Uighurs & China

Well, how cleanly can you distinguish between a race riot and nationalist/separatist protest turned violent? When the riots happened in Tibet last year, non-Chinese sources tended to fit them into the rubric of nationalist protest (I would say a nationalist protest that contained a race riot as one of its component events). The events in Xinjiang do strike me as a bit more narrowly-motivated, but clearly this is a point on a continuum. The problem is that the Western media and conventional thought think of "race riot" as pure evil -- wrong in both its means and ends -- but "national liberation protest" as, in many cases, a good thing. So it can make a big difference which category a given event gets lumped into.

otto, i think colonialism is more salient of an issue for uighurs, as there are many more han proportionality in xinjiang than in tibet. i think part of it is that it is really uncomfortable for non-tibetans to live in tibet proper (as opposed to greater tibet which expands as far as sichuan). the uighurs are being turned into a minority in their own homeland. the "40% han" number has been quoted for nearly 15 years now, there are suspicions that this is an underestimate so as not to inflame. in contrast last i heard tibet was 10% han. in a realistic sense the uighurs will be outnumbered in xinjiang for the indefinite future, they're already outnumbered in dzunhgaria, and han are now starting to settle in the core cities of uighuristan in the tarim basin. tibet is a somewhat different case because its occupation is motivated by strategic and historical-nationalist considerations. there will never be a large number of han living in tibet, so it won't be colonized and absorbed, it needs to be permanently occupied.

additionally, i would hazard to say that the racial angle is more clear in the case of the uighurs because they look more physically different than the tibetans. to use the old cliche, if you dressed up a tibetan like a han he might not stand out, but some of the more european looking uighurs would always stand out.

i think a good analogous case is what happened to the hazaras in afghanistan. racially they're just like the uighurs, a east-west eurasian hybrid population which is physically distinct from the majority. the taliban attack (and partial genocide) against them was motivated in part due to their shia islam. but there were pretty clear racial overtones too, as their mongoloid features made their identity visible in a much more clear way than say would be the case with th tajik.

I'm not sure what kind "economic resentment" a population needs to have for them to do something like this.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article6677379.ece

"âWe saw hundreds of Uighurs running down the street on the afternoon of July 5. About ten suddenly rushed into the store. They began to hit the people inside, even the old mother, with bricks and stones. They tried to run outside. Then they were dragged back inside.

âThere were terrible screams. Just wordless screams. But then very quickly they fell silent.â

She said that the son tried to hide in a chicken coop but was dragged out and his head was cut off. All the victims were left to burn inside the building. The corpses of the boy and his father were found beheaded. Mr Yu said: âEven the 84-year-old mother was stoned and then burnt."

They took our jobs! So we are going to butcher entire families like animals, decapitate them, and then set their corpses on fire.

On the other hand, this sounds like precisely the attitude of some medieval minded Muslims who think nothing of slaughtering kafirs.

jing, yes, but they attacked hui too. in any case, sure it sounds like stuff people would do due to economic resentment. the tibetans certainly don't view the chinese as kafirs. the overseas chinese experience in southeast asia attests to the generality of these dynamics, where they've been periodically attacked and genocided in buddhist, catholic* and muslim countries. granted, in muslim countries the killers do get backing from mullahs in their attacks, but this is more post facto ass-covering than the primary motivation.

* the chinese community in manila was subject to several mass exterminations during the period of spanish hegemony. the spanish were powerless to do anything about it since there were too few of them, but luckily the chinese gov. didn't care too much (many of the fujianese merchants were officially not supposed be abroad).

The Uigher mobs targeted Han, Hiu, and Kazhaks, according to news reports. The Han mobs targeted only uighers. Not dissimilar to the Kosovar mobs that attack Slavic Muslims (from the Sandjak) along with Slavic orthodox.

Curiously, in the anti-Han Tibetan riots last year, the Tibetans attacked and burned a Mosque, presmably Hui. Are the Muslim Hui some sort of middleman minority on the Han frontier?

The Uyghers are on very bad terms with Tajiks too. Tajiks are non-Turkish and earlier than Uyghurs in the region but much weaker in numbers. Historically Hui people often find themselves sandwiched between Islam-nomads and Han people, inconveniently on both sides in time of troubles

Razib,

I think I agree with the basic gist of what you're saying, but there are a few points that I think need to be qualified. Regarding colonialism, in Authenticating Tibet, one of the authors (I don't have my copy in front of me), argues that none of the ethnic autonomous regions of China are currently undergoing major increases in the Han population (this is in a book that I found to have an anti-Chinese perspective that was sometimes irritating). Xinjiang is the only one that had a major population shift during the PRC period (Inner Mongolia, Manchuria, were already majority-Han a hundred years ago), but that that was before 1976 for the most part. Basically, Chinese people don't want to live in these godforsaken places, the economic incentives are sufficient to get some people to stay there for a while but they eventually leave, so the government would have to work a lot harder than it currently is to increase the permament Han population. I agree that that is particularly true of the Tibet Autonomous Region, due to its altitude; but it also seems to be the case in the eastern Tibetan areas, which don't have quite such an extreme environment.

