After Tibet, Xinjiang exposes China's Achilles' heel - Windows Live

• After Tibet, Xinjiang exposes China's Achilles' heel - Windows Live

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  • For China, the chickens come home to roost

     

    Brahma Chellaney

  • By blanketing the oil-rich Xinjiang with troops, China’s rulers may have subdued the Uighur revolt, which began in Urumqi, the regional capital, and spread to other heavily guarded cities like Kashgar. But this deadliest case of minority rioting in decades — along with the 2008 uprising across the Tibetan plateau — shows the costs of forcible absorption, laying bare China’s Achilles’ heel.

     

    About 60 per cent territory of the People’s Republic comprises territories that historically had not been under direct Han rule. In fact, the Great Wall was built as the Han empire’s outer security perimeter. Today, Xinjiang and Tibet, by themselves, make up nearly half of China’s landmass.

  • The Manchu assimilation into Han society and the swamping of the locals in Inner Mongolia have left only the Tibetans and the Turkic-speaking Muslim ethnic groups in Xinjiang as the holdouts. But the events since last year have come as a painful reminder to the Chinese leadership that its policies in Tibet and Xinjiang aren’t working. Economic development in those regions, largely geared at exploiting their resource wealth, has only helped marginalize the natives. While the locals get the menial work to do, the Han settlers run the show and hold the well-paying jobs, symbolizing an equation between the colonized and the colonizers.
  • There are important parallels between the Tibet and Xinjiang violence. The ethnic uprisings in both regions erupted after authorities tried to disperse peaceful protesters in the local capital — Lhasa and Urumqi — where Han Chinese now outnumber the natives. And just as Beijing was quick to accuse the Dalai Lama of inciting the Tibetan rebellion, it has blamed the Xinjiang bloodshed on exiled Uighur leaders, specifically the Washington-based Rebiya Kadeer. But Kadeer, an ex-businesswoman, is no advocate of violence, although she spent six years in a Chinese jail and two of her sons are still imprisoned in Xinjiang.
  • The policies of forced assimilation in Tibet and Xinjiang began after Chairman Mao Zedong created a land corridor link between the two rebellious regions by gobbling up India’s 38,000-square-kilometre Aksai Chin. This area — almost the size of whole Switzerland — started coming under Chinese control through furtive encroachment in the 1950s, before Mao consolidated and extended China’s hold by waging open war on India in 1962. Aksai Chin provides the only accessible Tibet-Xinjiang passageway through the Kunlun Mountains.