Urumqi must be one of the most obscure cities of its size anywhere on Earth. Google Maps shows its location in the far north-western corner of China. It’s the capital of Xinjiang Province, whose indigenous population was mainly Muslim Uighurs. But over the past few decades, increasing numbers of Han Chinese have moved there, particularly to Urumqi, and these days Uighurs are a minority group in Urumqi.
Figuring out exactly what went on there over the past few days is rather difficult, but Wikipedia’s summary of the news reports suggests that the trouble initially started after a brawl at a workplace saw two Uighur workers killed by Han Chinese. A protest by Uighurs demanding further investigation of these killings was then subject to heavy-handed policing, which saw it turn into a riot. Further violence has apparently ensued with groups of Han Chinese committing revenge attacks.
Some useful context is provided by this piece at opendemocracy.net, which notes Uighur groups in China and elsewhere, and their – largely peaceful – attempts to achieve more autonomy and self-determination. This New York Times article also notes Chinese government policies towards the Uighurs, including a gradual erosion of the use of their language in the school system, and the fact that most of the economic spoils from growth seem to be going to Han Chinese.
While China remains a totalitarian state, it seems likely that minority rights will continue to be trampled on. But if and when the current political system changes, it will be interesting to see how China’s relationship with the ethnic minorities in its border provinces sort themselves out.
China isn’t just a totalitarian state, it’s a racist totalitarian state with Han Chinese at the top. All unstated of course – publicising such a philosophy would be tawdry, and there’s no need to when the vast majority of the population will impose the system for you. Don’t expect democracy to change anything. Get used to it, they don’t think much more of westerners.
Xinjiang will go the way of Tibet. The indigenous will be marginalised and eventually turned into a tiny curiosity for adventurous tourists.
There are pictures circulating on Chinese-language websites of piles of bodies, of Han Chinese including women, children and babies all with their throats slit or other signs of violent attack. Regardless of the justness of their cause{or the veracity of the pictures], these images have prompted revenge attacks by mobs of vigilantes. The Chinese government line (which is the narrative accepted by Han Chinese within and outside of mainland China) is very much that this has all been caused by separatists living in western countries, with tacit support from western governments who have ‘ulterior motives’. Expect China to retract more into knee-jerk nationalism and mistrust if not outright hatred of the west.
Actually, I’d argue that China isn’t a totalitarian state, or a racist totalitarian state.
I’d say that it’s an empire that never declined or fell. The empire has had some minor geographical modifications over the millenia (I think it once stretched as far south as Vietnam and as far east as the Korean peninsula), but it still encompasses roughly the same territory it did when Caligula decided his horse would make a good Senator.
Of course, I could be wrong. I often am.
Hate to quibble, but it’s somewhat unlikely that the Uighurs are literally ‘indigenous’ to the region, depending how you define it. For instance the Uighurs displaced the Tocharians in the Tarim Basin, and it’s not at all clear that the Tocharians were ‘indigenous’ either. Central Asia’s kooky that way. The Uighurs and/or the Han may be no more indigenous to the region than the Turks are to Anatolia. The word should be used sparingly, as it can turn into a political football if folks don’t consider what ostensible ‘rights’ they may be accidentally inferrin’ when they use it.
Ha, Craig, you and I don’t agree often, but on this one we sure do.
Xinjiang. In news just in, Melbourne looks like one of the most obscure towns anywhere on Earth, at least looking across from here.
Time to consult the contestant from South Carolina for some maps & advice on rural provincial attitudes.
Some good points by everyone.
And Mr/Ms Xinjiang, I suspect even your average Beijinger or Shanghaiese would regard Xrumqi as an obscure backwater, and would have almost as much trouble finding it on a map as they would Melbourne.
Some good points by everyone.
And Mr/Ms Xinjiang, I suspect even your average Beijinger or Shanghaiese would regard Xrumqi as an obscure backwater, and would have almost as much trouble finding it on a map as they would Melbourne.
Get your hand off it dude. It was an innocuous comment, and furthermore relatively true. Urumqi is only 230km from the Eurasian pole of inaccessibility.
That’s pretty damned remote by any definition.
jpz: Of course you’re right. The region has been like a game of musical chairs over the millenia. “indigenous” isn’t really the correct word.
If you just change a few words it’s like your talking about the NT…
government policies towards Indigenous Australians, including a gradual erosion of the use of their language in the school system, and the fact that most of the economic spoils from growth seem to be going to mainstream Australia.
patrickg: in that article, “Eurasian pole of inaccessibility” only means it is the furthest place away from oceans in the globe. Since the Silk Road went through there, it really isn’t that inaccessible.
It’s not like the other “pole of inaccessibilities” in your link – especially the Oceanic one, which is a patch of the Pacific between Easter Island and Antarctica. Now THAT’S inaccessible. Nobody goes through there, except the odd suicidal cross-the-world yacht racer.
