Testvéreink az ujgurok (figyeljétek a zászlójukat!) East Turkestan For decades, Tibet (no. 7 on this list two years ago) and Taiwan had dominated the large area of the Chinese Communist Party’s collective brain labeled “paranoid fantasies.” But now the most serious threat to the unity of the Chinese state is the tiny Uyghur national minority, who form only a slight majority in the vast far-western Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, the People’s Republic of China’s largest province-level jurisdiction, known by nationalists as East Turkestan (which was no. 9 on last year’s list). Uyghurs are different: their land is an arid swath of Central Asia, they are Muslim, and they speak a Turkic language related to those of formerly Soviet republics like Azerbaijan and nearby Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. In the early 20th century, Xinjiang (called Sinkiang, in English) was a far-flung, thinly governed part of the old Chinese Empire, then a Soviet satellite of sorts for a while, till Josef Stalin, at Yalta, negotiated it away to the Nationalists who were running China as the Second World War ended. The Nationalist Kuomintang (KMT) promised, and to some extent granted, Xinjiang some autonomy, but once Mao Zedong seized the territory in 1950, ruthless central control was imposed and it became a Glorious Worker’s Paradise where all were treated equally—actually, I’m just kidding about that last part. During the Cultural Revolution in Xinjiang, Maoists, in a frenzy similar to what was happening in the rest of the country, embarked on an orgy of destruction, much of it focused on obliterating the Muslim religion. Alas, little has changed. Muslim holidays, prayers, and dress are criminalized as part of the official ideology of denouncing all religion as superstition. In the old Maoist China, worship of Mao was the only worship permitted; today, Chinese—and their smaller captive nations as well—are really only allowed to worship money. (Buddhism of the type practiced half-heartedly by the ethnic Han majority gets a pass.) For several years now, a sporadic Uyghur uprising has been claiming lives on a regular—recently almost weekly—basis. Most unrest takes the form of crude knife or hatchet attacks by Uyghurs on civilian targets like marketplaces. According to Beijing, that is: as with much else in this closed, totalitarian society, no one knows what is really happening in these incidents—whether Uyghurs are being provoked, whether agents provocateurs are staging the attacks in “false flag” operations to discredit Muslims, or whether, indeed, some of these events are even happening at all. And some of the alleged Uyghur terrorist attacks have happened far afield—in Kunming, even Beijing. This is a far cry from the peaceful approach taken by proponents of Tibet’s autonomy or independence, and Beijing is making much of supposed links to Islamic radicals in places like Pakistan, Central Asia, even—implausibly—Turkey. But Beijing had better be careful what it wishes for: after seeing what has been going on in Hong Kong this fall, Uyghurs may be awakening to the fact that—even though Han Chinese are threatening to soon outnumber them in their own region, as part of Beijing’s internal-migration program to dilute the local culture—there is still some strength in numbers. Uyghurs do, if they play it right, have the capacity to make Xinjiang ungovernable. It’s possible a truly general uprising would result in a bloodbath that would make the Tiananmen Square massacre look like nothing. But if it happens in the context of a general unraveling of Chinese unity—with separatist sentiment on the rise in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Tibet as well—then anything can happen. I predict that, if nothing else, there will be more and greater interethnic carnage in China’s wild west in 2015, and a further official crackdown on Uyghur religion and culture—which, of course, will only create more radicals.
Posted on: Tue, 23 Dec 2014 11:47:57 +0000
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