslim minority, but did nothing to foment unrest.

"I consider myself as the voice of the voiceless Uighur people in the West," Mrs. Kadeer, a 62-year-old grandmother who wears her hair in two thick gray braids that drape to her waist, said in a high-pitched tone, speaking through an interpreter. "It is a new cause, a new thing."

Mrs. Kadeer says that as Muslims, Uighurs have a difficult time winning sympathy in the West, and she expressed regret that no government has officially endorsed her cause. After the 2001 terrorist attacks on the U.S., former President George W. Bush accepted Beijing's contention that one Uighur group, the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, should be labeled a terrorist organization.

"This created a negative impression. We have many difficulties in introducing ourselves," Mrs. Kadeer said. Mrs. Kadeer did meet twice with Mr. Bush, including in July 2008 shortly before he traveled to Beijing to attend the Olympics.

Far less scrutinized internationally than China's thorny rule over the Tibetan region is its control of the massive Xinjiang territory where Urumqi is located and which is home to Uighurs and other ethnic minorities.

Though the territory is steeped in history as the crossroads between China and Western Europe known as the Silk Road, Uighurs have little of the mystique of the Dalai Lama with his Buddhist people.

In the U.S., the ethnic group may be best known for the political headache Washington found recently in handing a group of Uighurs freed from the detention facility in Guantanamo Bay and once suspected of terrorism. Washington concluded the Uighurs could face trouble in China if they were returned home, but it was also unwilling to allow them to settle in the U.S., and instead reached a deal to send a group to Bermuda.

Two decades ago, Mrs. Kadeer looked like just another Chinese entrepreneur making it big. She had opened a major department store in Urumqi that introduced stylish clothes to a remote province better known for raisins and desert.

By her own estimate, Mrs. Kadeer was soon China's wealthiest woman. The Communist Party embraced her success by offering her official positions.

Yet when Mrs. Kadeer was granted the rare opportunity in 1997 to speak to an official assembly in Beijing's Great Hall of the People, she took the risky step of highlighting the plight of her fellow Uighurs, from taxes to political prisoners, according to her new autobigraphy.

"I'm quite sure that the president and the delegates in this hall aren't accurately informed about the true conditions I've spoken of. The right to self-determination in our Autonomous Region should be put into action," she recalls in the book.

While she was admonished by some officials for her frank remarks, Mrs. Kadeer says she was encouraged by others. And she remained in political favor until two years later, in August 1999, when she was blocked from meeting a U.S. delegation during its trip to Urumqi.

Mrs. Kadeer was then jailed for over five years and claims in her book that she was tortured during that period.

Under pressure from Washington, Chinese authorities released Mrs. Kadeer in 2005, and she was immediately exiled. When she ignored instructions to keep quiet in exile by speaking widely in the U.S., her adult children were arrested and at least two remain in prison, she says.

Today, Mrs. Kadeer operates from offices on Pennsylvania Avenue, a short stroll from the White House. She heads various Uighur groups, including the World Uyghur Congress and the Uyghur American Association. The National Endowment for Democracy says it supports some of her groups with grants totaling around $600,000 annually. "Her mind is always going forward, not back," said Louisa Greve, director for East Asia at the National Endowment for Democracy.


Violence Escalates in Xianjiang Province
Dave Nalle
http://blogcritics.org/politics/article/violence-escalates-in-xianjiang-province/

In the west we don't always have easy access to news coming out of China where the media is kept on a tight leash and forced to make concessions in what they cover in order to get any access at all. Despite this partial news blackout, events in trouble Xianjiang Province are escalating to the point where the Chinese government cannot keep a lid on what is turning into another grim chapter in their long history of human rights abuses.

Xianjiang's population of mostly muslim Uighurs has been seen as a potentially troublesome minority for decades and in an effort to keep the region under control and protect their access to energy resources, the Chinese government has been encouraging ethnic Han Chinese to move into the area and has been showing favoritism to these settlers over the Uighur natives in employment and providing government services. This has reached the point where the Uighurs have become increasingly ghettoized and demoted to a status as second-class citizens in their own homeland. In the Urumqi, the capital of Xianjiang, ethnic Chinese now outnumber the native Uighurs 7 to 1.

In recent weeks this situation has become more ugly, with riots breaking out in major cities, especially Urumqi. Mobs of Uighurs and Chinese settlers are roaming the streets and meeting in violent clashes while Chinese soldiers look on and make little effort to do more than contain the violence. In one case a Chinese mob caught brutalizing a lone Uighur even attacked an ABC news crew and police and soldiers chose not to intervene.

Exiled Uighur leader Rebiya Kadeer has been accused by the Chinese of inciting the violence, but she maintains that the Chinese are telling only one side of the story and that Uighurs are being forced to respond to violence from the Chinese population who are supported and protected by the government and military.

The current violence was spurred by a June 26th attack on Uighur factory workers in Guangdong province in which at least two Uighurs were killed by Chinese mobs. Protests have spread throughout Uighur populated areas, but protesting Uighurs often face violent reprisals from the more numerous Chinese population. There is certainly violence on both sides in the conflict, but with larger numbers and the tacit approval of the government and military the ethnic Chinese enjoy a considerable advantage. Bands of Chinese vigilantes roam the streets of the cities, attacking any Uighurs who venture out of their ghetto-like neighborhoods.

The extent of the violence is hard to gauge with limited media access to the region, but even the Chinese Xinhua news service admits that hundreds are dead in the last week alone, over 150 of them when Chinese settlers and police attacked a Uighur protest march Urumqi on the 5th of July.

