China Unrest Tied To Labor Program

Uighurs Sent to Work in Other Regions
Ariana Eunjung Cha
Washington Post Foreign Service
July 15, 2009
(http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/14/AR2009071403321.html)

URUMQI, China -- When the local government began recruiting young Muslim Uighurs in this far western region for jobs at the Xuri Toy Factory in the country's booming coastal region, the response was mixed.

Some, lured by the eye-popping salaries and benefits, eagerly signed up.

But others, like Safyden's 21-year-old sister, were wary. She was uneasy, relatives said, about being so far from her family and living in a Han Chinese-dominated environment so culturally, religiously and physically different from what she was accustomed to. It wasn't until a local official threatened to fine her family 2,000 yuan, or about $300, if she didn't go that she reluctantly packed her bags this spring for a job at the factory in Shaoguan, 2,000 miles away in the heart of China's southern manufacturing belt.

The origins of last week's ethnically charged riots in Urumqi, the capital of China's Xinjiang region, can be traced to a labor export program that led to the sudden integration of the Xuri Toy Factory and other companies in cities throughout China.

Uighur protesters who marched into Urumqi's main bazaar on July 5 were demanding a full investigation into a brawl at the toy factory between Han and Uighur workers that left two Uighurs dead. The protest, for reasons that still aren't clear, spun out of control. Through the night, Uighur demonstrators clashed with police and Han Chinese bystanders, leaving 184 people dead and more than 1,680 injured in one of the bloodiest clashes in the country's modern history. Two Uighurs were shot dead by police Monday, and tensions remain palpable.

"I really worry about her very much," Safyden, 29, said of his sister, whom he did not want named because he fears for her safety. "The government should send them back. What if new conflicts happen between Uighurs and Han? The Uighurs will be beaten to death."

Both Han Chinese, who make up more than 90 percent of the country's population and dominate China's politics and economy, and Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking minority living primarily in China's far west, say anger has been simmering for decades.

By moving Uighur workers to factories outside Xinjiang and placing Han-run factories in Xinjiang, Chinese officials say, authorities are trying to elevate the economic status of Uighurs, whose wages have lagged behind the national average. But some Han Chinese have come to resent these policies, which they call favoritism, and some Uighurs complain that the assimilation efforts go too far. Uighurs say that their language is being phased out of schools, that in some circumstances they cannot sport beards, wear head scarves or fast asdictated by Islamic tradition, and that they are discriminated against for private and government jobs.

Xinjiang's labor export program, which began in 2002 and has since sent tens of thousands of Uighurs from poor villages to wealthier cities, was supposed to bring the two groups together so they could better interact with and understand each other. The Uighur workers are lured with salaries two or three times what they could earn in their home townspicking cotton, as well as benefits such as training on manufacturingequipment, Mandarin language classes and free medical checkups.

Several Uighur workers said that they have prospered under the programand that they were treated well by their Han bosses and co-workers.Others, however, alleged that the program had become coercive.

In the villages around the city of Kashgar, where many of the workers from the Xuri factory originated, residents said each family was forced to send at least one child to the program -- or pay a hefty fine.

"Since people are poor in my home town, they cannot afford such big money. So they have to send their children out," said Merzada, a 20-year-old who just graduated from high school and who, like all the Uighurs interviewed, spoke on the condition that a surname not be used.

A Uighur man named Yasn said his family had no choice but to send hissister, who had just graduated from middle school, to the eastern city of Qingdao to work in a sock factory last year because they could not afford the fine: "She cried at home every day until she left. She is a girl -- according to our religion and culture, girls don't go to such distant places. If we had it our way, we would like to marry her to someone or let her go to school somewhere to escape it," he said.

The Han Chinese owner of a textile factory in Hebei province that hasbeen hiring Uighur workers from the program since 2007 said that in the first year the company participated, 143 female workers came to thecompany. Liu Guolin said he was surprised to see that they were accompanied by a bilingual police official from their home town who oversaw the details of their daily life.

"Without the policeman, I assume they would have run away from the very beginning. I did not realize that until the local officials revealed to me later. Only by then did I learn most of those girls did not come voluntarily," Liu said.

He said the security officer did not allow them to pray or wear head scarves in the factory workshops. He later learned that some of the girls were as young as 14 and that their ID cards had been forged by the local government.

Bi Wenqing, deputy head of the Shufu county office that oversees theXinjiang labor export program, denied that any participants had been coerced or threatened with fines. However, he said that although theUighur workers at the factories have the freedom to worship, the practice is not encouraged.

"We have been trying hard to educate them into disbelieving religion. The more they are addicted to religion, the more backwards they will be. And those separatists try to leverage religion to guide these innocent young Uighurs into evil ways," Bi said.

