Business Times - 16 Jul 2009
Last week's violence shows there's clearly something wrong that neither a clampdown nor spending more money will fix
By JOHN GEE
THE violence in China's Xinjiang province has been damped down for now, but serious damage has been done. Blaming the troubles on outside interference was the predictable reaction of a government wrongfooted by events.
The immediate cause of last week's violence was the escalating response to an incident in Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong province, in which Uighur workers were alleged to have molested a Han Chinese woman.
But this begs the question of why relations between many Han and Uighur Chinese citizens should be in such a fragile state that a possible case of sexual harassment should lead to so much violence. The incident became a lightning rod for the expression of other discontents.
China was an empire for most of its history. The experiences of its non-Han Chinese peoples differed considerably. In the more outlying areas, including Tibet and Xinjiang, central government authority sat lightly for long periods of time; in return for a formal acceptance of imperial authority, Beijing was content to leave in place the local power structures, cultures and religious observances.
Closer to the imperial centres of power, some nationalities faced more heavy-handed treatment by the government and felt threatened by encroachments on their lands and livelihoods by Han Chinese arrivals.
When the Communist Party of China was established, its policy on the 'national question' in China followed that developed by Soviet communists. Their understanding of national oppression and how it should be countered had been crystalised as early as 1913 in Marxism and the National Question, an essay that established Joseph Stalin as the Bolsheviks' leading authority on the issue and, incidentally, defined nationhood in narrow Eurocentric terms as a feature of 'the epoch of rising capitalism'.
The Bolsheviks' official stand was that pre-revolutionary Russia was a 'prison house of nations', and it should be replaced by a voluntary union in which the people of all nationalities would be equal. A distinction was made between 'nations' and 'nationalities'.
Peoples such as the Ukrainians and the Kazakhs were held to have all the characteristics of nationhood, and this was acknowledged by establishing republics for them that, in theory, were voluntary member-states of the Soviet Union and could secede if they wished.
In reality, the Soviet Union was far more centrally controlled than its Tsarist predecessor. Only with the collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of the 1980s did it prove possible to exercise that right, and all the republics did so with alacrity.
Soviet experience
'Nationalities' were seen as being somewhat less than fully formed nations. Official policy towards them was that they should have a right to various degrees of autonomy, but not to secede from the republic within which they lived. Hence, they were given autonomous republics and regions. This has led to big complications since the break-up of the Soviet Union, with members of some nationalities (most notably, the Chechens) seeking to achieve independent status for their autonomous entity or unification with others of their nationality (as in the case of the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabagh).
As far removed as this might seem from present-day China, it is directly relevant, as the Soviet experience not only informed Chinese communist policy making in the past, but the circumstances of the collapse of the Soviet Union are seen as a lesson in what should be avoided.
After the Chinese communists took power in 1949, they recognised over 50 different populations as nationalities, which they regarded as part of a larger Chinese nation. Extensive areas with a high concentration of a particular nationality - roughly 45 per cent of the country - were designated as autonomous regions: Xinjiang, Tibet, Ningxia, Inner Mongolia and Guangxi. Some smaller autonomous units were also created.
Crucially, none of the minority peoples were regarded as nations with republican status on the Soviet model and a constitutional right (however constricted in practice) to secede from the Chinese state.
Foreign perceptions of China's nationalities policy have been largely moulded by the example of Tibet, but the record has been more mixed than that unhappy case might suggest. China can cite progress in the autonomous regions in health care, education and housing, investments in infrastructure and other indicators of progress. Also at times of greatest hardship, such as the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, people of all nationalities suffered, without discrimination. The problem here - and it has been a problem all along - is that the official approach is overwhelmingly defined in social and economic terms that take little account of attitudes and values.
Demographic issues
The treatment of religion is a case in point. While all religious groups came under various forms of pressure after 1949, the communist leadership saw Confucianism as having had a particularly harmful effect on China by inculcating submission to traditional authorities.
During the Cultural Revolution, there was even a 'campaign to criticise Lin Biao and Confucius'. So the belief system that had been most influential among China's majority population was certainly not treated favourably compared to the religions traditionally dominant among the minority nationalities, but that might not be what the minorities saw. What mattered to the religious among them was that their mosques and temples were attacked by Red Guards and that their values were denigrated: They often experienced things such as offences against their nationality, irrespective of the fact that they were not being specifically targeted by the leadership in Beijing.
