Ethnic conflict erupts in
by Martine Bulard
Le Monde Diplomatique
http://mondediplo.com/2009/08/02china
With July's violence in
My journey to
A few days later, I arrived in
Hidden differences
The district's small mosque was open to visitors. In noisy, narrow streets lined with stalls near the recently spruced-up bazaar, traders were selling a bizarre mix of goods: combs and hair dyes, herbal remedies, phone cards etc. Skewers of chicken and mutton with noodles were also on offer. Unlike the Han Chinese, the Uyghurs don't eat pork, but that's the least of the differences separating these two peoples.
Between 5 and 8 July, there was an unprecedented outbreak of violence in this and neighbouring districts of
Even if no one could have predicted interethnic violence on this scale two months earlier, there had already been signs of a build-up of anger in a humiliated and often harassed community. Even making appointments with Uyghurs, whether they were political activists or not, turned out to be far from straightforward. I had to make repeated phone calls, and conversations begun in public places would be concluded in streets where no one was watching. Sometimes I even had to introduce my interviewee to the Han party secretary in order to show that everything was above board. Anyone who receives a foreigner may immediately be suspected of "nationalist activities", an accusation second only to terrorism in its gravity, which can lead to loss of your job, demotion or even arrest and imprisonment.
According to Abderrahman (2), an Uyghur civil engineer, "suspicion and repression are the rule for Uyghurs, but the Han Chinese have also got cause for concern if they're suspected of involvement in politics". I had met him in one of the best Uyghur restaurants in
Surveillance is widespread, particularly around mosques. In Kashgar (Kashi to give it its official name) in the south of the region, Friday prayers can draw as many as 20,000 people. The whole event takes place under the watchful eye of plainclothes police. Here, the appointing of imams needs official approval from the authorities and their sermons are carefully controlled: the Xinjiang government's official website, which publishes a History of Islam in China, explains that the (carefully chosen) religious authorities and the Communist Party of China (CPC) leadership have produced a four-volume set of sermons, time-limited to 20-30 minutes, from which the busy imam can choose.
It wasn't always like this. Religious freedom was written into the Chinese constitution in 1954. Until the mid-1960s, Muslims could practise their faith with little impediment. Ahmed, who's a guide in Kashgar, remembers women of his grandmother's generation wearing the veil when he was a boy. But during the dark years of the cultural revolution and its aftermath, mosques were shut down or destroyed. Even within the home expressions of religious feeling were out of the question. The repression came to an end with Deng Xiaoping's move towards economic liberalisation in 1978 and the principle of religious freedom was put back into the constitution in 1982.
'What are you waiting for?'
By the end of the cultural revolution, only 392 useable places of worship remained in Kashgar district, one of the region's most important religious centres. By the end of 1981, their number had risen to 4,700, and in 1995 it stood at 9,600. According to Rémi Castets, a French specialist on Uyghur movements, by the turn of the millennium Xinjiang had 24,000 mosques, two-thirds of the total in
But things started to go wrong in the early 1990s. On one hand, Islam became politicised: there was an increase in the number of meshreps (a sort of local religious committee which sometimes engaged in protest) and organisations such as the
Saniya, who teaches ancient literature in
Such feelings probably contributed to the birth of Uyghur movements with links to
"Central government's aim is not to attack Islam per se," says Castets. "What it wants to do above all is prevent Islam giving legitimacy to expressions of separatist or anti-government feeling. The CPC has as its model the example of the Hui."
Castets estimates government investment in Xinjiang since 2000 at 870bn yuan ($127bn). Economic dynamism is apparent everywhere: the region's rich reserves of coal, oil and gas are being exploited and new sources of energy developed (on the Urumqi-Turfan motorway there's a special viewing point where you can photograph the wind turbines (4) which disappear into the distance). Giant new towns such as Korla are being built, with its numerous open-air shopping centres and oil company headquarters. Airports and motorways are under construction. Building sites have sprung up everywhere, including in Kashgar's old Uyghur quarter, which is well on the way to being destroyed.
State within a state
Xinjiang's economy is based on raw materials, agriculture and, to a lesser extent, tourism, and a good half of the engines of economic growth are in the hands of the XPCC or bingtuans. Comprehending this state within a state is essential to any understanding of this far-flung
Bingtuans were created in 1954 to safeguard
Shihezi museum traces their history in socialist-realist style: there are dozens of yellowing photographs of poor peasant-soldiers or children in makeshift schools that are redolent of the pioneering spirit of their time. One room is entirely filled with a huge map that shows the power of the bingtuans today, a power that far exceeds that of the region's government.
The bingtuans are still under the control of the People's Liberation Army. The districts they control have a population of 1.9 million. They have powers to levy taxes. They own 1,500 businesses, including construction companies, several of which are quoted on the stock market. They also run two universities and control a third of the agricultural land in Xinjiang, a quarter of its industrial output and between half and two-thirds of its exports. (Bizarrely, the bingtuans are also the biggest producer of ketchup in the world; they even bought up a French company, Conserves de Provence, in 2004 through their subsidiary Xinjiang Chalkis Co.)