The Xuri Toy Factory -- which makes electronic toys and travel bags -- once seemed a model for the export program.

In May, 818 Uighurs from Xinjiang joined the 18,000-person workforce. Although the newcomers had limited Mandarin skills, the Uighurs and Han Chinese workers bonded over nightly dances that seemed to transcend lingual, cultural and religious barriers.

But the atmosphere started to become tense last month when a rumor spread about a rape at the toy factory. An anonymous message, posted on the Internet in June, stated that six Uighurs assaulted two Han female co-workers. No one seemed to know exactly who the alleged victims were, employees said, and police later said the story was made up by a disgruntled former worker. But suspicions festered.

When Huang Cuilian, a 19-year-old trainee who is Han, walked into the wrong dormitory and ran into two Uighur men on the night of June 25, she screamed, and a melee ensued. When other workers heard the commotion, a brawl broke out between the Han and Uighur workers. In the end, 120 were injured, and two Uighurs later died.

Information about the fight spread via the Internet and cellphones to the Uighurs' home towns in Xinjiang, and there were calls for other Uighurs to take action.

In the aftermath of the fighting, both Han Chinese and Uighur workers at the factory say they are afraid of each other.

Tursun, a 20-year-old Uighur man from Kashgar, said he had been lying inbed in the dormitory when "suddenly a bunch of Han Chinese broke into mydorm and beat me."

Liu Yanhong, a 23-year-old Han Chinese who works in the assemblydepartment, said: "I still don't know if I can work together with them, after that thing happened. If they really come back, I will quit my job and go home."

Two days after the deadly riots in Urumqi, officials at the Xuri Toy Factory announced that they had come up with a solution to the ethnictensions: segregation.

The company opened a factory exclusively for Uighur workers in an industrial park miles from its main campus. They have separate workshops, cafeterias and dorms.

A Uighur employee named Amyna, 24, said the working conditions at thenew factory are "not very good" and the living conditions also are "not very good." But at least, she said, "the Uighurs are living together and don't mingle with Han Chinese."

Researchers Wang Juan and Liu Liu contributed to this report.

Uighur mosques open, defying Chinese authorities

Gillian Wong, William Foreman
The Associated Press
July 10, 2009

photo: Muslim worshipers overflow from a mosque out in to the street during noon prayers in Kashgar, China, Friday, July 10, 2009.

URUMQI, China – Boisterous crowds turned up at mosques in riot-hit parts of this western Chinese city, ignoring orders cancelling Friday prayers due to the ethnic violence, and police quickly broke up a small protest nearby.

Nearly a week after riots in Xinjiang unleashed clashes and drew a massive security response, the U.S. national security adviser told Chinese diplomats on the sidelines of the G-8 summit in Italy that President Barack Obama expects Beijing to act with "appropriate restraint."

On Friday, about 100 men argued with guards, demanding they be let in for prayers at the White Mosque – near the Muslim Uighur neighbourhood that saw some of the worst violence after angry protests Sunday spiraled into a riot that left at least 156 dead, many of them from China's Han majority.

A Uighur policeman guarding the mosque, who would not give his name, said: "We decided to open the mosque because so many people had gathered. We did not want an incident."

Nearby, on Liberation Road, a group of about 40 Uighur men and women began to march, shouting, crying and pumping their fists in the air as they walked.

Madina Ahtam, a woman in a multicolored headscarf, begged foreign reporters to stay with them as they walked.

"Every Uighur people are afraid," she said in English. "Do you understand? We are afraid. ... The problem? Police."

A group of 10 police in bulletproof vests and helmets and armed with batons and stun guns blocked their march within minutes. Shortly after, several dozen more police surrounded the group and forced them to squat on the sidewalk. Police pushed journalists away from the area and detained at least four foreign journalists, holding them for several hours.

Kaishar, a 23-year-old car salesman, said his heart hurt when he first saw that the gates to the mosque were closed.

"There was no reason to shut the gate. They said it was for our safety but actually there is no need; nothing will happen here," said Kaishar, with a red prayer mat folded under his arm.

It was not known how many of the mosques across the city of 2.3 million people were opened.

A few blocks from the White Mosque, at the Yang Hang mosque, hundreds of men streamed in clutching green, red and blue prayer mats. A white notice that had been glued to the front gate cancelling the day's service was gone.

An mosque official, who refused to give her name, had said earlier the closure was ordered for public safety reasons after the widespread ethnic violence between Uighurs and Han Chinese. She didn't elaborate.

The government has imposed curfews and flooded the streets with security forces to avoid a repeat of the running street battles earlier in the week.

In L'Aquila, Italy, Gen. James Jones, the U.S. national security adviser, urged two Chinese diplomats "to ensure that government forces act with appropriate restraint," according to a senior Obama administration official, who described the meeting to to reporters on background.