Demographic issues are another case. China recognises that the eastern heartlands are densely populated by Han Chinese, while the minorities are numerically much fewer, live in less densely populated regions and might be particularly sensitive to policies that could reduce their numbers. For these reasons, the minority nationalities were not pressed to embrace the 'one child' policy that was applied to the majority population.
However, at a local level in Tibet and Xinjiang, what counts most is the influx of Han Chinese who come to live there. The newcomers see opportunities to earn a living; the locals see them as favoured pawns of a central policy intended to tighten Beijing's hold on their homelands.
The reform process that got under way in 1979 produced its own problems, including a crisis of expectations. The demands of development encouraged an increase in Han Chinese migration to some national minority areas. The economic benefits of reform were unevenly spread, being concentrated on the east coast - which was why those Uighur workers were in Guangzhou in the first place. Living standards rose for most in Xinjiang but, like the poor in the east, many Uighurs felt wronged by the increasing gap between their own position and that of the most advantaged.
Repression against traditional practices and religion lessened after the end of the Cultural Revolution, but this has led to a thirst for further change that the central government may be unwilling to contemplate, out of fear of a break-up of the country - a fear intensified by the Soviet experience.
Policy shortfall
While Mao Zedong and other leaders talked of opposing national hostility, with a stress on Han 'great nation chauvinism', there was a lack of specific initiatives on the educational level. Frictions between nationalities were regarded as being due primarily to the activities of the old oppressing classes, who set people against people for their own advantage: Under socialism, national oppression and hostility were expected to fade away as the country developed.
Although there have been many policy changes in China since Mao died, there is still a strong tendency to treat the nationality issue as if it is chiefly a matter of economic development - hence the descriptions of money invested and projects implemented that loom so large in China's defence of the status quo.
This is an instance in which China might gain by considering experience in the West, where minorities protesting against oppression and racism have often managed to make their voices heard. The results included cultural and literary expression, equal opportunities programmes, schemes to encourage understanding and dialogue between communities and a wealth of initiatives that a primarily economic approach to national problems leaves unexplored and untried.
When people turn on each other as they did last week in Xinjiang, killing and maiming them because they come from the other community, there is clearly something wrong that neither a clampdown nor spending more money will fix.
The author is a Singapore-based freelance writer.
Last week's violence shows there's clearly something wrong that neither a clampdown nor spending more money will fix
By JOHN GEE
THE violence in China's Xinjiang province has been damped down for now, but serious damage has been done. Blaming the troubles on outside interference was the predictable reaction of a government wrongfooted by events.
The immediate cause of last week's violence was the escalating response to an incident in Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong province, in which Uighur workers were alleged to have molested a Han Chinese woman.
But this begs the question of why relations between many Han and Uighur Chinese citizens should be in such a fragile state that a possible case of sexual harassment should lead to so much violence. The incident became a lightning rod for the expression of other discontents.
China was an empire for most of its history. The experiences of its non-Han Chinese peoples differed considerably. In the more outlying areas, including Tibet and Xinjiang, central government authority sat lightly for long periods of time; in return for a formal acceptance of imperial authority, Beijing was content to leave in place the local power structures, cultures and religious observances.
Closer to the imperial centres of power, some nationalities faced more heavy-handed treatment by the government and felt threatened by encroachments on their lands and livelihoods by Han Chinese arrivals.
When the Communist Party of China was established, its policy on the 'national question' in China followed that developed by Soviet communists. Their understanding of national oppression and how it should be countered had been crystalised as early as 1913 in Marxism and the National Question, an essay that established Joseph Stalin as the Bolsheviks' leading authority on the issue and, incidentally, defined nationhood in narrow Eurocentric terms as a feature of 'the epoch of rising capitalism'.
The Bolsheviks' official stand was that pre-revolutionary Russia was a 'prison house of nations', and it should be replaced by a voluntary union in which the people of all nationalities would be equal. A distinction was made between 'nations' and 'nationalities'.
Peoples such as the Ukrainians and the Kazakhs were held to have all the characteristics of nationhood, and this was acknowledged by establishing republics for them that, in theory, were voluntary member-states of the Soviet Union and could secede if they wished.
In reality, the Soviet Union was far more centrally controlled than its Tsarist predecessor. Only with the collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of the 1980s did it prove possible to exercise that right, and all the republics did so with alacrity.
