Jul 9th, 2009 at 1:44 pm
What’s Happening in Xinjiang?
Russell Leigh Moss offers up a very helpful op-ed in The New York Times that helps lay out some of the background for recent violence in China’s Xinjiang province, spelling out the region’s native Uighur population’s various grievances. He also argues that the Chinese government has gotten really, really good at crushing unrest and there’s little reason to think the regime can be forced to change from below.
Meanwhile, National Review’s Andy McCarthy seems to have decided that since Uighurs are Muslims, violent Communist Party crackdowns must be a good thing.
18 Responses to “What’s Happening in Xinjiang?”
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July 9th, 2009 at 1:46 pm
Iranians are Muslims. Why are we not all Uighurs now? To which color should we set our Twitter avatars?
July 9th, 2009 at 2:04 pm
Iranians are Muslims. Why are we not all Uighurs now? To which color should we set our Twitter avatars?
Has Obama said anything about the Uighurs? Or is the new Obama “realism” not to meddle – whether in Iran or China – prevailing?
The Chinese’s ethnic cleansing reminds one of Saddam and the Kurds or the Bosnian Serbs cleansing Muslism or the Nazis, the uber-cleansers who set the standard. (although America did do a pretty throrough job).
July 9th, 2009 at 2:19 pm
I really don’t know what’s become of this nation if you can’t advocate the indiscriminate killing & incarceration of Muslims without pointy-headed liberals castigating you for it.
July 9th, 2009 at 2:23 pm
All power to the Party if it’s crushing Islamofascists!
July 9th, 2009 at 2:28 pm
the emphasis on islam is probably overdone. uighurs are attacking hui too, the hui being muslims who speak chinese dialects and basically look chinese. this is a story about ethnicity and economics, not religion.
July 9th, 2009 at 2:37 pm
The East is Red, as usual. With blood anyway.
Just one more demonstration that the CCP is just the modern mandarinate. Do they even make a pretension of being for ethnically blind solidarity and all that shit anymore?
July 9th, 2009 at 2:46 pm
An extremely timely article in this month’s Scientific American helps clarify Chinese treatment of the Uighurs with little to no respect going back generations as evidenced through Chinese nuclear testing:
href=”http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=did-chinas-nuclear-tests”>
July 9th, 2009 at 2:47 pm
here is the link
July 9th, 2009 at 2:47 pm
China has shown that it is very effective at suppressing unrest which consists of less than 1/100,000 of its population. If the protests in Iran were only by 700 people, I think they could have handled them much better than they did.
If China faces a situation of general unrest, it might very well have difficulty in dealing with it. They have exploited racial divisions and class divisions to crush dissent. What happens if there is an episode of broad spectrum unrest.
July 9th, 2009 at 2:59 pm
Basically, as I see it, the Uighers are screwed.
Even if it remains a restive province, the Chinese government isn’t going to collapse over it. Not in a million years.
And Xinjiang isn’t going to get independence. If Tibet isn’t going to get independence (and I really don’t think it is), then there’s no way that Xinjiang’s going to get it.
The *best* hope in the medium term is that Chinese party officials – and the man rumored to be Hu’s successor, Xi something, is said to favor a more inclusive approach to the Uighers – make attempts to incorporate Uighers into the provincial leadership.
Long-term, the only real hope for the Uighers is democracy in China. Even then, they almost certainly wouldn’t get independence, but it would give them the space to agitate for greater rights. As an outside observer, it would seem to me the best strategy for Uigher activists would be to link up with democracy activists. Still, the Chinese state shows no sign of liberalizing anytime soon.
July 9th, 2009 at 3:03 pm
The nuttiness hadn’t then yet spread to National Review, but if you’ll remember the Kosovo Unpleasantness, a lot of folks on the right decided that a Marxist dictator was on the side of good and right because he was being opposed by Clinton and Muslims.
July 9th, 2009 at 3:53 pm
“Just one more demonstration that the CCP is just the modern mandarinate…”
The Qing dynasty wasn’t nearly as good at maintaining control of its territory and population.
July 9th, 2009 at 5:24 pm
Before 9/11 we championed the rights of theUighurs, but after that acceded to Chinese insistence that they harbor terrorists. They are probably feeling very abandoned by us.
July 9th, 2009 at 5:24 pm
The other interesting thing is that there hasn’t been one peep in the Corner about the situation in Xinjiang since McCarthy’s comment. It’s almost as if other Cornerites realize how loathsome and embarrassing the comment is and are refraining from adding their own 2 cents so as to not contradict him.
July 9th, 2009 at 6:18 pm
Change in the Chinese government *will* come — the leading sign is that Han Chinese are pursuing court cases to get justice within the rules, and are not getting treated properly according to the stated rules.
*This* resonates in Chinese culture and tradition. Corrupt judges are one of the worst possible things. *This* is what can remove the legitimacy of Emperors or cadres. Breaking their own rules was easy for the Russians; it doesn’t work that way in China, which is why they set up the rules to be biased.
Unfortunately the Uighurs are not going to get any improvement in their treatment. Not least because they haven’t been appearing to be Confucian models of virtue in their complaints, so they’ll never get the support of the Han until they do.
July 9th, 2009 at 7:03 pm
[...] UPDATE: Matthew Yglesias [...]
July 10th, 2009 at 5:42 am
Don’t just swallow what the mainstream media is throwing out there:
http://china.globaltimes.cn/editor-picks/2009-07/444870.html
July 10th, 2009 at 2:30 pm
The defining characteristics of neoconservatism are willful ignorance and a blase attitude towards consequences. Both are on display in this quote.
How do you manage not to know that Obama has been speaking out against the Iranian regime?
How do you manage to convince yourself that you care about Iranian protesters, without demonstrating the slightest desire to elevate the question of what actions help or harm their cause, over the question of what actions would make you feel better?