Why terrorism bypasses China's far
west By Colin Mackerras
Implications for Xinjiang? Four bombs exploded
in Uzbekistan in late March, three of them in the
capital, Tashkent. Two female suicide bombers carried
out the attacks. The government of President Islam
Karimov immediately charged responsibility for the
bombings to the worldwide Islamist al-Qaeda network, but
some observers claimed the blasts were a reaction
against official oppression of the people in general and
Muslims in particular.
Will Xinjiang, in China's
far northwest, follow suit with suicide bombings and
similar violence? Tensions already exist there, with the
Chinese authorities and the large Han population
vigilant against separatism and Islamic militancy among
the Uighurs, a Muslim Turkic people who have made their
home in the region since at least the 8th century.
My short answer is that suicide bombings and
similar violence in Xinjiang are possible but unlikely.
Xinjiang has many social and political problems of the
kind that could easily erupt into further terrorist
actions (some have taken place in the past, but not on a
large scale). However, China increasingly has the
situation in its far northwest under control through its
carrot-and-stick approach.
But China may well
use the Uzbekistan bombings to strengthen its hand in
cracking down further on Muslim activists in
resource-rich Xinjiang. In a report issued in January
2002, China said 200 violent incidents took place
between 1990 and 2001. At a press conference this April
12, Xinjiang government Chairman Simayi Teliwardi said
there had been no blasts or assassination incidents in
Xinjiang in "recent years", a sign that China indeed may
have the situation generally under control and that
terrorist violence has declined.
Historical
background China took over Xinjiang in the 18th
century. From the early 19th to the mid-20th century
there was a long line of separatist movements by the
Muslim peoples of the region, almost all suppressed by
military force. In 1944, a Uighur-Kazakh coalition
established the East Turkestan Republic, some say at the
behest of the Soviet Union. The Nationalist (Kuomintang)
Chinese government of Chiang Kai-shek managed to
negotiate a deal with them, but the situation remained
very unstable until communist troops took over Xinjiang
firmly in September 1949 after their victory in China's
civil war.
Though Xinjiang experienced problems
during the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) and in the
1980s, the difficulties were not generally due to
separatism. But in April 1990 a separatist movement led
by Uighur Islamic militant Zahideen Yusuf emerged in
Baren Township, not very far from Kashgar in the far
southwest of Xinjiang. The 1990s saw a further series of
disturbances in many parts of the region, by far the
most serious being in Yining, known to the Uighurs as
Gulja, near the border with Kazakhstan. The Chinese
authorities have suppressed all these disturbances
brutally, and executions of Uighur Islamic militants on
the grounds of terrorism and separatism continue to this
day. International human-rights bodies such as Amnesty
International have accused China of serious abuses in
Xinjiang, charging that they are now worse there than
anywhere else in the country - even worse than in Tibet.
(China and its allies on April 15 blocked a vote
in the United Nations Human Rights Commission on a
US-backed resolution criticizing Beijing's human-rights
record. It cited the situation in Xinjiang and Tibet and
continuing restrictions on freedom of association and
religion in those regions and elsewhere in China.)
Ethnic make-up The 2000 census put
Xinjiang's total population at about 18.5 million, and
official surveys showed growth to 19.05 million by the
end of 2002. Among these people, the two most populous
ethnic groups are the Uighurs at 45.2 percent and the
Han at 40.6 percent, with the Muslim Kazakhs running a
poor third at 6.7 percent, according to the 2000 census.
Chinese accounts say the total population in 1949 was
4.33 million, of whom 75.9 percent were Uighurs, 10.2
percent Kazakhs and only 6.7 percent Han.
This
means that though the absolute figures have risen, the
proportion of Uighurs has fallen drastically, and of the
Kazakhs somewhat, while the percentage of Han has shot
up. There are also other ethnic groups, such as the
Chinese Muslims (Hui), the Kyrgyz and the Tajiks. Other
than the Han, the great majority of Xinjiang's people
are Muslims.
Minorities are exempt from the
one-child-per-couple policy, though it has been my
finding from random samples over four visits to Xinjiang
(1982, 1994, 1999 and 2003) that the pressures on them
to keep the numbers of their children small have
intensified over the years. What has really made the
difference to the proportions in the population is
immigration of Han Chinese from the east. This began in
the 1950s when authorities demobilized many of the
victorious communist troops into the Xinjiang Production
and Construction Corps and sent numerous other Han from
the east to join the corps. They had three main tasks:
to maintain border security, to keep the minorities in
order, and to boost economic production. This Han
immigration reached a height in 1978, then began to
decline during the 1980s, but again accelerated in the
1990s. In 2000, the government launched its Great
Western Development Strategy, which has involved
extensive investment from the east in Xinjiang and Han
immigrants to staff development.