The violence has lead to the Chinese government declaring martial law in Urumqi, a curfew in Xianjiang and Guangdong, rounding up hundreds of suspected Uighur "ringleaders" and barricading Uighur neighborhoods to keep residents contained. Even though most of the violence seems to have been initiated by ethnic Chinese, the response of the police has been to crack down primarily on Uighurs while looking on Chinese vigilante gangs as allies rather than part of the problem.

Amnesty International complains that this recent violence is just the culmination of a long-term government campaign against the Uighurs which began in the 1980s, in which the minority group has been "the target of systematic and extensive human rights violations", including "arbitrary detention and imprisonment, incommunicado detention, and serious restrictions on religious freedom as well as cultural and social rights." They describe a situation in Xianjiang which comes close to "ethnic cleansing" or full government-supported genocide.

Other world news and the restrictions on media access to the region have limited the news coverage of events in Xianjiang, but as the violence increases and the Chinese government cracks down and human rights groups become more vocal in their complaints, the problem is becoming too large to ignore or cover up.


Washington Abetting Racism in China
Eric C. Anderson
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-c-anderson/washington-abetting-racis_b_226265.html

Racism, alas, is not a uniquely American or European phenomenon. I can personally attest to the fact that racism abounds in Asia. The Japanese have long discriminated against immigrants, the Koreans like to contend they are most homogeneous population on the planet, and Han Chinese have a thinly disguised disdain for minority groups who constitute the other 8% of Beijing's 1.3 billion constituents. On 5 July 2009, that disdain became painfully evident in China's Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. Xinhua, Beijing's official news agency, is now reporting riots in Xinjiang's capital resulted in over 140 deaths, more than 800 injured, and significant property damage.

Xinhua's explanation for this carnage is little more than a reiteration of the standard party-line: "terrorism, separatism, and extremism." Unfortunately, Washington is poorly positioned to refute this claim. The Bush administration's blind haste to launch a global war on terrorism provided Beijing with the ultimate excuse to crackdown on the Uyghurs. China's pledge of support for the U.S. campaign was secured by having our State Department place an obscure Uyghur group on the watch list of global terrorist organizations. In one fell swoop Washington blessed Han Chinese racism and granted Beijing a license to hunt Uyghurs at will.

The results were predictable. Human Rights Watch reports Beijing has established "a multi-tiered system of surveillance, control, and suppression of religious activity aimed at Xinjiang's Uyghurs." The group goes on to state, "peaceful activists who practice their religion in a manner deemed unacceptable by state authorities or Chinese Communist Party officials are arrested, tortured, and at times executed."

That's just for openers. According to Human Rights Watch, "The harshest punishments are meted out to those accused of involvement in separatist activity, which is increasingly equated by officials with 'terrorism'." This focus on alleged separatists is not accidental. The Chinese Communist Party cannot afford to be perceived as incapable of maintaining a unified China. This explains the continuing crackdowns in Tibet, the development of military capabilities sufficient to corral Taiwan, and curtailment of civil liberties in Xinjiang.

The real issue here, however, is not Beijing's persistent separatist paranoia. The real problem is how local officials seek to realize Beijing's intentions. China attempts to protect minority populations in her constitution, legal system, and via official statements guaranteeing religious freedom. The intent is noble; the execution is atrocious. As Human Rights Watch notes, "The reality is that Muslims in Xinjiang have only as much religious freedom as local and national authorities choose to allow at any given moment. For many who experience state repression, arbitrariness is the touchstone: what is permissible for some can result in harsh punishment for others, particularly those suspected of having separatist tendencies, leadership qualities, or disloyal political views."

Now let's return to the actual cause of the 5 July 2009 riots. In June 2009, a blogger in southern Guangdong province posted a message claiming six boys from Xinjiang had "raped two innocent girls." Local readers took this to mean "two Han women" and reacted by attacking Uyghurs employed at a factory where the alleged rape occurred. By the time local officials cleared the crowds 2 Uyghurs were dead and 118 people had been injured. At this stage, the horrific similarity to the 1923 riots in Rosewood, Florida, should cause some members of the Obama administration to immediately contemplate changing the State Department terrorist watch list--but, I suspect that's just wishful thinking on my behalf.

On 5 July 2009, several thousand Uyghur youths--many said to be university students--peacefully gathered at several locations in Urumchi, Xingjiang's capital city. According to a press release from the World Uyghur Congress, the protestors waved Chinese national flags as they loudly demanded justice for the Uyghurs killed in Guangdong. The demonstrators were also said to be protesting the increased racial discrimination Uyghurs encounter in China. The World Uyghur Congress claims authorities responded to these protests by dispatching a large security force equipped with tear gas, rifles, and armored vehicles.

We don't know who threw the first stone or fired the first shot. We do know the violence assumed a racial overtone from the outset. An official at one of Urumchi's largest hospitals told the Wall Street Journal they had treated 291 injured people. Of that lot, 233 were Han Chinese, 39 Uyghurs, and the remainder belonged to other ethnic minority groups. This body count alone speaks volumes. A more politically correct official might have declared 291 Chinese were injured--instead we have casualties identified by ethnic or racial composition. One can only speculate who was treated first...my bet is the Han.

How should Washington respond to this incident? First, avoid lectures on human rights. Beijing is not interested--and, as I have previously argued--the human rights rhetoric is widely understood as little more than a condemnation of another state's government. Instead, Washington should remove the Uyghurs from Secretary of State Clinton's terrorism watch list. We should not condone nor abet prosecution of any minority group by simply declaring them suspects in the war on terrorism. Finally, President Obama needs to make a statement concerning racism as it exists abroad and at home. The United States has come a long way since 1923 Rosewood, Florida, now we need to help other nations commit to a similar voyage.