Welmer

The street fighting that killed well over a hundred people in Urumqi a couple days ago went beyond a “riot.” It was more of a Uighur intifadeh in the heart of the largest center of Chinese settlement in Xinjiang. However, that is not to say that it was a Muslim uprising — there are plenty of reports of Hui (Chinese Muslims) being involved in the protests on the side of the Han.

The Uighurs, a Turkic people, are quite different from Han Chinese. Unlike the Hui, they look distinct from Han, having a roughly Eurasian countenance. Some of them would not stand out from the locals in Southeastern Europe, while others have a notably Turkic look, which is hard to describe to Americans who are unfamiliar with the ethnicity, but is nonetheless significantly different from Han Chinese. The Uighur language, which is a form of Turkish closely related to Uzbek, sounds vaguely similar to Korean and Japanese.

Despite the fact that Uighurs are a fairly mixed, cosmopolitan people, I browsed some images to look for the most typical Uighur I could find, based on my memories of the Uighurs I knew in Beijing, and came up with the following pleasant image of a Uighur woman in traditional dress:

So, as one might expect, there are some racial elements to the conflict in Xinjiang. These have fairly deep roots, and during the early days of the Chinese Republic, following the collapse of the Qing dynasty but prior to the victory of the Communists, there was a widely held view in nationalist circles that Uighurs did not belong in the Chinese state. In fact, Chiang Kai-shek’s brutal treatment of Uighurs and other Northwestern minorities following their move toward independence in the 1930s led to their alignment with Communist forces during the later years of the Chinese Revolution.

Following the 1949 establishment of the PRC, Xinjiang was mainly left to itself as China struggled to build a Communist society. The rural areas were largely untouched by the struggles of the Cultural Revolution, and life continued as it had for hundreds of years. The eastern core of Han culture had its own problems, and China was mired in medieval poverty, so there wasn’t much impetus for the kind of economic development that later began to bring millions of Chinese to Xinjiang.

When China’s economic ascendancy began around 1980, this started to change. Xinjiang, although lagging far behind coastal China, started to attract development — a trend that was encouraged by the central government in Beijing. Furthermore, increasing effort was put into assimilating the minority peoples of China, and students from Xinjiang were encouraged, through advantageous quotas, to attend universities in the east. The policy was the same age-old sinicization that has characterized the expansion of the Han ethnicity since the dawn of history, but with a decidedly modern implementation.

However, as I have written before in regards to Tibetan people, assimilation into the Chinese cultural sphere doesn’t usually work very well for people who are already civilized, and the Uighurs have been both settled and civilized for about a thousand years. Exacerbating the inherent tension between Chinese and peripheral civilizations is the policy of encouraging nationalism in response to the failure of Communist ideology. Inevitably, Chinese nationalism has taken on some Han supremacist overtones, and this is profoundly alienating to a people without any real connection or sense of belonging in the context of Chinese civilization.

Combined with economic discrepancies, it is natural that race and culture would play a part in fomenting conflict in the “New Territories” (direct translation of Xinjiang). As China goes through more growing pains and joins the rest of the world, it will increasingly face the difficult task of humanely managing these tensions within its own borders. Outbursts such as the bloodshed in Urumqi can only serve as serious setbacks to China’s goals, so a reappraisal of policies is in order. Despite the talk of the inevitability of China’s eventual ascendance to global power, these incidents serve as a reminder that there is a long path ahead; one that is fraught with pitfalls and potentially insurmountable obstacles.