Soviet experience
'Nationalities' were seen as being somewhat less than fully formed nations. Official policy towards them was that they should have a right to various degrees of autonomy, but not to secede from the republic within which they lived. Hence, they were given autonomous republics and regions. This has led to big complications since the break-up of the Soviet Union, with members of some nationalities (most notably, the Chechens) seeking to achieve independent status for their autonomous entity or unification with others of their nationality (as in the case of the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabagh).
As far removed as this might seem from present-day China, it is directly relevant, as the Soviet experience not only informed Chinese communist policy making in the past, but the circumstances of the collapse of the Soviet Union are seen as a lesson in what should be avoided.
After the Chinese communists took power in 1949, they recognised over 50 different populations as nationalities, which they regarded as part of a larger Chinese nation. Extensive areas with a high concentration of a particular nationality - roughly 45 per cent of the country - were designated as autonomous regions: Xinjiang, Tibet, Ningxia, Inner Mongolia and Guangxi. Some smaller autonomous units were also created.
Crucially, none of the minority peoples were regarded as nations with republican status on the Soviet model and a constitutional right (however constricted in practice) to secede from the Chinese state.
Foreign perceptions of China's nationalities policy have been largely moulded by the example of Tibet, but the record has been more mixed than that unhappy case might suggest. China can cite progress in the autonomous regions in health care, education and housing, investments in infrastructure and other indicators of progress. Also at times of greatest hardship, such as the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, people of all nationalities suffered, without discrimination. The problem here - and it has been a problem all along - is that the official approach is overwhelmingly defined in social and economic terms that take little account of attitudes and values.
Demographic issues
The treatment of religion is a case in point. While all religious groups came under various forms of pressure after 1949, the communist leadership saw Confucianism as having had a particularly harmful effect on China by inculcating submission to traditional authorities.
During the Cultural Revolution, there was even a 'campaign to criticise Lin Biao and Confucius'. So the belief system that had been most influential among China's majority population was certainly not treated favourably compared to the religions traditionally dominant among the minority nationalities, but that might not be what the minorities saw. What mattered to the religious among them was that their mosques and temples were attacked by Red Guards and that their values were denigrated: They often experienced things such as offences against their nationality, irrespective of the fact that they were not being specifically targeted by the leadership in Beijing.
Demographic issues are another case. China recognises that the eastern heartlands are densely populated by Han Chinese, while the minorities are numerically much fewer, live in less densely populated regions and might be particularly sensitive to policies that could reduce their numbers. For these reasons, the minority nationalities were not pressed to embrace the 'one child' policy that was applied to the majority population.
However, at a local level in Tibet and Xinjiang, what counts most is the influx of Han Chinese who come to live there. The newcomers see opportunities to earn a living; the locals see them as favoured pawns of a central policy intended to tighten Beijing's hold on their homelands.
The reform process that got under way in 1979 produced its own problems, including a crisis of expectations. The demands of development encouraged an increase in Han Chinese migration to some national minority areas. The economic benefits of reform were unevenly spread, being concentrated on the east coast - which was why those Uighur workers were in Guangzhou in the first place. Living standards rose for most in Xinjiang but, like the poor in the east, many Uighurs felt wronged by the increasing gap between their own position and that of the most advantaged.
Repression against traditional practices and religion lessened after the end of the Cultural Revolution, but this has led to a thirst for further change that the central government may be unwilling to contemplate, out of fear of a break-up of the country - a fear intensified by the Soviet experience.
Policy shortfall
While Mao Zedong and other leaders talked of opposing national hostility, with a stress on Han 'great nation chauvinism', there was a lack of specific initiatives on the educational level. Frictions between nationalities were regarded as being due primarily to the activities of the old oppressing classes, who set people against people for their own advantage: Under socialism, national oppression and hostility were expected to fade away as the country developed.
Although there have been many policy changes in China since Mao died, there is still a strong tendency to treat the nationality issue as if it is chiefly a matter of economic development - hence the descriptions of money invested and projects implemented that loom so large in China's defence of the status quo.
This is an instance in which China might gain by considering experience in the West, where minorities protesting against oppression and racism have often managed to make their voices heard. The results included cultural and literary expression, equal opportunities programmes, schemes to encourage understanding and dialogue between communities and a wealth of initiatives that a primarily economic approach to national problems leaves unexplored and untried.
When people turn on each other as they did last week in Xinjiang, killing and maiming them because they come from the other community, there is clearly something wrong that neither a clampdown nor spending more money will fix.
The author is a Singapore-based freelance writer.
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