Officials in the city of Kashgar, an historic Uighur cultural and commercial centre near Xinjiang's border with Pakistan, declared the city off-limits to reporters in all but name. Foreign reporters were not allowed to leave their hotels, except to travel to the airport. An Associated Press photographer was detained repeatedly and escorted to the airport. The effect was to make it impossible for reporters to work.

"There are no conditions for interviews in Kashgar, so we hope the foreign reporters will leave for their own safety," said Chen Li, a media officer with the city government.

In Urumqi, officials gave conflicting information about the closing of mosques. The secretary-general of the Urumqi Islamic Association, who would give only his surname Ma, denied there had been any shutdown order and said some mosques may have decided to do so independently.

A man from the Urumqi Administration for Religious Affairs, who refused to give his name, said only mosques in areas unaffected by the violence were allowed to open. In areas where severe violence took place, mosques were closed for people's safety, he said.

The official Xinhua News Agency, citing an unidentified religious affairs official in the Xinjiang government, said it was customary for mosques to close in times of trouble. "Muslims normally perform rituals at home in times of plague or social unrest," the official was quoted as saying.

Xinhua said mosques elsewhere in Xinjiang remained open.

Despite tight state control over Islam – imams are paid and vetted by the government – there are too many mosques in Xinjiang to enforce a mass closure, said Barry Sautman, who specializes in China's ethnic politics at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. There are 23,000 mosques in Xinjiang, the highest mosque-to-Muslim ratio in the world, and that provides room for some anti-government critics to slip through, said Sautman.

"It's impossible to control such an extensive number of religious personnel," Sautman said. In rural areas, he said, many officials in charge of religious affairs are Uighurs and are more sympathetic to Islam.

The violence in Urumqi began Sunday when Uighurs clashed with police while protesting the deaths of Uighur factory workers in a brawl in another part of the country. The crowd then scattered throughout Urumqi, attacking Han Chinese, burning cars and smashing windows. Riot police tried to restore order, and officials said 156 people were killed and more than 1,100 were injured.

The official Xinhua News Agency quoted the director of the Urumqi Civil Affairs Bureau, Wang Fengyun, as saying that families of innocent civilians killed in Sunday's riot would each receive 200,000 yuan (about $30,000) for each fatality.

left round-up on june 4th

The China Study Group
June 11 2009

Well, it’s June 11th, and as you can see, news stories on 6.4 started slowing down some time ago:
chart of 6.4 number of news stories in English on google news

Perfect time to do a round-up of left websites’ take on the 20th anniversary of 6.4!

First, John Chan at the World Socialist Web Site continues his excellent mix of news summary and analysis in his overview piece “Origins and consequences of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre” (Part I, Part II, Part III)

There is some boilerplate in the articles, but the articles’ virtues outweigh any sins. Chan puts things in perspective in ways that no other journalist has done. Most controversial is his portrayal of the students, who are portrayed in a tragic role, cynically manipulated by larger forces:

To legitimise market reform, Deng sought to cultivate support in intellectual and academic circles, and chose Hu Yaobang as CCP general secretary for that purpose. Western bourgeois social and philosophical thought was encouraged on Chinese campuses, including currents that openly blamed classical Marxism for the crimes of Mao and the CCP’s dictatorial rule. Many students, hostile to the decades-long bureaucratic controls over youth activities, were attracted by the anti-establishment flavour of these newly available works.

Unfortunately for the futures of the students, their antiestablishmentarianism extended to the leadership under Deng. This was not a big deal for the student movements of 1986 (easily dispatched), but Chan argues 1989 was an entirely different story for China’s leadership: rural reforms were stalled, and the corruption, inflation, and insecurity for workers following the urban economic reforms of the mid-1980s led to potential unrest. And while the leadership of the 1989 movement remained in students’ hands, the actions of workers and residents in Beijing in May and June of 1989 were crucial in supporting the protests.

I recommend the piece.

Next, Counterpunch delivers a glancing blow in The End of Idealism in China?, in which Behzad Yaghmaian, after some journalistic touring around young people in China, laments that kids in China just aren’t the way they used to be:

Today, however, prejudice, conflict of interest, and, in cases, outright hostility, separate students from the new Chinese working class, millions of underpaid internal migrants working tirelessly, and under severely substandard conditions, in the country’s export-processing factories. The alliance that once threatened the power of the Communist Party of China is now broken.

