Beijing can't bury the Xinjiang story
By Antoaneta Bezlova
BEIJING - The story of ethnic strife engulfing China's far-western province of
Xinjiang may have been relegated to the inner pages of the country's
state-controlled newspapers, but it found space on the front pages of almost
every other Chinese daily.
Unlike the Tibetan riots last year, when the media were initially told to
suppress the story, the clashes between Han Chinese and Muslim Uyghurs that
erupted in the provincial capital of Urumqi on July 5 was widely reported.
In many ways, this is symbolic of the profound changes taking shape in this
fast-developing society, which the communist mandarins can no longer fully
control.
Taking cue from the protests in Iran, where the emergence of new
media tools like Twitter, Facebook, and You Tube ensured the story was
broadcast to the rest of the world, Beijing was eager to put its own version
out as quickly as possible.
On July 7, widely read local newspapers like the Beijing Youth Daily and the
Beijing News published pictures of burned cars, smashed buses and bloodied
people in Urumqi. Accompanying reports from the state news agency, Xinhua,
claimed the violence that erupted was "a pre-empted, organized violent crime.
It is instigated and directed from abroad and carried out by outlaws in the
country".
Beijing has blamed Rebiya Kadeer - a female Muslim-American emigre, as well as
pro-independence Uyghur groups in exile in Washington, Munich and London for
masterminding the revolt from afar.
Even the Southern Weekend - a liberal newspaper based in China's free-wheeling
south - fell in line with the mandated version of events. It devoted a full
page to profiling Kadeer, describing her as "the Dalai Lama of Uyghur people".
It spent little effort on probing how more than a hundred people died in a
matter of hours in a city swamped with paramilitary police or questioning the
officially released number of Han Chinese and Muslim Uyghur victims.
Beijing insists that Uyghurs' fight is for independence and has condemned their
demands for religious freedom and genuine autonomy as separatist agitation. The
Uyghurs - members of a Turkic-speaking group that is culturally, religiously
and linguistically different from the Han Chinese - have long complained of the
heavy-handed Chinese policies.
Li Wei, an expert on terrorism issues with the Chinese Institute for
International relations told the Southern Weekend newspaper that the Urumqi
riots had the same goal as the Tibetan riots that erupted in the run up to the
Beijing Olympics last August.
"This is a provocation by Rebiya aimed at sabotaging the 60th founding
anniversary of the People's Republic of China," he said. "She has been plotting
incessantly and she has been looking for a suitable fuse to fire up unrest in
the autonomous region."
Much of the media have attempted to convey a message of danger from "hostile"
elements stirring trouble in the ethnic minority areas and has rallied the
nation to stand together in the face of the "threat". Photos of paramilitary
police officers on TV and the newspapers have been interspersed with the
coverage of state leaders visiting wounded people in the hospitals and calling
for national unity.
But not all the media have lined up behind the official line of reporting. Some
business newspapers - widely perceived as operating outside of sensitive topics
as national sovereignty - have probed the reasons for the protests beyond the
official sanctioned explanation of separatism.
The China Business Journal for instance, carried an investigation into the
triggers for the protests and dared to suggest that widening income disparity
between the ethnic Han majority and the Muslim Uyghur minority has played a
part in the uprising.
Much alike Tibetans, the Uyghurs have found themselves on the fringes of the
Chinese economic miracle. Hoping to benefit from the economic reforms that Han
Chinese spearheaded and introduced through the country, they have instead been
marginalized as outsiders in their own homeland, witnessing how resources and
profits have flown to Han Chinese migrants.
The last census taken in Xinjiang showed that although the nearly 8.4 million
Uyghurs are still a majority in their land (they stand at 42% of the total),
the Han Chinese population has risen to 38%.
The Urumqi riots - some of the deadliest conflicts between the two ethnic
groups in Xinjiang region since the Chinese communist troops arrived there 60
years ago - started with demands by local Uyghurs for the government to
investigate the deaths of two Muslim migrant workers in the southern province
of Guangdong.
Violence erupted when police began to disperse protesters, spreading across the
Han-majority capital city of 2.3 million people. Sympathy protests followed in
the traditionally restive towns of Kashgar and Khotan, and in places as far
away as Munich and Istanbul. The authorities claim some 184 people died in the
riots, more than two-thirds of them Han Chinese.
While the China Business Journal's reporting steered clear of questioning the
official version of events, it traced the origins of the conflict to a
government-sponsored poverty alleviation project. The migrant workers that died
in a brawl in Shaoguan, Guangdong province, were part of a labor force export
scheme aimed at reducing social tensions in the most remote parts of Xinjiang.
The two Muslim workers were among the 4,100 people from Shufu county under
Kashgar city that were "exported" by local authorities to work as migrant labor
in the manufacturing hubs of China's east and south. According to the report,
the project had transformed the remote county into a model "labor export"
center, attracting some 8,000 recruits since 2008.
"In the poorest areas of China where resources are scarce, labor export is one
of the most convenient ways for poverty alleviation," said Chen Yaogao, social
researcher with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
While in most areas, migrant force recruitment is conducted by labor agencies
or the companies themselves, in the case of Shufu scheme the recruitment was
entirely driven by the government. Local authorities contacted manufacturers in
Guangdong and in the eastern coast harbor of Tianjin to find placement for the
laborers, and even dispatched local cooks to cater to their food needs.
While sounding positive on the government intention, the paper highlighted the
problems of Muslim Uyghurs feeling "resentful" of the wealth and living
standards of Han Chinese. The report spoke of the "fragility" of the labor
export experiment in ethnic minority areas plagued by poverty.
Electronic media has been even more effective in raising public awareness about
political and economic inequality between Han and non-Han.
A Chinese-language website, www.uyghurbiz.cn, had emerged as a cyber forum
probing Beijing's minority polices and questioning the wisdom of encouraging
the migration of Han Chinese into Xinjiang. The Internet forum, founded by
Uyghur economist Ilham Tohti, had argued that Beijing's polices were in need of
revision as they had put Uyghurs at disadvantage and alienated them.
As Beijing tried to silence the forum after the riots, the response by online
activists was immediate. A lobby of more than 100 Chinese writers and
intellectuals published a letter calling for the release of www.uyghurbiz.cn's
founder. Ilham Tohti was reported missing from his Beijing home this week and
has apparently been detained.
The letter posted online on Monday urged Beijing to reflect on whether its own
mistakes caused the unrest in Xinjiang and the anti-government riots last year
in Lhasa and other Tibetan communities.
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