I’m very suspicious of reports out of china about the plight of indigenous peoples, particularly when they come from media outlets that only report on Asian countries in stereotypes (I don’t mean LP in this). The situation in Tibet is far more complex (now) than an invading nation oppressing helpless locals, and was far more complex (then) than a sweet government of hippies who didn’t torture and oppress their population. The recent riots in Tibet may have had as much to do with access to money and good jobs as with preserving indigenous culture.
Given how far away this place is and how little anyone knows about it, and given China’s media blackout, I’m dubious about making any claims one way or another about the situation. Also, Tibetans aren’t a “tiny curiosity for tourists”, and I don’t think that’s how the Chinese envisages them – they’re a functioning society which western hippies happen to want to visit, and as a consequence lots of them cater to tourism. Just as happens in Guilin, Xian or Beijing. If we don’t like the idea of an indigenous people not being reduced to a stereotype, we could probably start with our own comments…
Agree with j_p_z. This grasping at the crown of “indigenous”, well it’s not very deep. Over in Aotearoa the Maori have been there – what? – 700 years or so. They “displaced” the Morioiri, apparently. (The Europeans signed a treaty in 1840, only 169 years ago.)
So are the Morioiri the ‘true indigenous’? What of recent immigrants from Pacific islands? Or from Australia?
Many lands and islands must have experienced waves of mifgration and conquest or displacement over the millenia. Some of these displacements we’ll now never discover, being too ancient.
Hey indigene, hate to go off-thread but according to wikipedia the moriori never existed as a separate race or nation, and are just a sub-group of maori living in the Chatham Islands.
sg,
It was the Maori’s own story that they had cleared out these predecessors, hmmmm…. oral traditions a little unreliable?
I think you’re quite right about simplistic reporting, and the ignorance in Australia of the complexities….. What are the standard views?
1. China suppresses human rights
2. China oppresses “minorities”
3. Tibet should be free
4. Tibet was a feudal, backward, horrible country before the PLA sorted it out
5. Every group needs autonomy
6. China must hold together as a nation, despite centrifugal tendencies; as must the very diverse nation of Indonesia
7. Look what happened when the former Yugos drifted apart
8. Indigenous good, imperialists bad!
There’s a little truth in each of these views. Australan press reports are often framed along one of these lines. But a problem like this achieves prominence (especially if it’s in some “obscure” corner of the globe) only when cars are set alight in the street, heads are bloodied, people die, etc. I find that not only a sad aspect of the way we live…. but also it seems to me, that noticing this gives a strong motivation to the disaffected to seek mayhem as a means of gaining publicity. “We had no other choice.”
indigene, I get the impression from the wikipedia entry (which is pretty scanty, but has quotes) that oral history was pretty reliable as far as the moriori story goes – the maori went to the chatham islands and enslaved or ate people. But the rest of it – that they were a separate pre-maori race on NZ – sounds like a confection of late 18th-century/early 19th-century racists. Certainly the wikipedia entry doesn’t sound like maori are very supportive of the claim that they wiped out their predecessors, and see it as a racist claim.
I’ve never seen 4. acknowledged in the popular press. Or amongst most supporters of the dalai lama, for that matter. I wonder if xinjiang is actually a clearer case for independence than Tibet, but ignored for longer by the west because of its remoteness and the unsexiness of islam compared to buddhism.
I am glad LP has covered these events, even if in only a limited way. The silence from the right side of the blogsphere, usually so quick to criticize China, is nothing less than despicable. The oppressive Chinese government can oppress all it likes when the targets are a Muslim minority, it seems. Never has the hypocrisy and shallowness of the right been so exposed.
Having said that, the complexities of the events and their antecedents aren’t really captured here, and to do so is probably beyond the blog genre.
Conservative bloggers must be wracked with confusion by this…they definitely can’t support the Uighurs as they are ghastly Muslims and we all know that Islam intrinsically leads one to suicide bombings (never mind the Tamils…) and yet they can’t support the Chinese state as they are beastly ‘Communists’…
What a bind to be in!
Still, they’re probably too busy supporting a military coup that overthrew a democratically elected government in Honduras…
MH: I don’t think it’s the medium so much as the fact that I know very little about the issues, aside from the obvious that violence is bad.
I’m sure there are multiple informed perspectives out there.
If, at some future time, independence was achieved for places like Xinjiang, my guess is that you’d have a similar situation to you have now in many of the former Soviet states with ethnic Russians.
Indeed there are.
If you could point us to some, it’d be much appreciated!
There’s a doco at the Melbourne Film Festival called ‘The 10 Conditions of Love’ about Uighur activist Rebiya Kadeer. Kadeer will be at the Festival and I imagine, doing a fair amount of publicity whilst she’s in Australia.
