Brown Political Review, 10 December  2014

By Sergio Chen – Xinjiang is the largest province in China, accounting for one-sixth of the country’s tootal geography. Yet, it is the most sparsely populated, sharing borders with several central Asian countries including Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, creating a complicated mixture of Han and Islamic culture.

Ideally, this tremendously vast province ought to function as a religious and ethnic buffer zone between the non-religious Han Chinese and Muslim Uyghurs. However, this is far from the reality. Ethnic politics have lingered within western Xinjiang, leaving Uyghurs collectively labeled as terrorists and precluding any meaningful conversation between the Han Chinese and Uyghurs in the region.

The question of sovereignty over Xinjiang stands as a rich tapestry of geopolitics. But what appears in Beijing’s official rhetoric is a truncated history of Xinjiang, leaving out the part of Xinjiang’s history in which it was not in the hands of the Han Chinese. The earliest historical documentation of Han rule can be traced back to 60 BCE, when the Han Dynasty established a local authority there. But, since then, unlike the east coast — which has remained under relatively stable imperial rule for centuries — Xinjiang has seen a series of diasporas, both politically and ethnically, from the age of the Silk Road to China’s civil war in 1933, when Uyghurs first tried to secede from the Qing Dynasty and establish its own authority. A decade later, on the eve of China’s communist rebirth, Uyghur secessionists made a second futile attempt to break away from the control of the Han Chinese, leaving the region subject to sporadic violence and turmoil.

Nowadays, the Han Chinese and Uyghurs tend to segregate themselves for different reasons. The majority of the ten million Uyghurs population primarily reside along the western border closer to their central Asian neighbors who also devote themselves to Islamic practices. Yet, the Han Chinese, propelled by a fear of violence and uneasiness towards unfamiliar Islamic rituals, tend to live within homogeneously Han culture blocks. However, the clash between the two groups is not as fierce as often portrayed by Western media during intense spurts of violence, and it is critical to distinguish between ordinary Uyghurs and Uyghurs nationalists who fuel the flame of racial tension.

This fear that the Uyghurs are a monolithic terrorist block can be seen in events that took place earlier this spring. In March 2014, Uyghur nationalist forces indiscriminately stabbed dozens to death during the Kunming Train Station Massacre. Until the massacre, the government had extolled the highly multicultural Kunming province as a perfect example of racial harmony. Mass violence in this symbolic place struck fear into the hearts of many in China, including the national police department, which described the massacre as “terrorist attacks from the western border aiming to endanger social order.” This statement only further perpetuated the violence by empowering local police to shoot suspected terrorists without warning. Public fear was assuaged and a monolithic impression of Uyghur as violence-makers was amplified. A uniform fear of “Islamic independence” movements sprawled across China’s media apparatus, and Uyghurs were stigmatized as “terrorists allured by foreign extremist thoughts, particularly global Jihad.”

This labeling of the Uyghurs as terrorists not only dangerously generalized the Uyghur people, most of whom are moderate Muslims, but also subtly shifted the political scenario. Instead of two, legitimate political forces contending for sovereignty, the image portrayed by mainstream Chinese media became one of a righteous Communist Party battling brutal Uyghur extremists. In fact, despite widespread dissatisfaction with local Han-favoring policies, the entity accountable for most violence — the East Turkestan Independence Organization — is only representative of a small number of radical Uyghurs and has claimed responsible for a number of recent riots, including the 2010 Aksu bombing, the 2011 Kashgar attacks and the 2014 Ürümqi attacks.