Whoa, wait a minute? Alliance? What alliance? And does anyone actually think the CPC was in trouble because of the protests? Maybe one faction, but the party itself? Come on. On the issue of student-worker ‘alliances’, John Chan dug out a convincing quote from Zhao Ziyang from Prisoner of the State: The Secret Journal of Premier Zhao Ziyang that shows that the leadership of the students avoided such an alliance:

During the demonstrations, students raised many slogans and demands, but the problem of inflation was conspicuously missing, though inflation was a hot topic that could easily have resonated with and ignited all of society… In hindsight, it’s obvious that the reason the students did not raise the issue of inflation was that they knew that this issue was related to the reform program, and if pointedly raised to mobilise the masses, it could have turned out to obstruct the reform process. [p. 34]

Now the students may have had good strategic reasons for doing so – avoid getting crushed – but this casts serious doubt on the alliance thesis. Which is precisely the point Andy Newman makes in the next article: Socialist Unity’s Twenty Years on from Tiananmen Square Massacre:

…the economic reforms were experienced as a direct attack on the working class…so when the pro-democracy protests on 17th April culminated in defiance to the government, and Beijing students occupying Tiananmen Square, this became the catalyst for a huge explosion of working class protest….the June 4th Movement expressed polar opposites of political objectives, and the working class were demanding the cessation of the process [i.e. economic reform] that the students were arguing should accelerate.

Let’s take this one step at a time. First, enterprises were starting to transfer and layoff workers in late 1987, but this was still pretty limited in scope compared to what was awaiting workers in the 90s. About 1 million workers were affected by ‘labor rationalization’ of some kind by 1989. A large number, but remember the denominator of urban Chinese workers is huge. Economic disputes were more common than in the past, but these never became important issues in workers’ participation in 6.4. More important is that workers’ wages fell in 1988 after you take inflation into consideration, coming after years of rapid growth earlier in the 1980s. When viewed from the perspective of the very brutal direct attack on workers that was awaiting the Chinese working class in the 90s, the itty-bitty reforms of the late 80s are more like slaps across the wrist. not a direct attack.

Next, I don’t see any evidence for an explosion of working-class protest in May. There was an increase in worker participation, but it was tiny compared to the numbers of students protesting. The few workers’ organizations that did emerge (gongzilian) never developed the capacity to organize on a large scale. In terms of the ‘polar-opposite’ idea, there is evidence that workers were considerably less supportive of Deng’s economic reforms, and didn’t put much stock in supporting Zhao Ziyang, but the workers had lots of other common ground with students (anti-corruption, etc.).

Last is Twenty years after Tiananmen Square by Dennis Kosuth in the Socialist Worker. It’s not bad, but it’s there considerable boilerplate, and some glaring errors, like:

Hu Yaobang, the former general secretary of the CCP, died on April 15, 1989. Two years prior, he had been driven from his position in the party in disgrace because he was seen as challenging corruption.

Try harder Socialist Worker!

Anyway, glad to see so much attention paid to participants other than the students in these articles. Not that they don’t deserve it, just that most of the English-language media focuses exclusively on them while leaving out other important actors. As Jeffrey Wassterstrom points out in Illuminating and Misleading Takes on China 20 Years Since Tiananmen.

[note: a number of groups and websites reprinted old articles to commemorate 6.4. didn't include those. leave a comment if I missed anything]

Ghost of Marx haunts China's riots

Jian Junbo
The Asian Times
July 8, 2009

Jian Junbo (簡軍波) is assistant professor of the Institute of International Studies at Fudan University, Shanghai, China (復旦大學國際問題研究院歐洲研究中心 ).

SHANGHAI - The weekend violence that has left 156 people dead and more than 816 injured in Urumqi, capital of northwestern Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, is the latest example of growing conflicts between China's majority Han ethnic group and ethnic minorities.

At the heart of the escalating problem are China's antiquated policies towards its ethnic minorities - a raft of Marxist measures that are now pleasing neither the ethnic Han, nor the minorities. As China's gargantuan economy has advanced, former leader Mao Zedong's vision of political and economic equality between

Han and non-Han has gradually been undermined.

The end result could be seen on the bloody streets of Urumqi.

On Sunday, more than 300 ethnic Uyghurs - mostly Sunni Muslims - staged a protest in Urumqi's People's Square to demand an investigation into a June 26 brawl at a toy factory in Shaoguan, Guangdong province. Riots began when police began to disperse protesters, soon spreading across the remote city of 2.3 million people.

Groups of rioters broke down guardrails on roads, torched automobiles and beat Han pedestrians. The mob attacked buses and set fire to a hotel near the office building of the Xinjiang Regional Foreign Trade Commission, according to the state-run Xinhua News Agency. Hundreds of cars, shops and homes were smashed and burned during the violence, Xinhua said.

China Central Television on Monday aired images of Uyghur protesters attacking Han men and women, kicking them on the ground and leaving them dazed and bloodied. Images were shown of smoke billowing from vehicles as rioters overturned police cars and smashed buses.