This Han
immigration is a major cause of resentment among the
Uighurs, who feel they are being taken over. They resent
the way the Han give one another the best jobs and look
down on the Uighurs as culturally inferior. Recent Han
immigrants have a worse reputation than longtime
residents, because they are thought to care for nothing
except making a fast buck and to have no lasting concern
for Xinjiang. Before the 1980s all immigration was
government-sponsored, but more recently many Han go
simply as "drifters", and quite a few don't stay very
long.
Policy China's policy toward
Xinjiang is twofold: rapid economic modernization and
zero tolerance for secession. China is determined to
keep Xinjiang as part of China, and what my visit in
October-November 2003 told me was that this policy is
succeeding, though at a cost.
Chinese government
authorities reckon that rapid economic modernization
will raise the standard of living of the people enough
that a good proportion of them will see their best
interests served in remaining part of the People's
Republic of China (PRC), which will result in social
stability. At the same time, the history of the region
shows that China treads firmly on any attempt at
secession, however small in scale, and keeps an eagle
eye out, especially among groups it doesn't trust, which
include the Muslim clerics and devout laymen.
Certainly, the standard of living is going up,
especially in the cities. Measured against 1978 prices,
household consumption multiplied by nearly 16 times in
the countryside between 1978 and 2002, and just over 23
times in the cities, according to official figures.
Virtually all cities I visited in 2003 had the
signs of extensive modernization. In all the major
towns, there are modern and clean city squares, wide
roads, modern apartments and Internet cafes. Indeed, a
Uighur friend told me that she and other people, of
whatever ethnic group, are worried by the amount of time
young men spend at Internet cafes playing useless games.
Some also imbibe information from overseas that
authorities find dangerous. The capital Urumqi is now
home to two five-star hotels, new and modern office
blocks, high-speed motorways, beautiful new apartment
blocks and a bright and modern new airport.
There are downsides to this economic
development. One is the cost to the environment.
Xinjiang has always been very dry, especially the south.
But modernization requires a lot of water, and its
management leaves a lot to be desired. Industrialization
in cities such as Urumqi causes factories to spew clouds
of black smoke.
Xinjiang has become China's
premier cotton-growing area. Cotton is one of the
Uighurs' traditional products, and late last year I
interviewed at random Uighur cotton farmers who were
prepared to say they were making a lot of money and were
expecting their income to go up even more before the end
of 2003. But the fact is that the Han have been much
more active in the cotton-production increase than the
Uighurs. Many Han immigrants work on the cotton
plantations. As one of the Uighur cotton growers
complained to me, the Han have better access to the
Chinese state and economic management organs, which
yields them far more from cotton in terms of money and
privileges than the Uighurs can get. He said this was
not good for relations between the Han and Uighurs.
Inequalities Cotton is just one focus
of economic and political inequality. There are many of
these in Xinjiang society. On the whole the Han are the
most prosperous people in Xinjiang, with the Hui,
Uighurs and Kazakhs being some distance behind and in
that order. Although there are many poor Han and a
significant and growing Uighur middle class, the Han are
far better represented among entrepreneurs,
professionals and other middle-class groups than are the
Uighurs. The Kazakhs again fall well behind the Uighurs.
The Han concentrate more in the cities than the
countryside, while with the Uighurs it is the other way
around. And it is precisely in the cities that most of
the modernity is focused. The southern part of Xinjiang
is much the poorest, precisely the area where most of
the Uighurs live. And while it is true that the Great
Western Development Strategy is giving a lot of
attention to the south, the Han are getting more of the
economic benefits from development than the Uighurs, let
alone the Kazakhs. Official figures on income by ethnic
group are not available. Official figures do tell us,
however, that in 2002 the urban/rural income ratio was
4.1:1, which is higher than the national average
(3.5:1), but not by any means the highest in the
country.
In the urban job market, Han do much
better than Uighurs, even though there is an
affirmative-action policy that stipulates preference for
minorities. Though many Han employers observe the
policy, they generally prefer Han because they trust
their own kind more. To be fair, the authorities are
trying to overcome the problems of differential
employment opportunities by increasing the educational
levels of the minorities. However, that brings its own
problems, because doing well in the job market means
knowing very good Chinese, and many Uighurs feel they
tend to lose their own culture if their Chinese is good
enough to be really useful for employment.
