A lot of people chatter about the rise of China. But China has problems of its own, some more bothersome than anything facing the U.S. For starters, a quasi-capitalist, quasi-communist society whose affections lie with the ethnic Han majority has trouble containing its minorities in the frontiers. To the ethnic Hans, there's a situation somewhat analogous to that of America's Western Settlers - What do you do with a great open space previously uninhabited... except by the couple million people who happen to be living there.
Last year in March, it was Tibet that saw violence, ending with 18 dead. But Tibetans are a pretty tranquil people. This year, the troubles are in Uyghurstan, and we're getting a clear picture of why even if the four Uyghurs in Guantanamo weren't terrorists, going back wasn't an option if they had strong feelings about their religious or ethnic identities.
The death toll as things settle down is estimated at, get ready... 156. In other words, yes, the Iranians are brutal thugs. But there are other hotspots in the world. In this case, it's a spot in China that hardly anyone has heard of but where a lot of gas and oil resources lie. It's also a spot whose peoples and borders have been in flux for ages. For example, the border with the Persian-speaking Tajikistan was only settled in like 2002, and that with the proviso "for now." More to the point, this is an area where the Russians and English squabbled through much of the Great Game, with the English demanding the Russians keep their hands off and the Russians saying they would if and only if the Chinese could keep control of the territory.
From China's vantage point, Xinjiang is critical: It's a barrier between China proper and Central Asia, and it's home to a lot of resources. But culturally, it's a lot closer to Uzbekistan, Kyrgzystan and Kazakhstan (Lonely Planet advises that if you whine while speaking Uzbek you can pass it off as Uyghur, and it's only a slight exaggeration). The thing is, it's getting separated from Central Asia with each passing year, not because the Turks are gravitating toward the Chinese but because the Hans are overrunning the territory.
Some may have wondered why the Chinese weren't doing more to seek advantage with the U.S. in the War on Terror. But the truth is, they've had their own distractions with a Muslim minority and with Muslim nations on their borders who might at some point decide that the Uyghurs belong in the Turkic family, liberated from their Chinese Communist oppressors just as the other -stans have been liberated from their Russian Communist oppressors.
I'm not an expert on this stuff; just a dabbler. But I've been watching and wondering for quite some time if the surging Chinese wouldn't find themselves torn apart internally even as they prepared to pose before the world as a great and unstoppable force. Given the War on Terror dynamic, it's tough to know who to root for in this one. The easy way out, and the one I'm taking, is to hope for the Chinese to be forced to restrict Han migration before things escalate further so that what appears to be a relatively open Central Asian Muslim society can persist. The only alternatives I see are a Chinese crackdown of sufficient severity that the Uyghur culture gets destroyed or a Chinese crackdown of insufficient severity that allows the most extremist of the Uyghur nationalists to claim victory, setting the stage for a Muslim society that might be taken over by people who want shariah, not just a shot at being first class citizens in their own homeland instead of being second to the Hans.
My main concern is that the stupid Michael Jackson memorials swallow this whole in the West, relegating the newest attempt for the fair treatment of the Uighurs to the News Scrawl under Wolf Blitzer. The background is almost as controversial as the riots themselves - this being either the result of ethnic discrimination at a factory co-staffed by Han and Uighur, or the result of the “rape of two innocent Han girls by Uighur youths.” In general, the internal reporting is as biased as ever, with Han participants described as ‘innocent’ and ‘ordinary.’
And from their comments section:
In contrast to the nineties, when it was indeed trying to sweep all Uighur unrest under the carpet and minimise it all, since 2001 and 2002 China has been keen to sell all oppression of/crackdown against the Uighurs as its part in the so-called ‘war on terror’.
It will be curious to see how this plays out, but I expect it to get ugly.
