Struggle at the Center of Asia: China vs. the Uighurs. Mike Jeffers Reports

The official government version provides justification for Chinese control of the region using a very selective interpretation of history while pointing to the elevated economic status the Chinese have brought to the minorities in the area. Beijing blames international intruders for riling up separatist movements in Xinjiang.

China’s official view is that Uighurs would never want to rebel because they are living under the peaceful umbrella of stability and prosperity bestowed upon them by the Han. According to Beijing, trouble in the region could only come from Islamic extremists from the outside.

Meanwhile, the World Uighur Congress and its U.S. branch, the Uighur American Association, provide the Uighur version of the conflict. Mehmet Tohti, a former vice president of the World Uighur Congress, said the Chinese fabricated the existence of a group of Uighurs known as the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM), which, allegedly, has sought to form a separate country of East Turkestan — the name many Uighurs use to refer to Xinjiang.

The Chinese say this separatist group is real, and they have frequently blamed it for attacks in Xinjiang. It has also been deemed a terrorist group by the U.S. and United Nations.

After the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States, the Bush administration put the group on the terrorist watch list, ostensibly as part of a deal with the Chinese to ensure their cooperation in the so-called global war on terror. Amy Reger, a human rights researcher at the Uighur American Association in Washington, strongly disagreed.

“Of course there is no connection” between the Uighur American Association or the World Uighur Congress and ETIM, Reger said. “We think it either doesn’t exist or it’s a very small group of people, not a large organization.” Reger also makes it clear that the UAA and WUC both condemn violence, including any attacks blamed on any separatists.

Tohti and others at the World Uighur Congress question whether the East Turkestan Islamic Movement — or its alleged latest manifestation, the Turkestan Islamic Party — even exist. But they also freely admit to an increase in ethnic tensions as a result of Beijing’s growing presence in Xinjiang, calling the Han Chinese colonizers and saying the region should rightly be recognized as the nation of East Turkestan.

In many ways, the reality of the conflict rests somewhere between and among such views. Xinjiang has prospered economically under Chinese rule, and to some extent the Uighurs have benefited. But it is also true that Uighur culture, religion and even language have been threatened. Most Uighurs interviewed for this article in Xinjiang wanted to find a peaceful way to live under Chinese control but with more autonomy, religious freedom, and economic parity between them and the Hans.

I first encountered the Uighurs when I was a college student in Beijing in the late 1990s. I was surprised to find an entire street behind my college in Beijing peopled with dark-skinned men wearing doppas (skullcaps) selling lamb kabobs and flat bread, and listening to Middle Eastern music. The entire scene could have been transplanted from Central Asia.

On this more recent trip, I met a tall 36-year-old Han man, Li Panfeng, who sells and repairs computers in Korla. When he heard I was from Texas he immediately brought up Dell computers, because Dell’s headquarters is in Texas, and told me he sells them to one of China’s state-owned energy companies, PetroChina. Li was born in Korla and went to a university in northeastern China. He took me to one of Korla’s few tourist attractions, a sea of 300-foot-tall sand dunes in the Taklimakan Desert just north of the city.

When I asked Li about the Uighurs, he pointed to the modern glass buildings and the developed riverside park. “All this development comes from China. The Uighurs have benefited greatly from our investment,” he said. “The more concessions we give them, the more they want,” he added, referring to Uighur exemptions from some of China’s policies, such as the one-child-per-family policy.

Any visit to the region reveals that a large economic disparity exists between the Uighurs and Hans, and it is most evident in the cities. Beijing’s policies to deal with its minority populations, particularly in Xinjiang and Tibet, have included transmigrating large populations of Han Chinese to the areas to dilute the local population.

Han trans-migrants are offered economic and other privileges as incentives, and over time they have begun to dominate the local economies in the major cities, exacerbating the existing tensions between the ethnic groups,” said Rodger Baker, a senior East Asia analyst at Stratfor, a private geopolitical research company based in Austin.

It is, in many ways, a recipe for unrest, Baker said. “This helps stir ethnic disparities and tensions, with the local Uighur population worried about cultural and economic imperialism by the Han and often perceiving themselves [as] second class citizens in their own traditional lands.”