The alleged “silence from the right side of the blogsphere” and “conservative bloggers” (18 & 19) on Xinjiang will be motivated, I suggest, much less by any racist/religionist tendencies than much more pragmatic, down-home, and co-religionist ( ie neo-mammonism) concerns as suggested in
Aside- What a hoot, China accusing someone (Rio Tinto) of industrial espionage, a grande reverse ‘Qui s’excuse, s’accuse’, with double pike: talk about taking one to know one. My favourite’s the guy they lauded big-time, including a microelcetronics deanship at Shanghai’s Jiaotong uni, and the full national-hero wenjiabao workplace visit treatment, for developing “the first DSP chip to have been wholly developed in China”. It’s said to just be a motorola chip with it’s logo simply ground off and replaced with the Hanxin company’s. He’s pretty severely persona non grata now, and apparently won’t be working on any more government projects.
I’m well aware, BTW, we have our own history of dodgy boffins, but we couldn’t hope to achieve dodginess such a grand scale.
Oh wait, clean coal…
“…less by any racist/religionist tendencies than much more pragmatic, down-home, and co-religionist ( ie neo-mammonism) concerns …”
As in, capital accumulation driven by the profit motive trumps human rights…again?
I’m honestly not intending snark here, am probably being obtuse, but I don’t really understand how China losing one of its most resource-rich areas would result in a reduction of resource demand for Australia?
I mean they still have the factories etc. We still have the demand of flat screen tvs, etc…? The Chinese dragon is not so easily toppled methinks.
Mind you, this is all academic. I would be incredibly surprised if any area of current Chinese territory is given independence in any meaningful sense in the next 20 years at the least.
Danny: “What a hoot, China accusing someone (Rio Tinto) of industrial espionage, a grande reverse ‘Qui s’excuse, s’accuse’, with double pike: talk about taking one to know one.”
And meanwhile where are their computers, with all the highly confidential information on iron ore pricing negotiations? Call me suspicious, but the Chinese authorities have taken their sweet time over letting RIO or the Aussie government know the grounds for taking these guys.
Meanwhile those guys no doubt have high level clearances and passwords for the RIO databases. With threats of untold hardship, might they be induced to provide the Chinese government IT chappies with the necessary access codes…?
And for the future, how are the Aussie resources companies going to conduct future pricing negotiations? Is this signalling a really serious change in modus operandi for commercial dealings with Chinese state-backed companies?
Robert Merckel Says:
Gotta love the slanted interpretation (“heavy-handed policing”) and use of the passive voice here (“saw it turn into a riot”).
I suggest calling a spade a spade. This was a pogrom. P-O-G-R-O-M.
The rioting Uighurs turned ugly real quick and went on the hunt for Hans to kill. The police obviously acted with restraint, from what I can see of the footage. Wikipedia’s report elaborates:
No doubt the PRC should not have sent Han Chinese to live in a nation in which they were not welcome. But shouldnt LP’ers be glad about such culturally mixing diversity? Committed multiculturalists should a couple of hard questions relating to the management of ethnic affairs here:
1. Maybe its not a good idea to introduce massive numbers of another ethnic group into a previously more or less homogeneous nation. As empires like the UK, USSR and PRC have done. (And US with Hispanics.) Once ethnic critical mass is attained it generates centripetal force which leads to enclavism.
2. Market-dominant minorities like the Han Chinese, mercantile Indians and Azkhenazi Jews are invariably subjected to pogroms. This kind of problem always afflicts Chinese immigrants because they are industrious and intelligent, usually more so than the locals. (even in AUS, remember Lambing Flats riots?)
Robert Merkel says:
The plight of the Uighurs, like the Tibetans, is unfortunate. In a perfect world they would have more autonomy. OTOH, the PRC govt has generally done something useful for the Han people, who are more than likely mostly responsible for producing the economic growth.
Robert Merkel says:
It wont be pretty. Probably what happened when the USSR went democratic. It broke up with lots of nasty ethnic conflicts, still simmering, occasionally bursting into all out civil war eg Chechnya, Georgia etc.
Democracy does not tend to make multi-ethnic states into nice places to live.
Also, the PRC is not “totalitarian” by any measure. It allows capitalist enterprise and substantial contact with the outside world. The Party is fairly inclusive, recruiting Christians and capitalists. It only brings out the tanks when state sovereignty is directly threatened.
Why are supposedly Left-wing LP’ers so biased against the PRC, the one (somewhat) socialist government that has actually been a success at improving its citizens well-being?
“which notes Uighur groups in China and elsewhere, and their – largely peaceful – attempts to achieve more autonomy and self-determination”
Some people will believe anything. The fact that we don’t here about violence may simply be (and probably is) because the Chinese government is good at censoring things like this, and because it happens to suit both the Chinese (who want to pretend nothing bad happens in China) and the Uighurs (who don’t at present want to be seen as “muslim terroists” to the international community) to say they don’t commit nasty shit against each (much). In this respect, it seems rather hard to imagine that you can go from largely peaceful to murdering people on the streets with no intermediate stage.
