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China is confronting its toughest challenge in decades as it deals with ethnic violence raging through the far-west Xinjiang region where violent demonstrations on July 5, 2009 left at least 184 people dead and more than 1,680 injured according to Chinese government sources. The scenes across Urumqi, the capital city witnessed heavily armed troops as violence rose owing to ethnic tensions between the minority community of the Uighurs and the Han Chinese majority.
According to reports, the protests that took place in the predominantly Uighur-populated district could possibly have been a reaction to ethnic violence in southern China earlier when at least two Uighurs were killed. During the course of the past month, violence had broken out at a toy factory in the Guangdong province, where many migrants including Uighurs have moved in search of employment. As reported, a serious brawl broke out between the Uighurs and the Han nationalities. The ongoing riots are believed to have stemmed from a protest march held by more than 1,000 Uighurs as they demanded that the government investigate the earlier scuffle between the Han and Uighurs in southern China.
Later, hundreds of Han Chinese paraded the streets of Urumqi on July 7, 2009 demanding harsh punishment for Uighurs. On the contrary, the Uighurs contends that they have been victims of the violence and are the majority killed in the clashes. There has been simmering tensions and sporadic violence between Muslim Uighurs and Han Chinese. Earlier in August 2008, while the Olympics were in full swing at Beijing, news of fresh episodes of violence in Xinjiang had threatened to upset the image that China had striven to create for itself in front of the world. That particular incident reported the death of a security guard and at least 10 suspects after a series of bombings that began with a pre-dawn attack on a police station. The violence erupted in Kuqa, a city comprising a population of 400,000 in the southern part of Xinjiang.
The Chinese authorities have all along accused the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM) of plotting terrorist attacks against China. However, the Chinese government has come under widespread criticism for adopting a hard-line approach towards the Uighur separatists as it fails to differentiate them from terrorists and associated organisations. However much the Chinese government may disagree, the Xinjiang province has constantly surfaced as a potential flashpoint and continuing source of instability owing to political and social turbulence.
According to Chien-peng Chung at the Lingnan University in Hong Kong, “With racial tension still in the air, the danger is that a pattern of attacks and counter-attacks between armed Uighur and Han Chinese may emerge in the days to come, not only in Xinjiang, but also in large Chinese cities elsewhere.”
Sporadic protests by Muslim separatists in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region and police crackdowns in numerous locales of the province have been reported often. China has accused Muslims in the nation’s north-west of making efforts to initiate a rebellion in the Xinjiang province. Much like the Tibetans in the Tibetan Autonomous Region, the Uighurs constitute a predominant ethnic group in Xinjiang — a region that has struggled for cultural survival in the face of a government-supported influx of Chinese migrants, as well as harsh repression of political dissent. Moreover, they aspire for political independence and resent Chinese control.
The ethnic Uighur minority is a Turkic-speaking, predominantly Muslim community in the sensitive and remote province of Xinjiang abutting the Central Asian Republics. As a matter of fact, the influx of Han, the dominant ethnic group in China, has transformed Xinjiang: the percentage of Han in the population was 40 per cent in 2000, up from 6 per cent in 1949. Nevertheless, migration has further fuelled ethnic strains, as Uighurs suffer owing to unemployment, expansion of Han-owned businesses and large-scale disintegration of their own culture.
Religious freedom has been a constant source of tension in Xinjiang. The Chinese government has been accused of banning students and party members from practicing Islam, and firmly controlling the Muslim clergy. Throughout the 1990s, Beijing was apprehensive of the emergence of unrest and terrorism in its largely Uighur Muslim-inhabited region of Xinjiang, since the Uighurs share more cultural affinity with Central Asia than with rest of China. The Uighurs, who look and sound more like Turks than Han Chinese, advocate and support the creation of an independent state for Xinjiang’s Muslims, much to China’s antagonism.
Significantly, numerous human rights groups have accused Beijing of overstating the threat in order to validate its crackdown against the Uighur community. It would be crucial to mention here that Xinjiang remains the only province in China where execution of political prisoners is common. Human rights advocates have also stressed that since September 11, 2001 the Chinese government had expanded its suppressive policy toward the Uighurs under the more ‘acceptable’ pretext of the global war against terrorism.
Notably, Xinjiang is critical to the economic ambitions of the PRC, since the province makes up more than one-sixth of China’s landmass. In addition, it also possesses rich, untapped deposits of oil, natural gas and minerals. In fact, China perceives Xinjiang as its gateway to the huge oil and gas reserves of Central Asia with Chinese companies already seeking foreign partners to construct pipelines from fields in Kazakhstan and Russia.
Beijing expectedly would tread extremely cautiously in the given situation as the world observes the ongoing developments minutely. Stepping up its crackdown against the Uighurs at this juncture might be a blemish on its international image given that most members of the security forces are Han Chinese. China still remembers the horror of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre as it stands on the edge while dealing with the long-standing political and social discord prevalent in Xinjiang.
(Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not represent the views either of the Editorial Committee or the Centre for Land Warfare Studies).
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