Persecution of China's Muslims worse than Tibet!

There isn't a whole lot they can do in the present cirucumstances. Im not trying to sound defeatist, but the Uighur rebels i think need to adopt a more pragmatic approach. China is a nation that has since the revolution constructed a huge robust nationalist based sate edifice. It embodies the very ideology, belief systems and consequent policies of the communist party and it's perception of religion at large, not just Islam. So if even the Chinese Catholic Church with it's millions of members is riven and upholds two different disparate approaches to the government, only the one that conforms to state regulations is officially sanctioned by the government.

As such, the Muslims must try to retain a certain degree of autonomy, especially in religious and cultural affairs, but careful not to fall foul of the authoritarian officials who will not hesitate to resort to brute force and savagery to quell unrest.

The 'Hanification' of Xinjiang Published

Asia Times - Greater China - Aug 19, 2008
By Peter Navarro

While Tibet has played the role of China's "rock star" to human-rights activists around the world, China's Xinjiang province has been treated more like an unwanted stepchild. One reason is that Tibet has a true rock star in the exiled Dalai Lama. Another reason is that the strife in Xinjiang involves Muslim ethnic minorities with alleged ties to the most hated man in the Western world - Osama bin Laden. All of this, however, is simply unfair because what is happening in Xinjiang in terms of human-rights violations may be even worse than the Tibetan repression.

Xinjiang is China's largest province geographically but, with its extremes of heat and cold and desert climate, it is also one of its most sparsely populated. This province was formally annexed to the Manchu Qing Empire as early as 1759 but, for all practical purposes, it remained under the control of provincial warlords until the ascendancy of the Communist Party in 1949. That was when one of the most interesting, and possibly most ruthless historical events was ever perpetrated - one that allowed China to bring Xinjiang under its iron-fist control.

During the immediate post-World War II period, Xinjiang was controlled by Stalin and the Soviet-backed East Turkistan Republic. Reluctant to support a nationalist Muslim regime on the border of the then-Soviet Central Asian republics, Stalin brokered what appeared to be a peaceful accommodation between the Muslim leaders of East Turkistan and Mao Zedong's government. However, the plane carrying the East Turkistan leadership to Beijing to negotiate the peace agreement mysteriously - and all too conveniently - crashed and killed all aboard. In the ensuing leadership vacuum, Mao's forces stepped in and assumed control of Xinjiang, an "autonomous province" in name only.

From an agricultural point of view, much of Xinjiang is a virtual dustbowl in no small part because of overgrazing, deforestation, overplowing, and the failed efforts of the central government to turn grasslands into farmland. However, beneath Xinjiang's dusty soil and mountainous steppes lies buried 40% of China's coal reserves. Equally abundant and far more precious to the central government are oil and natural gas deposits that total the equivalent of about 30 billion tons of oil and represent one-fourth to one-third of China's total petroleum reserves.

Xinjiang is not just one of China's best bets for energy resources. Bordering eight countries in Central Asia and the Russian Federation, Xinjiang also has important strategic value. Central Asia can serve as a transshipment area for Middle East oil should war ever break out over Taiwan or China's various claims for oil reserves in the South China Seas. Central Asia republics such as Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan also have large petroleum reserves of their own that can help lessen China's Middle East oil dependence. For these reasons, China is building a vast network of modern infrastructure that includes railways, roads, and pipelines linking Xinjiang eastward to China's petroleum-thirsty industrial heartland and west and north to Central Asia and Russia.

In Xinjiang, the majority of the population consists of a Muslim Turkic people called the Uyghurs. These Uyghurs face some of the harshest and most repressive measures in the world under the jackboots of Chinese communism - arguably even more oppressive than what the Tibetans face. Any independent religious activity can be equated to a "breach of state security", activists are regularly arrested and tortured, and despite its sparse population, Xinjiang's ethnic groups suffer more executions for state security crimes than any other province.

Tragically, repression in Xinjiang has only intensified in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States. The Chinese government seized on this attack on American soil as a golden opportunity to cut a very clever deal with the US. China would support the US's "war on terror" if the United States would agree that the separatist activities of the Uyghurs represented not simply an indigenous rebellion against autocratic rule but rather a legitimate terrorist threat with ties to al-Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden. As part of its deal with America, China now defines a terrorist in Xinjiang as anyone who thinks "separatist thoughts", and Xinjiang's jails are crowded with such pseudo-terrorists.

Although China's iron-fisted repression in Xinjiang borders on the unbearable, what sticks most in the Uyghur craw is the ongoing "Hanification" of Xinjiang. As a matter of policy, for decades the Chinese government has sought to pacify Xinjiang by importing large portions of its Han population from other, primarily poor areas - and even by exporting young Uyghur women of child-bearing age out of the region.
Consider this chilling passage from Reuters:

China's government is forcibly moving young women of the ethnic Uyghur minority from their homes in Xinjiang to factories in eastern China, a Uyghur activist told the US Congress on Wednesday. Rebiya Kadeer, jailed for more than five years for championing the rights of the Muslim Uyghurs before being sent into exile in the United States, called for US help in stopping a program she said had already removed more than 240,000 people, mostly women, from Xinjiang. The women face harsh treatment with 12-hour work days and often see wages withheld for months ... Many suspect that the Chinese government policy is to get them to marry majority Han Chinese in China's cities while resettling Han in traditional Uyghur lands ..