As of Monday evening, at least 156 people were found dead and more than 800 others injured, including armed police officers, the Xinjiang Public Security Department said. More than 50 dead bodies were found in back streets and alleys, officials said, adding grimly that the toll may rise.

Official statistics did not give any breakdowns to show how many Uyghur protesters were killed. A spokesperson for the World Uyghur Congress (WUC), a United States-based organization of pro-independence Uyghurs in exile, told Voice of America that police opened fire on protesters. The Chinese government has blamed the WUC for masterminding the violence,

Xinhua said "the situation was under control" by Monday morning; police had shut down traffic in parts of the city and arrested over 1,000 protesters. Among those detained were at least 10 of the most prominent figures who fanned the unrest on Sunday, the Xinjiang Public Security Department said.

But on Tuesday, over 200 Uyghurs, mostly women, staged a new protest in Urumqi in front of foreign reporters and it was reported that in the afternoon Urumqi Han residents began to counter-attack on Uyghurs. The women demanded the release of their families arrested during Sunday's violence. The foreign reporters had been organized by authorities to visit post-violence scenes, where protesters engaged in a tense stand-off with police, Hong Kong media said.

The Xinjiang government that evening warned that "hostile elements" were plotting to stir up violence in other Xinjiang cities such as Yining and Kashgar.

"We deeply regret the loss of life" in Urumqui, US State Department spokesman Ian Kelly said. "We call on all sides for calm and restraint."

United Nations secretary general Ban Ki-moon also called for restraint. He told a press conference on Monday: "Wherever it is happening or has happened the position of the United Nations and the secretary general has been consistent and clear: that all the differences of opinion, whether domestic or international, must be resolved peacefully through dialogue."

According to Xinhua, a government statement claimed the violence was "a pre-empted, organized violent crime. It is instigated and directed from abroad and carried out by outlaws in the country."

In a televised address on Monday morning, Xinjiang governor Nur Bekri accused the WUC led by Rebiya Kadeer - a former businesswoman now living in the United States - of fomenting the violence via telephone and the Internet. "Rebiya had phone conversations with people in China on July 5 in order to incite ... and the Internet was used to orchestrate the incitement," read the statement.

Kadeer's spokesman, Alim Seytoff, told the Associated Press from Washington that the accusations were baseless.

"It's common practice for the Chinese government to accuse Ms Kadeer for any unrest in East Turkestan and His Holiness the Dalai Lama for any unrest in Tibet," he said. East Turkestan is the name of the state Uyghur pro-independence groups and militants wish to create in Xinjiang.

One the exile groups, the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, is listed by the Chinese government and the UN as a terrorist organization. The WUC denies any connection with the East Turkestan Islamic Movement.

The violence in Urumqi echoed last year's unrest in Tibet. In March 2008, a peaceful demonstration of monks in the capital of Lhasa erupted into riots that spread to surrounding areas, leaving at least 22 dead. The Chinese government accused the Dalai Lama of orchestrating the violence. The Dalai Lama denied the charge.

Whether the riots were instigated by pro-independence activists or not, the fact remains that violent conflicts are easily stirred up by the mutual distrust between the Han people and ethnic minorities. Internet rumors were also involved.

The brawl in the Shaoguan factory on June 26 was started by a post on an Internet website that claimed at least two female Han workers were raped by Uyghur migrant workers, many of whom work at the factory.

In response to the allegation, Han workers stormed into dormitories of the Uyghur workers. In the ensuing battle, two Uyghur were killed and many workers from both sides injured, according to local police. Authorities later arrested a Han worker for uploading the rape rumor to stir up trouble.

The end of class-struggle identity
The increasingly frequent conflicts between Han and other groups indicate the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP's) policy toward ethnic minorities has become ineffective in maintaining harmonious relations between peoples.

For the past 60 years, the stated aim of the CCP's policy has been to maintain national unity and stabilize civil society. The communist government considers all ethnic groups to be Chinese, but encourages all ethnic groups, especially minorities, to keep and develop their traditional cultures. The government has even helped minorities with only a spoken language create their own writing system.

The idea that all people in China belong to the "great family of Chinese" is not the invention of the communists. This attitude began with the founding father of modern China, Dr Sun Yat-sen, and was supported by early Chinese enlightenment thinkers such as Liang Qichao and Hu Shih.

In the era of chairman Mao Zedong, the ethnic policy was dictated by his class-struggle doctrine, by which all Han and non-Han working people shared one common identity - socialist labor. The term "labor" meant they were also the owners of the country - constitutionally and ideologically. Capitalists, land owners, serf owners and other "exploiters" - regardless of their ethnic origins - were the enemies.

