China Keeps Close Guard on Restive Xinjiang

China is perturbed regarding a potential spillover as a consequence of the populist uprisings in North Africa and West Asia. The government is keeping a close tab on its restive Xinjiang region that has perennially remained on a political and ethnic simmer.

It should be recalled that China’s toughest internal challenge in decades came in the form of  ethnic violence and demonstrations raging through the far-west Xinjiang region in July 2009 leaving nearly 184 people dead and more than 1,680 injured. The population of the capital city, Urumqi, has witnessed the presence of heavily armed troops to counter any ethnic tension leading to potential explosive unrest between the minority community of the Uighurs and the Han Chinese majority. The history of simmering tensions and sporadic violence between Muslim Uighurs and Han Chinese has continued for a while now.

With this historical background, the Chinese government is taking no chance of allowing even the remotest window of opportunity for protests to regain momentum, thus assuming a greater threat to broader political stability in the rest of China.

While demanding an immediate ceasefire in Libya, the People’s Daily ran a commentary lashing out against the western coalitions and associated the campaign with “… oil reserves and strategic interests… Iraq was invaded for oil…  Now it is Libya.”

The official Xinhua agency reported that China’s top leadership has decided to ramp up development in the north-western region, where ethnic Uighurs have long protested against losing out on economic growth. Premier Wen Jiabao stated in March 2010 that the government would focus on the economic and social development in Xinjiang, Tibet and Tibetan ethnic areas in provinces of Sichuan, Yunnan, Gansu and Qinghai.

Wen’s statement was followed by a change in leadership in Xinjiang in April 2010 with the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee nominating Zhang Chunxian as the new head of the party, succeeding Wang Lequan. With all likelihood of Zhang becoming a member of the politburo in 2012, Xinjiang may well witness priority given to building of internet networks and other cyber capabilities—a facet that Zhang is known to promote.

This however, would be an irony, given that Beijing is known to possess the world’s strictest internet controls. This aspect got verified yet again, with Google accusing the Chinese government of disrupting Gmail services in the country. Internet users in China are being prevented access to any ‘sensitive information’ regarding the uprisings, manifested in the form of censoring web content and disrupting web searches related to calls for similar protests in China.

The Chinese government has come under widespread criticism for adopting a hardline 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. The Chinese authorities have all along accused the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM) of plotting terrorist attacks against China.

According to analysts 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.”

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 to 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 the 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 has gift-wrapped its suppressive policy toward the Uighurs under the more ‘acceptable’ pretext of the global war against terrorism.

Xinjiang remains 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.

In a rare admission, during his January 2011 visit to the US, President Hu Jintao for the first time confessed that “a lot still needs to be done” in terms of human rights in China. Beijing is walking a thin line as it strives to maintain a delicate and symbiotic balance between political stability and economic development—thus ensuring the legitimate supremacy of the proverbial rule of the CCP in China.

Dr Monika Chansoria is a Senior Fellow at the Centre for Land Warfare Studies (CLAWS)

(The views expressed in the article are that of the author and do not represent the views of the editorial committee or the centre for land warfare studies).