Resistance Is Futile
STRATEGY PAGE
July 16, 2009: China has brought over 20,000 troops and police into the western city of Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang province. The actual death toll from over a week of unrest, appears to be more than 500 dead, over 2,000 injured and several thousand arrested. Most of the dead and injured are Han, while most of those arrested are Uighurs.
Two years ago, there was similar unrest in Tibet, where a similar situation exists (Han Chinese moving into a fringe part of the country where Han are a minority that is on its way to being the majority). This is how China has evolved over the last few thousand years. Today, China's border areas are full of minorities, often groups that have been fleeing the Han for centuries, and are now trapped. The Han are 92 percent of the 1.3 billion population and believe that these minorities merely need more education and better work habits (in other words, be more like the Han) in order to prosper. When the communists took over sixty years ago, they encouraged Han to move into minority border areas, mainly to counterbalance any anti-communist attitudes. But the Han did bring more economic activity, and Han cultural influences that were most attractive to the young. In the last decade, the Han migration has increased, and many minorities, like the five million Tibetans, and ten million Uighurs in China, feel they are doomed to be eventually absorbed by the Han, just like so many other minorities. But the process is very unpleasant. The Han tend to favor each other in economic matters, and the government corruption also helps Han more than Uighurs. So while the economic growth helps the Uighurs, it helps the local Han a lot more.
The current violence arises from the fact that the Han Chinese moving in are better educated and connected (with the local Han officials), and more successful economically. The Han look down on the Uighurs as backward and ungrateful for the prosperity and economic growth the Han have brought with them. Many Uighurs resent this treatment, and this occasionally leads to Uighur mobs attacking Han neighborhoods, and businesses in Uighur areas. The same thing happened in Tibet, and overseas, where colonies of "overseas Chinese" have, for centuries, settled and prospered (and not integrated with the local majority).
China apparently learned from their experience in Tibet two years ago, and had a Information War plan in place when the Uighur unrest broke out. The government promptly shut down most Internet and cell phone service in areas where there was violence, and cranked up the reporting (for Chinese media) on how most of the victims were Han, attacked by ungrateful (for Han driven economic growth) Uighurs. This reduced foreign support for the Uighurs, and created a Han backlash against the Uighurs throughout China.
The trigger for the recent Uighur violence appears to be the murder of two Uighur men who were working in a factory in southern China. The two men were accused by local Han of raping women. Han have the usual prejudices against minorities, especially the Uighurs (because they are Moslem). The murder of the two Uighur men (who were apparently innocent of any rapes), caused a stir back in western China, and the local security officials (nearly all of them Han) didn't pick up on it. |