Anybody can live in the new apartment blocks,
provided one can pay. And the fact is, as several
sources admitted to me, there are more Han who can pay
than minorities, because they have better-paid jobs. And
per capita, there are more Uighurs than Kazakhs living
in these modern flats.
Xinjiang is called an
autonomous region, which means that the people who head
the government must belong to the ethnic group
exercising autonomy, in this case the Uighurs. And the
Uighurs are quite well represented in the government.
However, this is not the case with the body that
wields real power, namely the Chinese Communist Party
(CCP). Many sources told me that the norm in Xinjiang at
all levels is for the government head to be a Uighur,
but the CCP head to be a Han.
In 1997, according
to official figures, there were 358,000 minority members
of the CCP in Xinjiang, accounting for 37.37 percent of
the total of 958,000. Since the minorities are much more
than 37.37 percent of the population, it is obvious that
they are under-represented in the CCP. Moreover, it is
likely that the locus of power of the minorities is
lower than the Han, with Han occupying most of the
highest positions in the CCP.
Given that most
minorities are Muslims, this may not be too surprising,
since Muslims may not wish to belong to an atheist
political party for religious reasons. But several
sources mentioned to me that even Uighur CCP members
usually believed in Islam anyway, despite calling
themselves Marxist-Leninists.
There are Uighurs
who are doing well in economic terms, and they generally
enjoy a much higher standard of living than they could
have expected only a decade or so ago. But the
disparities are serious, and several Uighurs told me of
their conviction that they are widening.
To be
fair, ethnic inequalities are hardly peculiar to
Xinjiang or to China. However, that does not lessen the
antagonisms caused by wealth and opportunity gaps.
Government authorities are among those calling for
action to reduce inequalities of all kinds.
Islam Almost all Xinjiang's Muslim
ethnic groups are Sunni. The exception is the Tajiks,
who are Iranian linguistically and culturally and
therefore Shi'ite. However, the 2000 census counted only
39,493 Tajiks in Xinjiang.
Islam has been
growing in influence over the past decade and more.
There were about 20,000 mosques in Xinjiang in 2000,
according to official figures, many of them new or newly
restored, and most being in the Uighur-dominated south.
Traditionally, the Uighurs have had a reputation for far
stricter observance of Islamic rules and practices than
the Kazakhs, and that remains the case today. They are
far more likely to worship five times a day. On the
whole the mosques in the Uighur areas are far more
numerous, better patronized and larger than in the
Kazakh areas. One reason is that the Kazakhs tend more
to be nomadic, and a mosque may be further away from
their current home.
The fact that the Uighurs,
Kazakhs and Hui are all Muslims does not ensure good
relations among them. I asked several clergy whom I
interviewed whether people of different ethnic groups
worship in different mosques. They answered, with some
feeling as though I had asked an insulting question,
that there was no such policy, but they conceded that
was what happened in practice.
In one respect,
Uighurs, Kazakhs and Hui agree strongly: they are very
much against interethnic marriages. I interviewed quite
a few people from all three ethnic groups. Among my
questions was how they would react if one of their
children wanted to marry a Han Chinese. All said they
would strongly resist it, because marriages with
non-Muslims were always a failure and against their
tradition. Oddly enough, this is not only a religious
matter. It's also ethnic. I found Uighurs very resistant
to the idea that any of their children should marry a
Kazakh, even though the Kazakhs are Muslims. Uighurs
interviewed expressed some contempt for Kazakhs,
regarding them as inferior in culture.
There are
two big restrictions on attending the mosque: one
against women, imposed by Islam itself, the other
against anybody aged 18 or under, imposed by the
government.
Women very rarely pray at the
mosque, and never in the main prayer hall. The only time
I saw women at a mosque in Xinjiang during any of my
four visits was in 2003 at the beautiful 16th-century
mosque in Yarkant, not far southeast of Kashgar. Three
women were praying below the prayer hall and right at
the side, while the prayer hall itself was crowded.
Women are supposed to pray at home. In the south of
Xinjiang, when women appear in public, many of them wear
a full veil that covers their entire head, including
their eyes.
