A Year since Xinjiang Riots: Are the faultlines manageable?
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Avinash Godbole
Archive data: Person was Research Assistant at IDSA from June 2009 to February 2016 Joined IDSA June 2009 Research Interests Chinese Foreign Policy, India-China Relations, Environmental Changes in China, India’s… Continue reading A Year since Xinjiang Riots: Are the faultlines manageable? read more
The week that began on July 5 marks the first anniversary of the Urumqi riot of 2009 in which 200 people, according to the official numbers, lost their lives. Unofficial estimates put this number at about 500. The 2009 riot was the biggest ethnic riot in Xinjiang. Beyond the number of deaths, however, the fact that it exposed one of the fault lines in modern China, that too in a most serious manner, should worry the communist leadership.
Even while being majority Han, China has many other ethnic minorities who mainly inhabit China’s border regions. The Beijing leadership has evidently struggled to keep the ethnic differences to a manageable level, let alone projecting the ethnic diversity of the country with pride. This has obviously been caused by certain historical errors that date to the Mao era. In addition, in the recent past, China’s minorities have merely been a spectator of the country’s economic miracle. Hence, alienation of the people belonging to the minority ethnicities has been an unintended consequence of China’s economic success. An increased sense of ethnic identity among the people whose cultural ties are more with the Central Asian states than with their Han counterparts is the bitter truth for a country that looks forward to rising in the global power hierarchy.
Since ‘liberation’, China has used different policies at different times, from assimilation to accommodation, towards its minority regions. However, none seems to have worked as inter-ethnic understanding remains elusive. As a result, there is widespread misperception and humiliating stereotyping that the ethnic minorities, particularly the Uighurs, are subjected to. The Shaoguan toy factory clash in which two Uighur factory workers were killed was caused by extensive ethnic stereotyping and abuse. On the other hand, for the ethnic Han workers of the toy factory, the sudden influx of Uighur workers, 800 in less than six months, led to anxiety about their job security, especially in a time of economic slowdown when joblessness is rampant for the single skill blue-collar worker. Thus, jobless growth along with the challenges of positive discrimination within larger welfare policies is a mountainous challenge for the Chinese leadership.
When Hu Jintao visited Xinjiang in August 2009 after the July riots, he said that “the key to China’s success in Xinjiang was to properly handle development and stability.” China also released a white paper on Xinjiang in which it put ethnic unity, social harmony and national unification as the pillars for socio-economic development. In all, it looks as if the Chinese leadership knows the diagnosis though the magic pill seems to be equally elusive.
The present state of affairs in Xinjiang, alienation of the ethnic Uighur population, has been the major reason why ethnic emotions were stoked lasted year. This alienation has been caused by rapid economic activities in the region along with large scale settlement of the Han population. According to some sources, not just the Uighurs, even the traditional Han settlers in Xinjiang feel threatened by the influx of the new immigrant population in the region.1 It has been reiterated over and again that even as the region is developing the local people are not. As a consequence, the local population still remains outside the economic advancements of the region. Moreover, Han-isation of the local culture is another fear that has encouraged the sense of alienation.
Therefore, in the absence of adequate socioeconomic measures that are aimed at affirmative action, the situation is unlikely to change. Preferential treatment to the local population in jobs and localisation of practices of the state agencies could be some of these policies. Encouraging more economic activities without undertaking any reconciliatory policy may not bring about the social harmony that the government desperately wants to bring about. If in the rest of China the dissatisfaction due to economic exclusion has caused mass level protests, then combined with the ethnic dimension it becomes a recipe with serious repercussions in the minority regions.
The fact that the Xinjiang riots occurred a little more than a year after the Tibetan unrest is no mere coincidence. What makes the Xinjiang situation more serious is the more violent nature of the protests in the region. While the nature of the challenge in Tibet is ideologically driven, the violent nature of activities in Xinjiang makes it difficult for the state to respond in a manner that is most efficient for the moment and not counterproductive in the longer term at the same time. For both of these objectives to be achieved, fresh thinking on the part of the Chinese leadership is required. Nationalistic imaging of the People’s Republic based on the Han identity could be the biggest obstacle to the pluralist solution that the contemporary situation in Xinjiang requires.