However, civil unrest is presumably driven by perceptions about demographic changes (among other things), rather than cold, hard facts. I don't know if the average Xinjiang Uighur has a stronger perception of being under seige from colonisation than the average Tibetan does. It certainly seems that the Tibetan exiles and their Western fans believe in the demographic threat, so maybe that idea is also popular back in the old country. Also, it's worth noting that the only place (to my knowledge) that suffered from pogroms against civilians during the Tibetan protests last year was Lhasa, which has a very different demographic than the rest of Tibet. The Tibetan hinterland might never be re-settled by outsiders, but Lhasa could definitely end up as a permanently Han-majority city. So, colonisation really is a live concern for them (and, by extension, to the nationalistically-inclined in the rest of Tibet, since Lhasa is Jerusalem to them).

The authors of Authenticating Tibet might be wrong about the demographic future of Xinjiang, since they are Tibet experts rather than Xinjiang experts. The irony of Ãrümchi, thought, is that it's outside of the Uighur heartland in southern Xinjiang. It appears to have been founded by the Chinese as an administrative fort town in the 18th century, and the name is Mongolian, not Uighur. Did Ãrümchi ever have an Uighur majority at any point in its history? I don't know. They're nowhere close now. Of course, a race riot is a bit different when carried out by a minority than by the majority: a pogrom can be an effective, if amoral, tactic used against a minority; but race riots started by the minority are potentially suicidal. It's hard to believe that anybody would come up with this plan as part of a calmly thought-out strategy. Maybe somebody thinks that, if they can get the fuse lit, all of the Uighurs in Xinjiang will rise up and be able to seize the north â or, at least, the part that includes Ãrümchi â and ethnically cleanse the Chinese. That sounds like a stretch to me.

Jing,

My guess is that the Hui have many of the same characteristics that make the Hans successful in business in the minority areas, plus they come from even poorer backgrounds on average. So, there are more of them who are willing to go to Tibet or Xinjiang to make money. They presumably also had better connections along the Silk Road and across the Himalayas in the old days, but I don't know if that tradition still has much effect on current behaviour.

I'm not sure why people are surprised when Hui people are attacked along with Hans in these sort of situations. I think they are perceived by the locals as being outsiders who are probably loyal to the Chinese state. I don't know to what extent the average Tibetan is aware that there is any difference â both are gyanags in Tibetan. Uighurs presumably attach some importance to the religious angle, but I haven't seen evidence that there was much religious motivation to these riots anyway. I also haven't heard anything about Kazakhs being attacked.

a supplement to what otto noted: the norther half of xinjiang is dzhungaria, and was not traditionally inhabited by uighurs. uighurs are not nomads, but settled oasis people. rather, dzungharia was dominated up until the 18th century by various mongol confenderacies (especially the oyrat), but the manchu state destroyed their power during a series of wars which also resulted in a massive depopulation (the kalmyk state of the volga in russia arose during this period from emigration from these areas).

World on fire-http://www.amazon.com/World-Fire-Exporting-Democracy-Instability/dp/038…

The same old story has repeated many times. The best solution is to change dominating minority into market dominanting majority (USA, Australia ect).

Jing, You appear to think that the extreme cruelty and mindless violence of the riot is somehow inexplicable, but if you read about riots in ANY part of the world, the thing that stands out is the extreme cruelty of human mobs. Hindu rioters ripped fetuses out of pregnant muslim women in Gujarat. I personally met people who surrounded a temple near our hometown in Pakistani Punjab where some hindu families had taken refuge in the partition riots of 1947. The families (mostly women and children) were begging for mercy. Rioters piled wood outside the temple and burned them alive. 50 years later, the perps were somewhat ashamed, but also thought that "someone else in the mob came up with that idea". In the South, the white people would picnic while some black man was lynched, burned alive, skinned, had his testicles cut off and so on. Nirad choudhry has recorded how he saw a hindu engineer using his imported watch to keep time while the mob held a muslim grocers head under the water and he drowned. We are not a pleasant species...