The government forbids people under
18 to go to the mosque. There are signs in Uighur at the
Uighur mosques and in Chinese at the Hui mosques
spelling out quite a few rules, one of them being age
restriction. The reason given is that children should be
studying and getting an education, not going to the
mosque. Another reason for the proscription is no doubt
to reduce Islamic influence on the youth. I asked quite
a few laymen and clergy what they thought of this rule.
None would criticize it, possibly through fear of the
consequences if they did.
The government is
afraid of Islam, because it is so anti-communist.
Authorities believe Islam responsible for trying to turn
Uighurs against the Han. Perhaps more important, they
suspect that some of its leaders harbor political
intentions to try to overthrow the state. Public
security is active everywhere and keeps an eagle eye on
the mosques. Authorities are not reluctant to condemn
individuals without a fair trial if they think the CCP's
power is under threat. It is precisely for this reason
that human-rights activists have been so critical of the
authorities.
Laymen I interviewed at several
mosques expressed loathing for separatists, fearing that
their presence gave Islam a bad name. What they actually
feel in their hearts I do not know, because I doubt that
any would tell a foreigner in a group situation that
they supported separatism.
Islamic militancy,
terrorism The association of separatism with
Islamic militants is a long one in Xinjiang, as the
brief history at the beginning of this article showed.
After the disturbances that occurred from 1990 on, the
CCP and the government held a large-scale meeting in May
1996 to decide how to react to the deteriorating
security situation in Xinjiang. The meeting heaped much
of the blame on Islamic militants, even accusing them of
infiltrating the CCP to undermine it. The meeting called
for the reorganization of "weak and lax" CCP branches,
especially those dominated by Muslims, better training
of cadres (administrators and professionals) and better
investigation into cases of people who harassed and took
revenge against CCP members and cadres.
That
this meeting failed to achieve its immediate objective
was obvious from the major disturbances in Yili early
the following year, 1997. There was a series of
terrorist bomb blasts in Urumqi on the very day that the
memorial ceremony took place in Beijing for Deng
Xiaoping (February 25, 1997), who had died six days
before. The official Xinjiang Daily charged that three
bombs had been planted in late-afternoon buses, killing
nine people and wounding 74, most of the victims being
children on their way home from school.
The
September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York and
Washington heightened the general fear of terrorism in
Xinjiang. In January 2002, the government released a
long report accusing terrorist forces fighting for an
independent Uighur state of having been responsible for
more than 200 terrorist incidents in Xinjiang between
1990 and 2001. It also claimed that the East Turkestan
Islamic Movement (ETIM), headed by Hasan Mahsum, was
receiving "unstinting" moral, material and financial
assistance from Osama bin Laden, with the aim of
launching a "holy war" to separate Xinjiang from China
and set up an independent East Turkestan. Hasan Mahsum
has acknowledged leadership of ETIM, but denied
receiving any help, let alone financial, from bin Laden.
Mahsum was killed by Pakistani soldiers in Pakistan last
October.
The US Department of State commented
with a forked tongue: its counter-terrorism office was
generally sympathetic toward China's position, even
commending it for taking concrete actions against
terrorism, but its human-rights section continued to
condemn discrimination against Uighurs in Xinjiang and
any action it saw as a human-rights abuse.
In
August 2002, the concern with worldwide terrorism won
out when the United States officially sided with China
by recognizing ETIM as a terrorist organization. The
United Nations shortly followed the US lead. Beginning
from last December 15, the Chinese government has
identified a number of other groups in Xinjiang it
claimed were terrorist and separatist and called for
international support against them.
Uighur
organizations overseas and human-rights activists were
alarmed at the US and UN moves, regarding them as
kowtowing to the Chinese government, despite abuses
claimed by human-rights organizations such as Amnesty
International. Many observers argue strongly that there
is not enough evidence to condemn ETIM or others as
terrorists. They claim that to brand ETIM as terrorist
is a gross overreaction that the Chinese have been able
to get away with because of the general international
fear of terrorism.
They claim, further, that the
disturbances against the Chinese are largely due to Han
immigration, various forms of oppression from the
authorities, discrimination against the Uighurs and
other minorities, and state-sponsored terrorism against
separatists. For the Uighur diasporic organizations, the
Chinese state is the terrorist organization, while
active opponents of its rule are freedom fighters.
My own opinion is that the Chinese do have
reason to fear terrorism, but that they have exaggerated
the problem for political reasons.