This policy successfully surpassed ethnic differences and constructed a shared identity for all working people. To an extent, this policy under Mao united all ethnic groups in the "class struggle" against the "oppressors". It also made the former elites of ethnic minorities diehard enemies of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

The working poor of China's ethnic groups gave much support to the CCP government, and accepted their new socialist identity. Han and non-Han people became equal economically and politically, and the idea of ethnicity was gradually faded out by the idea of class.

The concept of a common class, which gave equality to all people in the same class regardless of their ethnicity, surpassed the idea of ethnic identity and forestalled ethnic conflict.

But when the class-struggle doctrine was practiced to the extreme particularly during the Cultural Revolution between 1966 and 1976, it gave the Red Guards - consisting of mostly Hans - the ground to attack China's cultural and historical heritage - Han as well as ethnic - in the name of the revolution. These attacks tremendously hurt the feelings of ethnic minorities.

After the Cultural Revolution, apparently as some form of compensation, the Chinese government began to award some privileges and preferences to ethnic minorities.

For example, the tough one-child policy applies only to Han couples. Accordingly, the birth rate and population proportion of the Han are decreasing, compared to other ethnic groups. Meanwhile, privileges have been granted to ethnic minorities for employment and education opportunities. To boost economic growth, the government in recent years has poured much money into ethnic minority areas.

Many Han are upset at what they see as discrimination. In the aftermath of the Shaoguan brawl, Guangdong party secretary Wang Yang visited and consoled the injured Uyghur workers, but allegedly ignored the injured Han workers. This angered the Han workers and increased their suspicion of the government's policy.

Even as ethnic groups, such as the Uyghurs, complain they are being exploited or discriminated by the Han, many Han accuse the government of doing the same. In the end, as China's economy advances, political and economic equality between Han and non-Han is being undermined.

The wealth gap is expanding between the Han, who in general live in rich areas, and those ethnic minorities who live in relatively poorer areas. The economic inequality between different regions is also a case between Han and non-Hans. Although this imbalance of economic development is due to many factors, it's easy for minorities to feel exploited by the Han.

As the influence of Marxism as the dominant ideology is diminishing in China, the sense of political equality is also abating. Today, common people aren't really considered the owners of the country, and laborers are no longer a respected class. Capitalists have become the government's guests of honor.

In China, political equality based on class equality has collapsed. For the past 60 years, this idea of class equality was a basis on which all common people, including minorities, could maintain an identity as one member of the Chinese political community.

Now, the economic and political marginalization of ethnic minorities is destroying the foundation of some ethnic groups' Chinese identity. At the same time, this marginalization is deeply misunderstood by many of the majority Han ethnic group.

The shared identity of the Chinese - as socialist labor - is gradually falling to pieces. The resulting riots in Urumqi may be just the start of something much, much bigger.

(Copyright 2009 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd.)

Uighur oppression

Louis Proyect
http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2009/07/07/uighur-oppression/
July 7, 2009

Uighur woman confronts Chinese cops

My Turkish language professor at Columbia University once made an interesting observation. He said that variations on the Turkish language (Turkic) can be heard from Turkey to China and that he could understand it from country to country if he proceeded eastward. But the further east he went, the harder it would be for him to understand. Azeris would be quite easy to understand; Kazakhs somewhat more difficult; and Uighurs (or Uyghurs) the most difficult of all.

On the Uighur Language website, there’s a comparison between Turkish and Uighur drawn from the Nasreddin folklore, a series of tales about a wise and humorous elder that I had occasion to read in Turkish class. “Bir gun” in Turkish means one day; in Uighur it is “bir kun”. Hoca is Turkish for teacher; in Uighur it is “hoja”, etc.

Turkish

Bir gun sevmedigi bir komsusu Nasreddin Hoca’nin kapisini caldi; bir gunlugune esegini kendisine vermesini rica etti.

Uighur

Bir kun yahxikurmeydighan bir hoxnisi Nasirdin Hojaning ixigini urup, exigini bir kunlik otnige berixini soraptu.

Uighur ballad (sounds very Turkish)

During the rise of the Mongols, the Turks, who were also a nomadic people historically, settled into the region that became known as Turkestan. As such, it was a key element in the Silk Road that facilitated trade between Europe and Asia until the end of the 15th century.

This area languished for centuries until competition between China, Russia, and European powers during the 19th century prompted an invasion by the Manchus into East Turkestan with the encouragement of British banks who were participating in the “Great Game”. “Xinjiang” or “Sinkiang”, which means “New Dominion” or “New Territory”, was annexed by the Manchu empire on November 18, 1884.

