Muslim Separatists or “Terrorists”?
As Muslim ethnic minorities chafe under Chinese rule, a simmering revolt and seething ethnic conflict have turned much of western China into a heavily armed garrison ready to crush sporadic, spontaneous, and seemingly futile acts of rebellion.
—New York Times
The Chinese military in Xinjiang will always keep up the intensity of its crackdown on ethnic separatist forces and deal them devastating blows without showing any mercy.
—Xinjiang Party Secretary Wang Lequan
Almost 95% of China’s population is classified as “ethnic Chinese” or “Han.” However, not all of China’s many wars from within are pitting Han “brother against brother.” Ground zero for China’s growing ethnic rebellions against the ruling Han class is the northwest province of Xinjiang.
Xinjiang is China’s largest province geographically but, with its extremes of heat and cold, and its desert climate, Xinjiang is also one of its most sparsely populated. From an agricultural point of view, much of Xinjiang is a virtual dustbowl. However, beneath Xinjiang’s dusty soil and mountainous steppes, 40% of China’s coal reserves lie buried. Equally abundant and far more precious to the central government are oil and natural gas deposits that total the equivalent of about 30 billion tons of oil and represent one-fourth to one-third of China’s total petroleum reserves.
In Xinjiang, the majority of the population consists of a Muslim Turkic people called the Uighurs. These Uighurs face some of the harshest and most repressive measures in the world under the jackboots of Chinese communism. Any independent religious activity can be equated to a “breach of state security”; activists are regularly arrested and tortured; and despite its sparse population, Xinjiang’s ethnic groups suffer more executions for state-security crimes than any other province.
Tragically, repression in Xinjiang has only intensified in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States. The Chinese government seized upon this American tragedy as a golden opportunity to cut a very clever deal with the United States. China would support the U.S. war on terrorism if the United States would agree that the separatist activities of the Uighurs represented not simply an indigenous rebellion against autocratic rule but rather a legitimate terrorist threat with ties to Al Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden. As part of its deal with America, China now defines a terrorist in Xinjiang as anyone who thinks “separatist thoughts,” and Xinjiang’s jails are crowded with such pseudo-terrorists.
Although China’s iron-fisted repression in Xinjiang borders on the unbearable, what sticks most in the Uighur craw is the ongoing “Hanification” of Xinjiang. As a matter of policy, for decades the Chinese government has sought to pacify Xinjiang by importing large portions of its Han population from other, primarily poor areas—and even by despicably exporting young Uighur women of child-bearing age out of the region. Consider this chilling passage from Reuters:
China’s government is forcibly moving young women of the ethnic Uighur minority from their homes in Xinjiang to factories in eastern China, a Uighur activist told the U.S. Congress on Wednesday. Rebiya Kadeer, jailed for more than five years for championing the rights of the Muslim Uighurs before being sent into exile in the United States, called for U.S. help in stopping a program she said had already removed more than 240,000 people, mostly women, from Xinjiang. The women face harsh treatment with 12-hour workdays and often see wages withheld for months. ... Many suspect that the Chinese government policy is to get them to marry majority Han Chinese in China’s cities while resettling Han in traditional Uighur lands.
Today, as a result of these policies, the Han population is rising at a rate twice as fast as that of the Uighur population. Instead of being pacified or tamed by the growing Han population, the Uighurs are just becoming more and more radicalized. There is a very bitter and dangerous irony in this ethnic strife reported in The Economist: Whereas the Uighurs historically have been “among the world’s most liberal and pro-Western Muslims, fundamentalist Islam is gaining sway among young Uighur men.” Today, “small-scale clashes break out nearly every day between Chinese and Uighurs in Xinjiang’s western cities.”
It is unlikely that a true guerrilla movement will emerge in Xinjiang to engage Chinese forces in an Algerian- or Vietnamese-style revolt. The populace is simply too small, and Chinese security forces are too big and powerful. However, in an age of “suitcase” nuclear bombs and biological terrorist weapons, China is exposed to terrorist threats at soft target points, such as the Three Gorges Dam, or any one of its teeming cities. Any such terrorist incidents could possibly help fuel conflicts in any one of a number of China’s other “wars from within,” making the severe repression of the Uighurs a risky strategy indeed.
In this chapter, we have seen both how and why the Communist Party is now facing ever-increasing opposition from China’s downtrodden peasant farmers, its oppressed workers, its increasingly desperate senior citizens, and its ruthlessly suppressed ethnic minorities. Still other crises loom on the horizon, including rapidly rising income disparities and the kind of rampant inflation that sparked the Tiananmen Square uprising. In light of this growing opposition, it is hardly surprising that the Chinese government continues to escalate its efforts to spy upon, and ruthlessly crack down on, Chinese dissidents. The next chapter details in much greater detail just how “Big Brother” is alive, well, and ever-more Orwellian in what has morphed into the world’s biggest prison.