You think they’re that ignorant? Urumqi isn’t a Beijing or Shanghai that’s for sure. but it’s the major commercial, political and transportation hub of northwestern China and pretty much the only city in that region that stands out on a map. It’s far from being a backwater and Chinese people aren’t stupid about their own country.
Robert Merckel Says:
Gotta love the slanted interpretation (“heavy-handed policing”) and use of the passive voice here (“saw it turn into a riot”).
I suggest calling a spade a spade. This was a pogrom. P-O-G-R-O-M.
The rioting Uighurs turned ugly real quick and went on the hunt for Hans to kill. The police obviously acted with restraint, from what I can see of the footage. Wikipedia’s report elaborates:
No doubt the PRC should not have sent Han Chinese to live in a nation in which they were not welcome. You would think Left-liberals should be celebrating this cultural diversity?
Committed multiculturalists should be asking themselves a couple of hard questions relating to the management of ethnic affairs here:
1. Maybe its not a good idea to introduce massive numbers of another ethnic group into a previously more or less homogeneous nation. As empires like the UK, USSR and PRC have done. (And US with Hispanics.) Once ethnic critical mass is attained it generates centripetal force which leads to enclavism.
2. Market-dominant minorities like the Han Chinese, mercantile Indians and Azkhenazi Jews are invariably subjected to pogroms. This kind of problem frequently afflicts Chinese immigrants. It may be because the locals have a xenophobic reaction. Or possibly because the Han Chinese have superior economic ability. (even in AUS, remember Lambing Flats riots?)
Robert Merkel says:
The plight of the Uighurs, like the Tibetans, is unfortunate. In a perfect world they would have more autonomy. OTOH, the PRC govt has generally done something useful for the Han people, who are more than likely mostly responsible for producing the economic growth. Therefore, as with Cartman, we must respect the PRC’s authority.
Robert Merkel says:
It wont be pretty. Democracy does not tend to make multi-ethnic states into nice places to live. Probably what happened when the USSR went democratic. It broke up with lots of nasty ethnic conflicts, still simmering, occasionally bursting into all out civil war eg Chechnya, Georgia etc.
Also, the PRC is not “totalitarian” by any measure. It allows capitalist enterprise and substantial contact with the outside world. The Party is fairly inclusive, recruiting Christians and capitalists. It only brings out the tanks when state sovereignty is directly threatened.
Why are supposedly Leftists so biased against the PRC, the one (somewhat) socialist government that has actually been a success at improving its citizens well-being?
“I suspect even your average Beijinger or Shanghaiese would regard Xrumqi as an obscure backwater,”….
The characters Xin & Jiang mean (New,fresh, modern) & (Boundary, Border, Frontier) so “obscure backwater” is pretty much right, literally.
In that context Australia, Aodaliya is
Ao-(inlet, bay, dock, bank)-
Da-(big, great, vast, large, high)-
Li-(gains, advantage, profit, merit)-
Ya-(Asia, second), so
Hugely profitable safe harbor/ plan B
When exactly did this phrase “indigenous people” sneak into our public discourse nomenclature? It is a totally useless and basically meaningless phrase, so what interests push it? They even call the “Palestinians” “indigenous people”. Who makes the judgements on claims to being “indigenous”? I can not think of even one time I have read or heard the phrase used in an uncontestable context.
@32 Thank you Jack for, literally, reciting the party line on this issue. Almost nothing you say here is correct.
Good point Scarlett, has been discussed a little, up thread.
Used to express irritatin when newcomers arrive and wreck the joint: Europeans in Australia, Han Chinese in the north west.
Another pertinent example is the State policy of “transmigration” within the Indonesian Republic with locals objecting to the arrival of Javanese, in various obscure backwaters of the archipelago. Murder, demonstratin, murfer, etc ensuing.
But as j_p_z pointed out very skilfully earlier, if you delve into the history it gets murky. Migration and change is a general phenomenon, oui?
The Age is now reporting that the Chinese Government wants the Melbourne International Film Festival to pull ‘10 Conditions of Love’, the documentary about a Uighur activist. I don’t think they’re going to have much succes.
http://www.theage.com.au/national/beijing-pressures-film-festival-to-dump-documentary-20090714-dk5y.html
Jack @32,29
You ask:
It’s not a socialist government, even with the qualification “somewhat”, and speaking as someone who has been on the far left most of her conscious life I’m always offended when someone associates my banner with the conduct of repressive and/or capitalist regimes. China is a crony capitalist regime — kind of like what the mafia would be like if they achieved state power.
No, it’s not totalitarian but its brutality is pervasive.