The stigmatization of the Uyghurs seen in China is illustrative of a larger pattern of institutionalized discriminatory policies against the Uyghur people. Since 2001, the Communist Party’s white papers on the Chinese economy have proposed a vision of “western development” and have used a slogan famously known in China as “go west.”  While economic development in China’s western provinces will help to reduce poverty, these policies are additionally motivated by something more sinister — Beijing’s intention to culturally erode and marginalize the Uyghurs, who once predominated economic life in western China. Just as intellectuals and laborers are allured by governmental incentives to enter Xinjiang’s labor market and help to inundate Xinjiang with Han Chinese, officially sponsored exhortations for Chinese citizens to migrate westward achieve the same effect. Most well-paid jobs, either in local government or in corporations, share one hardline caveat: applicants should be Han Chinese and native Mandarin speakers. Chinese authorities justify these restrictions by arguing that these jobs would give Uyghurs resources that they would abuse.

These policies have only helped to solidify a specter of racial discrimination that has never been truly dispelled, even among Han Chinese residents in the region. To Uyghur residents, the effects are even more devastating. “The bottom line is that the Chinese don’t trust us, and that is having a corrosive impact on life in Xinjiang,” said Ilham Tohti, a prominent Uyghur activist, in an interview with the New York Times in October 2013. “And the way things are going, it’s going to get worse.” In September 2014, Mr. Tohti was sentenced to life imprisonment for his imprudent remarks.

Such an intricate, manipulative social engineering project is not built in one day, and it would not be possible without the Chinese government’s ability to effectively label Uyghurs as terrorists. In Kashgar, where Uyghurs makes up 90 percent of the population, Han Chinese and Uyghurs live in discrete ethnic enclaves guarded by armed Han patrols. A fear of “terrorist neighbors” permeates daily conversations among the Han. Violence is bound to rise up from such an oppressed group, giving rise to even more repressive policies from the party and creating a self-perpetuating cycle. Even if one zooms out to the national level, there is a strong tendency to overstate the extent of Uyghurs’ radicalness. Consequently, the vast majority of the Han Chinese who live on the east coast population do not have access to constructive political dialogue and are fed news of the terrorizing Uyghur people upon the latest upsurge in Uyghur-led riots.

Despite pressures from the outside, Beijing does not seem ready to change its view in the near future. Like Taiwan and Tibet, Xinjiang stands as a strategic outpost with abundant natural resources that are extremely valuable to the energy-scarce east coast. In efforts to seek international support to combat the Uyghurs’ “terrorist threat,” China successfully prevailed in getting the Bush administration to list the East Turkestan Liberation Organization as a terrorist group, in exchange for China’s backing for the US-led anti-terrorism struggle around the globe. Yet, China’s diplomatic drive did not stop there. To counteract the Uyghur insurgency bottom-up, China founded the Shanghai Cooperation Organization in 2001, of which Russia, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan are members. The latter three all border Xinjiang and have a considerable Islamic East Turkish population, of whom the Uyghur minority is a part. For them, acknowledging the Uyghurs’ terrorists and separatist activities is a small price to pay for strengthening economic ties with China.

In spite of the tenuous nature of Xinjiang’s political and social reconstruction, Beijing’s efforts have paid off. The party succeeded in surreptitiously shifting the matter of Uyghur nationalism into a question of terrorism. Such a political trick employed by the more powerful side to silence dissidents is not uncommon in the history of geopolitics. As the “giant dragon” expropriates land from the Uyghur minority and deprives them of their inalienable rights, the line between these political moves and internal imperialism is all but blurred. The false label of terrorism has been carefully crafted and applied not only to justify actions against Uyghur nationalists, but also to justify the deep-rooted social discriminations that the Uyghur people face. All of these have fueled moderate Muslim Uyghurs to follow a more radical path, whose subsequent actions rationalize repressive policies enacted by the Han Chinese government.

Regardless of the sheer attention Xinjiang’s regional conflict attracts, there has not been any indication for a near or peaceful ending. Both sides have turned down the possibility of making any compromises, since any concession may result in an irreversible loss in the larger political game. If there is anything for which one could hope, it would be the end of labeling all Ugyhur people as terrorists so that a productive dialogue can finally begin.

This piece is part of BPR’s special feature on terrorism. You can explore the special feature here. 

http://www.brownpoliticalreview.org/2014/12/the-rise-of-false-terrorism-in-china/