The new frontier
At a historic meeting about the stability of Xinjiang province in 1996, the CPC politburo invited communists to "encourage the young people of
The new arrivals also include professionals who work for public companies and whose salaries are much more comfortable, even if their living conditions aren't. One such is Liu Wang, an engineer who is working on the new railway line between
Liu Wang regrets how slowly the wheels turn in the region: "Everything always has to be referred higher up. You always have to cover your back." As a result, public money gets wasted. "They build motorways, airports and hotels, but staff training doesn't follow." That's why on his building site the skilled positions go to the Han while Uyghurs are left with the unskilled jobs. It's an argument that's heard repeatedly. As we drove past a building site on the Kashgar-Hotan road, my Uyghur taxi driver said: "Of course there are Uyghur engineers, but they can't go abroad to get trained, and now all the techniques are imported from
In
Language barrier
Language is the other thing that holds Uyghurs back in the job market. Most Uyghurs don't speak Mandarin, or speak it badly, but it's the language used in most Han businesses. Wang Jian-min, an anthropology professor at the
Even so, the language barrier is a real one. Previously, most families sent their children to schools for ethnic minorities where Mandarin was just another subject on offer. And in the countryside it wasn't on offer at all. This created their current disadvantage and made it impossible for young people to leave their province, which is the only place their language is spoken. This problem didn't arise for the Uyghur elite in the cities; there, parents sent their children to Chinese schools (where Uyghur was offered as an option).
Since 2003, however, teaching in Chinese is obligatory throughout the school curriculum, except for the teaching of literature. Uyghur now has the status of a second language. This new rule has become a crucial bone of contention between the Han and the Uyghurs. Many people have compared it to "cultural genocide" or, like Abderrahman, to brainwashing. In the countryside this leads to ridiculous situations, as Nadira, a new teacher, told me; she was trained at the Chinese-language university in
By contrast Nazim, who runs a department at
Young people are much more opinionated. Assiane, who has been taught in Chinese right from the start, waited for her older colleague to leave before expressing her opinion. "They start by limiting the scope of Uyghur teaching and it ends up dying out," she told me. In
Since 2003 the law has obliged administrations to have joint leadership, one from the Han community and one from an ethnic minority. But most of the time, the power remains with the Han. That is the case at the top level of the region's government: the president is Nur Bekri, an Uyghur, but it's party secretary Wang Lequan who pulls the strings. Wang Lequan has ruled the province with a rod of iron since 1994. "He's not a man who understands the situation. He doesn't have love in his heart. He doesn't understand people's souls," says Yi Fang, an old
History serving politics
As ever, history becomes politically charged – historical facts are regularly pressed into service and even falsified in current disputes. In Kashgar's dusty, little-visited museum, there's a sign reading: "In 60BC… local government was established under the Han dynasty. Since then Xinjiang has been part of the Chinese state." That version was the official one for a long time but has now been dropped, as has the idea that the Chinese were the first inhabitants of the region. The magnificent Indo-European mummies found in the Taklamakan desert put paid to that claim. Xinjiang was on the
On the other hand, dating the "colonisation of the province" to the arrival of the communists in 1949, as the World Congress of Uyghurs would have it (a view accepted by several French newspapers), doesn't reflect reality either. The first Chinese political presence in Xinjiang dates from the Manchu dynasty in the 1750s. In the wake of rebellions, Daoguang, the eighth emperor, created the first "reconstruction offices" as part of a policy of assimilation in which the powers that be were reluctant to depend on local leaders as they were "corrupt and harmful to the policy of central state". In 1884 the province became part of
It's true that history is not linear and Xinjiang has seen several bids for independence. The emirate of Kashgarie survived from 1864 to 1877 thanks to the recognition of the Ottoman empire,
Most Uyghurs are not in fact calling for independence, but greater justice and recognition of their identity. "We may be better off than we were a decade ago," Abderrahman says, "but we're still lagging behind." GDP stands at 15,016 yuan per inhabitant in Shihezi (which is 90% Han), 6,771 in Aksu (30% Han), 3,497 in Kashgar (8.5%) and 2,445 yuan in Hotan (3.2%) (6).
These flagrant, ethnically based inequalities are pushing the Uyghurs towards Islam, the only vehicle for their opposition and means of affirming their identity. Already the sight of women in burqas is no longer a rarity. There is a clear danger that the fundamentalists will be the beneficiaries of this shift. Extremist groups are still marginal, but that could change if
Xinjiang's minorities, and the Uyghurs in particular, are trapped between modernisation, which is crushing their culture; discrimination, which excludes them from prosperity; and authoritarianism, which is grinding down their distinctiveness. Their dislocation is more social and cultural than religious. And it's a situation that will go on as long as the autonomy that
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