Today, as a result of these policies, the Han population is rising at a rate twice as fast as that of the Uyghur population. Rather than being pacified or tamed by the growing Han population, the Uyghurs are simply becoming more and more radicalized. There is a very bitter and dangerous irony in this ethnic strife reported in the Economist:

Whereas the Uyghurs historically have been "among the world's most liberal and pro-Western Muslims, fundamentalist Islam is gaining sway among young Uyghur men. Today, Uyghurs report that small-scale clashes break out nearly every day between Chinese and Uyghurs in Xinjiang's western cities.

It is unlikely that a full-blown guerrilla movement will emerge in Xinjiang to engage Chinese forces in an Algerian- or Vietnamese-style revolt. The populace is simply too small, and Chinese security forces are too big and powerful. However, in an age of "suitcase" nuclear bombs and biological terrorist weapons, China is increasingly exposed to attacks from Uyghur separatists at soft target points such as the Three Gorges Dam or any one of its teeming cities. Indeed, as we have seen in a series of recent attacks, Uyghur separatists are showing an increasing ability to strike at Chinese targets.

The question ultimately for this conflict - and the fate of the Uyghur people - is how this conflict will be judged by world opinion. Will the Uyghurs be seen as a ruthlessly oppressed people being gradually exterminated through the policy of Hanification? Or will the taint of a Bin Laden connection prevent the same kind of world outrage that we now witness over Tibet? It is an open question - and one that the Chinese government itself could deftly sidestep if it simply began to treat its autonomous regions as truly autonomous.

Peter Navarro is a professor at the Merage School of Business at the University of California-Irvine, a CNBC contributor, and author of The Coming China Wars (FT Press). www.peternavarro.com.
Copyright 2008 Asia Times Online

http://www.uhrp.org/articles/1335/1/The-Hanification-of-Xinjiang-/index.html

I don't think Beijing really cares much about the opinion of the international community. Look at all the issues such as human rights, dissent, political reform, provincial autonomy, etc. None of these issues, despite repeated entreaties from western powers and senior officials in major international institutions like the UN, EU, World Bank etc, they will remain intransigent.

National sovereignty is a sacrosanct tenet of the modern chinese psyche. It wouldn't have been so dangerously manifested if impetuous western demonstratos new better than to sabotage the olympic torch relay for example. This just inflamed Chinese nationalism, and essentially spawned a breed of new generation hardliners keen to assert their identity, their country, and as they see it, with both Tibet and Xinjiang being inalienable parts of it.

We need consistent, concerted, international diplomatic pressure. This is the only way to get the Chinese to yield. Bellicose statements and impassioned rhetoric will only alienate China from fully integrating into the structures and processes of the international system. (which i agree, needs to be emancipated from American hegemony too).

format_quote Originally Posted by barney

It's not just the Muslims! Nobody can speak out in China, its ummm...like a communist Country??

The Christians are all bugged and tapped and imprisoned and tortured etc etc.

Atheists, Bhuddists, Agnostics Muslims, anyone. If you speak against the state there is the reckoning.

I know pal, im not disputing that. Im just saying that the recourse people resort to often is ill-concieved and not thought out carefully. When you're dealing with a regime as repressive as the Chinese Communist Party, you have to be ready to face imminent incarceration. Either that or give up secessionist ambitions.

I don't believe the Nazis were trying to alter the world in their own image. They were interested in subjugating the world, imposing their hegemony, and using coercive measures, forcing conquered peoples and territories to conform to Nazi policies. Shaping the world in their image is what the Soviet Union did through organizations such as Comintern. The Chinese also adopted the same strategy under Mao and his sucessors, in terms of international interference and the propagation of Chinese Communism.

I suppose you can aruge that the Nazis were more strident and fervent in their desire for what Hitelr called "lebensraum", and hence the expansionist policies.

format_quote Originally Posted by nocturnal

I don't believe the Nazis were trying to alter the world in their own image. They were interested in subjugating the world, imposing their hegemony, and using coercive measures, forcing conquered peoples and territories to conform to Nazi policies.

I don't think there's any evidence that their territorial ambition stretched much further than recovering traditionally 'German ' territorities in Europe and sweeping up further land in eastern Europe to provide 'lebensraum'. Such a nation had it been established would have been a dominant economic power anyway, at least in Europe. I don't think 'the world' was ever on the agenda; there was certainly no desire to fight France and Britain let alone the USSR and United States.. although arguably Hitler believed war with the USSR was an ideological inevitability. He rather anticipated, at least prior to 1940, that Britain France and the USA would be on his side in such a conflict.

only on LI one can find historians of such high calibre!

there was me, believing in my ignorance that he was going to replace us, the sub species of humans with his lab bred master race.

now all I need to learn is how Libyan deserts got moved out of Europe and dumped in North Africa, or were those there all along and Rommel went there just to borrow a can of oil for his tank?

format_quote Originally Posted by doorster

now all I need to learn is how Libyan deserts got moved out of Europe and dumped in North Africa, or were those there all along and Rommel went there just to borrow a can of oil for his tank?

The Desert War was the result of British and Italian colonialism rather than German expansionism. On the outbreak of war the British attached the Italians in Libya, then the Italians attacked the British in Egypt. When it became apparent his Italian allies were losing big-time Hitler sent Rommel and the Afrika Korps to bail them out. Subsequently neither side could afford to abandon North Africa as it was too important in the context of controlling the Mediterranean.

Enough history for today... we are straying woefully off what is a very serious and sad topic, I think.

The Hui community is not mistreated, nor are the other small Muslim minorities. It is only the Uyghurs who suffer due to the underground separatist movement.