There is no
doubt that on the whole the disturbances of the 1990s
were indeed inspired by separatists, many of them
deriving inspiration from Islamic militants. Uighurs
have been found fighting outside Xinjiang, including in
Afghanistan and Chechnya, and there are some imprisoned
in the US base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
However,
there are some anti-Muslim Uighurs, especially among
intellectuals, who are highly nationalist. Some of them
may want full independence, but others realize this is
an unrealistic pipe dream and would settle instead for a
greater degree of autonomy or some other accommodation
within China. The Uighur tradition is similar to the
Turkish in its strong element of secularism and
intolerance against religiously based violence. By no
means all nationalism in Xinjiang is based on Islamic
militancy.
The January 2002 report, citing 200
incidents between 1990 and 2001, which the Chinese
released precisely to emphasize the need to fight
separatism, notes hardly any disturbances at the turn of
the century. At a press conference this April 12,
Xinjiang Chairman Simayi Teliwardi claimed that no
explosions or assassination incidents had taken place in
in Xinjiang in "recent years". While his likening of
terrorists to "rats scurrying across the street" was
totally unnecessary and provocative, he was probably
right in suggesting that terrorist separatism is on the
decline in Xinjiang. Reasons may include vigilance by
the public security organs and the general rise in the
standard of living.
This does not mean that
problems of ethnic relations and hostility to the
Chinese state are about to go away. It does mean that
the Chinese could afford to be more tolerant of Islam
and could take other measures geared towards inspiring
greater confidence among Uighurs, such as reducing Han
immigration. However, I do not expect the Chinese to
relax their policy, at least in part because of the
situation in Central Asia and especially because of the
recent bomb blasts in Uzbekistan.
Links with
Central Asia: Uzbekistan At the same time as
Islamic impact has increased in Xinjiang, Chinese
economic and political influence has risen in the
countries of Central Asia that once belonged to the
Soviet Union. China once saw a major threat from the
Soviet Union, but with the fall of the Soviet Union at
the end of 1991, a new threat seemed to come from
Central Asia in the form of pan-Islamic militancy.
In an April 1996 meeting, the presidents of five
countries, China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and
Tajikistan - all but China formerly part of the Soviet
Union - met in Shanghai to discuss mutual interests.
These included economic cooperation of various kinds as
well as several other serious issues, such as terrorism
and the control of drugs and arms across mutual borders.
The presidents of these five countries have continued to
meet on a regular basis, showing that their joint
cooperation matters to them. In 1999, they signed an
agreement in Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan, to set
up a formal organization for the control of terrorism.
In June 2001, in other words before the September 11
terrorist attacks, they met again in Shanghai and formed
the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. This time there
was a sixth country represented, Uzbekistan.
This country is notable in the present context
for two reasons. One is that it has grappled with
Islamic militants for some years, the other that
President Karimov is known for his heavy-handed approach
to solving problems and his abuse of human rights. Many
specialists think that his methods are
counterproductive, exacerbating the very problems he is
trying to solve. In 1998, Islamic militant leaders set
up the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, which the US soon
recognized as a terrorist organization.
The
United States, which began its "war against terrorism"
by overthrowing the Taliban in Afghanistan late in 2001,
has moved into several Central Asian countries to an
unprecedented extent. Never before has it been able to
set up military bases in Central Asia, as it has now
done in Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and especially
Uzbekistan.
We can expect that all the countries
of the region will be deeply concerned about the bomb
blasts in Uzbekistan. China has taken a very low profile
in reaction, but may crack down even harder on
separatism or terrorism.
If injustice is one of
the causes of terrorism in Central Asia, then terrorism
itself has provoked an unprecedented reaction among the
states of the region to protect themselves and each
other. They may have differences, including over
borders, but when it comes to terrorism they see their
interests as the same. And the United States, Russia and
China also find themselves with a common purpose in
opposing terrorism in the Central Asian region.
China has shown it is determined to hold on to
Xinjiang. The signs are that it is succeeding, despite
ongoing problems, and that separatist terrorism is
declining. Suicide bombing is unlikely to spread there,
but it cannot be ruled out.
Colin
Mackerras is foundation professor in the Department
of International Business and Asian Studies at Griffith
University, Queensland, Australia. He has visited
Xinjiang four times, most recently in October-November
2003. He has written extensively on ethnic issues in
China, including Xinjiang, his most recent book being
China's Ethnic Minorities and Globalisation, Routledge
Curzon, 2003. He can be reached atc.mackerras@griffith.edu.au.
