Ben Caldecott is an Associate Fellow of the Henry Jackson Society and a Research Director at Policy Exchange.
The violence that has recently erupted in China’s far-western province of Xinjiang is the latest act of rebellion against Chinese control of the region. Between 1648 and 1878 more than 12 million Muslims in China were killed in ten major uprisings against central authority in Beijing. More recently, hundreds of Uygurs have been arrested and sentenced to death for engaging in 'separatist activities’.
This long history of resentment and rebellion by Muslim minorities in China is coalescing once again and has initiated widespread violent resistance against Beijing's authority. This situation has arisen entirely because of Beijing’s intransigence and its longstanding strategy in the parts of China with a Muslim majority to divide and rule.
Beijing has long sought to break up Muslim populations into smaller administrative units and encourage rapid Han immigration in order to dilute Muslim majorities. Their policies have been strikingly successful at disenfranchising Muslim ethnic groups and reinforcing Han Chinese control in parts of the country remote from Beijing. For example, the proportion of Han Chinese in Xinjiang has grown from only 9 percent in 1949 to around 40 percent today. This growth is staggering, but does not reflect the extent of Sinocisation on the area. Nor does it express the widespread resentment amongst Xinjiang's proud and distinctive Muslim majority.
When I travelled through Xinjiang in 2007 some of the Uygurs and Kazakhs I met on the road into the Taklamakan Desert in the centre of Xinjiang felt angry and hoped for change. 'I wish we could govern ourselves. The Chinese have no right to be here’, said my guide. Some Uygurs I met went as far as to wish openly for the American's to use nuclear weapons to 'annihilate’ Lanzhou – a city of several million in a neighbouring province where the People's Liberation Army have a regional command centre. That is the scale of the resentment felt by some.
Kashgar is an important cultural and economic centre for Xinjiang's Muslims. It is a mere 200 or so miles from Afghanistan and the majority of its people look as if they belong to the Bazaars of Central Asia than in a part of China. Despite the profound differences, Han Chinese hegemony is ever present. The billboards are plastered with Chinese characters and China's largest statue of Mao Zedong, surrounded by even larger red flags, gazes at the mountains beyond the city's communist era square.
Although the Chinese government has long realised the bitterness it faces and has invested heavily in the region's infrastructure in an attempt to foster development, secessionist activities continue. One reason for this failure is that the central government in Beijing has yet to address calls from the native population for greater autonomy and specifically, much less government encouraged Han Chinese immigration and forced sinocisation.
Xinjiang holds significant oil and gas reserves and as a result, Beijing will not allow any discussions that could lead to independence – perhaps the only thing that could guarantee a permanent peaceful solution. However, China can do much more to protect the cultural heritage of Muslim ethnic groups throughout China and act to grant them greater autonomy to manage their own affairs. If implemented fully and effectively (unlike the current Autonomous Region system), this could go some way to reducing tensions between Muslim ethnic groups and Beijing.
Greater autonomy would need to involve allowing Muslim majority areas to tackle the root causes of their resentment, which are primarily mass Han Chinese immigration and forced Sinocisation. This means, 1) that the extent of Han Chinese immigration should be managed by local peoples and 2) schools and the like should have the resources to teach Muslim ethnic groups their own languages and Islam, as well as Mandarin Chinese.
Before the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, Mao Zedong proclaimed that, 'The Mongol, Hui, Tibetan, Miao, Li and Gao Li peoples can voluntarily decide whether to break away…[and decide] to set up independent regions'. Although the Han Chinese majority and their Chinese Communist Party politicians would never allow that now, especially given the natural resource wealth of these regions and the loss of face it would involve, they could do more to empower China's ethnic groups. In the Muslim areas of China's North and West, failing to do so risks turning the widespread anger directed toward Beijing into something altogether more malevolent and destabilising.