Meanwhile, Czarist Russia was seizing control over West Turkestan in its own expansionist bid. In their victory over the old regime, the Bolsheviks had to contend with the problem of oppressed nationalities, in particular the Muslim peoples to the south in what had been known as West Turkestan. In a fascinating debate between Lenin and Bukharin in 1919, there are some issues that are relevant to today’s struggles. Bukharin questions the need for self-determination of such peoples, using arguments similar to that of Rosa Luxemburg. Responding to Bukharin’s assertion that “I want to recognise only the right of the working classes to self-determination,” Lenin refers to the Bashkirs, a Turkic people who had petitioned the Soviet government for the right to form an autonomous Soviet Republic.

What, then, can we do in relation to such peoples as the Kirghiz, the Uzbeks, the Tajiks, the Turkmen, who to this day are under the influence of their mullahs? Here, in Russia, the population, having had a long experience of the priests, helped us to overthrow them. But you know how badly the decree on civil marriage is still being put into effect. Can we approach these peoples and tell them that we shall overthrow their exploiters? We cannot do this, because they are entirely subordinated to their mullahs. In such cases we have to wait until the given nation develops, until the differentiation of the proletariat from the bourgeois elements, which is inevitable, has taken place.

Our programme must not speak of the self-determination of the working people, because that would be wrong. It must speak of what actually exists. Since nations are at different stages on the road from medievalism to bourgeois democracy and from bourgeois democracy to proletarian democracy, this thesis of our programme is absolutely correct. With us there have been very many zigzags on this road. Every nation must obtain the right to self-determination, and that will make the self-determination of the working people easier.

As most of you probably know, this policy was reversed within two or three years as Stalin consolidated power and reintroduced the Great Russian chauvinism that made people such as the Bashkirs miserable. Just before his death, he wrote an article that has been described as his testament. It included the following warning:

It is quite natural that in such circumstances the “freedom to secede from the union” by which we justify ourselves will be a mere scrap of paper, unable to defend the non-Russians from the onslaught of that really Russian man, the Great-Russian chauvinist, in substance a rascal and a tyrant, such as the typical Russian bureaucrat is. There is no doubt that the infinitesimal percentage of Soviet and sovietised workers will drown in that tide of chauvinistic Great-Russian riffraff like a fly in milk.

Probably no Turkic people had it worse under Stalinist rule than the Crimean Tatars who were exiled from their homeland as a measure intended supposedly to help the USSR defend itself from the Nazis. Since there was a Tatar Legion in the Nazi army and since some of the Tatar clerics were sympathetic to the Nazis, Stalin decided upon collective punishment. The Soviet government described the forced migration as “humane” but the Wiki on the Tatars claims that 46.3% of the resettled population died of diseases and malnutrition. In other words, they suffered the same fate as Cherokees or Armenians.

In 1967, when I joined the Trotskyist movement, the party press, especially Intercontinental Press that was edited by Joe Hansen (one of Trotsky’s body guards), was taking up the cause of Soviet dissidents, including General Pyotr Grigorenko who was such a forceful defender of Crimean Tatar demands for justice that he had been put in a mental hospital in 1964. You can judge his mental status based on a speech he gave to the Tatars in 1968:

After having lost forty-six percent of their numbers in the forced exile disaster, they began to gather strength and to enter into battle for their own national and human rights. This struggle led to certain successes: the status of exiled deportees was lifted and a political rehabilitation of the people was achieved. True, this rehabilitation was carried out quietly … which in significant degree rendered it valueless. The majority of the Soviet people, who previously had been widely informed that the Crimean Tatars had sold the Crimea, never did learn that this ’sale’ was transparent fabrication. But worst of all, the decree on political rehabilitation… legalized the liquidation of the Crimean Tatar nationality. Now, it appears, there are no Crimean Tatars, there are just Tatars who formerly lived in Crimea.

Some would say—and they did—that the SWP was in a united front with the imperialists since the United States Information Agency had decided to publish a collection of documents written by the dissidents, including Grigorenko. Interestingly enough, they appeared in the journal Problems of Communism that was edited by Abraham Brumberg. Brumberg, who had impeccable anti-Communist credentials, developed some sympathies for the Sandinista revolution and defended Nicaragua against Reagan’s counter-revolutionary intervention throughout the 1980s. For those who think in terms of black-and-white, Brumberg would be too hard to figure out.

For all those leftists who harp on American support for the Iranian reformists as proof of its reactionary character, we can only assume that they would have opposed repatriation of the Crimean Tatars as well. If the USIA took up their cause, that’s all you need to know. In the 30s through the 50s, this kind of knee-jerk support for the Soviet government was the stock in trade of the Communist Parties. It is particularly unfortunate to see people such as James Petras, who were educated in Trotskyist politics in a previous lifetime, making the same kind of rotten arguments today.

