A YEAR ago today, China was convulsed by riots in its northwestern region of Xinjiang, as it had been a year earlier in Tibet.
More than 200 died in Xinjiang.
Beijing’s initial response to such challenges from people in its “western regions” has usually been to initiate a crackdown.
But this has not been so successful, especially in recent years. The resentment has continued, amplified by increased international concern.
So, in April, China’s heir apparent, Vice-President Xi Jinping, who has just visited Australia, flew to Xinjiang’s capital, Urumqi. He announced Wang Lequan, the hardline Communist Party secretary and thus the top figure in the region, was to be replaced.
This followed an extraordinary 15 years during which Wang focused heavily on security and on gaining access to Xinjiang’s resources for China’s largely east coast-based industries. He ruled the remote region rather like a Roman governor, deputed to rule the original Uighur population as if they were a recalcitrant tribe that needed bringing to heel.
Now he has been replaced by the governor of Hunan province in China’s heartland, Zhang Chunxian, whose first policy shift was to restore access to the internet, which Wang had cut off.
He appears set to encourage, as a sensible step beyond a narrow security focus, greater economic engagement. But the Tibetans and Uighurs, among the largest and most culturally distinct of China’s 55 ethnic “minorities” (the Han comprise 95 per cent of the population), have not been eager to trade off their culture and religious loyalties for the modern Chinese lifestyle.
The alienation felt by many Uighurs has been reinforced by the destruction of much of the ancient city of Kashgar, pushing the Uighur inhabitants out to the fringes of the city in apartment blocks, where they are more easily controlled.
China will not relinquish its authority over these large western regions. It is ensuring living standards rise there, and is showing some signs of softening its tough controls around the edges.
But the inhabitants appear also unlikely to abandon their own desires for a far higher degree of autonomy than Beijing will feel able to deliver. This, of course, is a recipe for continuing unease.
“Whether we are Uighurs, Tibetans or Chinese, we all suffer under the authoritarian rule of the Chinese Communist Party,” says Alim Seytoff, vice-president of the Uighur American Association and the most articulate voice for the Uighur cause internationally. “China has run out of solutions to create genuine stability in East Turkestan (Uighur nationalists’ name for Xinjiang, which in Chinese means, revealingly, “new territory”), Tibet and the rest of China.”
He says President Hu Jintao’s so-called “harmonious society” is just a fallacy, and that the political situation has seriously worsened in the year since the riots. The Chinese authorities have deployed more than 130,000 troops to the region from other Chinese provinces, detained, arrested and imprisoned tens of thousands of Uighurs, sentenced 26 people to death and executed at least nine of them, and initiated a 10-month long internet lockdown.
“The government wanted to appear benevolent . . . But it seems China wants to speed up the process of cultural genocide of the Uighurs, as most of the investment goes to infrastructure building and forcible implementation of the Chinese language education of Uighurs, aimed at eventually eliminating (our) language.” It’s hard to see where there’s room for movement.
