Want China Times, 6 March 2014

It may come as a surprise that while Beijing has labeled Sunday’s knife attack in the city of Kunming as a “terrorist attack” by Xinjiang separatists, the Communist Party of China once put its support behind an independent state in China’s northwest reaches.

At least 29 people died and over 140 were injured in the attack by knife-wielding assailants in a train station in Kunming, the capital of the southwestern Yunnan province, with authorities and official media pointing the finger at terrorists campaigning for an independent Xinjiang for the region’s ethnic Uyghur people.

Ironically enough, history shows that the Communist Party, now infamous for its policies focused on maintaining stability and holding China together at all costs, once supported the same ideal.

Thanks to support from the Soviet Union and China’s communists, Xinjiang was briefly independent under the name of the East Turkestan Republic for around five years starting in 1944, when all of China was still ruled by the Republic of China (ROC) government.

Late communist leader Mao Zedong at the time praised the “revolution in three parts of Xinjiang,” referring to the subdivisions of Ili, Tarcheng, and Altay.

The revolution helped the communists “liberate” Xinjiang by containing the 100,000 ROC Nationalist troops stationed nearby, eventually contributing to the communist victory that drove the ROC government to Taiwan in 1949 and led to the establishment of the People’s Republic of China on the mainland.

The rise and fall of the second East Turkestan Republic was closely tied to the complexities of regional politics — as was the fate of the first East Turkestan Republic, established by the Uyghurs in 1933 and crushed with the help of the Soviet Union just months later.

As China continues to expand its economic power and international clout, any further hopes for an independent Xinjiang look quite slim, if not totally impossible. Beijing has tightened its control over the arid region after rich crude deposit was found in the Taklamakan desert, and an influx of Han Chinese settlers has weakened the power of the local Uyghur population.

The authorities have meanwhile worked hard to play up violent acts by Xinjiang independence advocates as acts of terrorism, leading the United States and the United Nations to list the East Turkestan Islamic Movement as an international terrorist organization.

But not all Uyghurs, a Turkic people with significant numbers in Kazakhstan and nearby regions, are calling for independence.

Minzu University associate professor Ilham Tohti, an outspoken advocate of Uyghur rights but not independence, was detained without charge early this year. Even though he has spoken out against an independent Xinjiang, charges of separatism were nonetheless brought up against him in late February, ahead of the opening of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference and Chinese National People’s Congress in Beijing.

The scholar told Hong Kong-based Phoenix Weekly from detention that he opposed independence because “whenever there is an ethnic conflict in Xinjiang, it always starts with Uyghurs cutting people but ends with more Uyghurs dead than anyone else.” In other words, any conflict in the region will lead to more deaths among his people.

Tohti said there are many Uyghurs like himself pursuing the more modest goal of self-rule as promised to minority peoples by the PRC constitution.

“For the Uyghur people to be proud of living in China, and for China to have strength in soft power over Central Asia, Xinjiang must truly be allowed to be an autonomous region as part of a free and democratic China,” he said.

While the Kunming killings were overwhelmingly condemned worldwide, some voices within China have urged “deep reflection” on Beijing’s poor policies in governing the minority population.

Human rights activist and lawyer Teng Biao, a co-signer of the “Charter 08” movement calling for better rights guarantees, criticized Beijing’s “barbaric minority policy,” calling it a catalyst for conflicts in which the innocent suffer the most.

At the center of the struggle for the hearts and minds of Xinjiang may be historical factors, but Teng has argued that those in charge should be held accountable for exacerbating problems.

He has singled out “those who want to totally destroy southern Xinjiang,” the center of the Uyghur population, as well as those who belittle the Uyghurs — and even the general public, which has shown little concern for what is happening in China’s westernmost expanses.

http://www.wantchinatimes.com/news-subclass-cnt.aspx?cid=1101&MainCatID=11&id=20140305000097