As might be expected, the people of East Turkestan were treated just as badly as their brethren under Soviet rule since Mao, for the most part, agreed with Stalin on how to build socialism. Although China had fewer nationalities to forcefully assimilate, it did so with little regard to Lenin’s warnings about avoiding national chauvinism. In China, this was essentially expressed as Han nationalism that was intended to serve as a battering ram against non-Han peoples, first and foremost the Tibetans and the Uighurs.

China decided to swamp the Xinjiang province, the homeland of the Uighurs, with the dominant Han nationality not long after Mao took power. Between 1949 and the mid-80s, more than 5 million Chinese were sent to Xinjiang from eastern China in order to help assimilate the Uighurs, as well as other Turkic peoples including the Kazakhs, Kirghiz and Mongols.

In utter disregard of Lenin’s comment about having patience with people who still follow the lead of their mullahs, China organized a campaign against Islam under the rubric of combating a desire to restore “the old rule by capitalists, feudal lords, slave-owners” in the words of Liu Ke-ping, the Chairman of the Committee of Nationalities of the National People’s Congress. This included a ban on teaching Arabic in Xinjiang schools, a measure that would undercut the study of the Koran but likely to have little effect on the development of communism.

On January 14, 1985 the Washington Post reported:

The assimilation effort reached its peak during the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976 when the Arabic alphabet was outlawed in favor of the Latin alphabet, mosques were closed and turned into workshops, Moslem classics were burned, restrictions were imposed on the number of sheep minority peasants could raise, and Han officials delivered speeches in Chinese without providing interpreters.

So much for the Cultural Revolution as returning China to the communist road, unless of course your idea of communism is inspired by Stalin rather than Lenin.

The Post article continues:

In 1981, ethnic tension flared in Kashgar when a young Uighur peasant who was digging a ditch got into a fight with a Han Chinese. Neither was able to speak the other’s language. In a fistfight the Han was beaten by the stronger and bigger Uighur. Angered, the Han went into his store, took out his hunting gun and shot the Uighur.

Not much has changed in Xinjiang apparently. In recent clashes with the Hans, more than 150 people were killed. With a population numbering about 8 million, this would be the equivalent of 6000 killed in the U.S. in a day or two.

As is so often the case today, oppression of Muslim peoples seems to go hand in hand with the need to control petroleum resources. On August 28, 2008 the Financial Times reported:

The increasing importance of the Muslim-dominated Xinjiang autonomous region as a source of the energy and minerals needed to fuel China’s booming eastern cities is raising the stakes for Beijing in its battle against separatists agitating for an independent state.

“The Chinese didn’t want to let Xinjiang be independent before, but after they built all the oilfields, it became absolutely impossible,” said one Muslim resident in Korla, who asked not to be named for fear of retribution by government security agents.

The desert around the city is punctuated every kilometre or two by oil and gas derricks, each of them topped with the red Chinese national flag, an assertion of sovereignty over every inch of the energy-rich ground.

In 2005, Xinjiang’s local government was allotted only Rmb240m ($35m, €24m, £19m) out of the Rmb14.8bn in tax revenue from the petrochemical industries that are based in the region.

In Korla, the oil industry is under the control of a subsidiary of PetroChina, the state-owned energy giant, which answers directly to its head office in Beijing.

“We don’t have the power to tell them to do anything – they only listen to their bosses in Beijing,” said one local government official who asked not to be named.

Many of Korla’s original Uighur residents feel they have missed out altogether on the few benefits that have trickled down to the region from the rapid extraction of its energy resources.

It is no wonder that China put so much pressure on the U.S. government not to release the Uighur men who were kept in Guantanamo after being falsely accused of being Al Qaeda operatives. In the war on terror, which is really after all a war to control oil resources, the U.S. and China clearly see eye to eye.

Bir kun yahxikurmeydighan bir hoxnisi Nasirdin Hojaning ixigini urup, exigini bir kunlik otnige berixini soraptu.

COMMENTS:

Thanks for posting on this subject Louis.

I want to make a slight correction, though. You say that Xinjiang was annexed by the Manchu empire in 1884, which is not quite right. Xinjiang was first invaded by the Manchus in the 1750s, and was under Manchu administration as one of the outlying regions of the empire from that point on. That means it was not a province, and was subject to laws different from other parts of the empire. After about half a century of relative peace, rebellions in the 19th century led to the region falling out of Manchu control on several occasions, the most notable being the decade-long rule of Yaqub Beg in Kashgar. It was after the reconquest of Xinjiang by general Zuo Zongtang in the 1880s that Xinjiang was turned into a fully-fledged province. It’s this date which is sometimes erroneoulsy said to mark the initial annexation.

Comment by dawutjan — July 7, 2009