GLOBE EDITORIAL
Beijing’s wages of intolerance
July 11, 2009
IF CHINESE leaders want to blame someone for inter-communal riots pitting Uighur Muslims against Han Chinese in the western province of Xinjiang, they need only look in the mirror. The mayhem that caused China’s president, Hu Jintao, to quit a G-8 summit in Italy and fly home to impose order was the inevitable consequence of rigid, repressive government policies.
In Xinjiang as in Tibet, the labels Beijing applies to its treatment of non-Chinese peoples bear no resemblance to the reality. Official propaganda pretends that the People’s Republic of China has nothing but respect for Tibetan Buddhists or the Uighurs of Xinjiang. Party myth has it that all China’s minorities enjoy complete equality with the Han majority that makes up 92 percent of the country’s population. And the government has long promised to endow so-called autonomous regions with economic development that will make the “backward’’ or “feudal’’ minorities happy to shed their traditional ways.
Like the Tibetans, the Uighurs have seen their region swamped by Han Chinese migrants. After the 1949 seizure of power by the Communists, the first colonizing waves were due to governmental population transfers. After the Cultural Revolution ended in 1976 and the economic reforms initiated by Deng Xiaoping were underway, Han migrants were drawn to the oil-rich land of the Uighurs by economic incentives. After 60 years, the Han portion of Xinjiang’s population has gone from 6 percent to 40 percent.
This submerging wave of Han immigrants might have been tolerable if the Communist authorities had not also acted to restrict and suppress the Uighurs’ practice of Islam, and to force grade schools to teach Chinese and stop teaching the local Turkic language. To add insult to injury, Uighurs who dare protest this Chinese chauvinist attempt to efface their culture are denounced as “splittists,’’ a transgression akin to treason.
What’s more, the economic opportunities that were supposed to accompany the Han migration to Xinjiang have been mostly for the migrants. In part, this is because the local party and government bosses are Chinese, and in a system tilted toward those with connections to officialdom, Uighurs have been at a great disadvantage.
If Hu Jintao and his party comrades want to achieve harmony and stability in Xinjiang, it is not enough to fill the streets with security forces and hand out death sentences to Uighur rioters. The bosses in Beijing will need to grant religious freedom to the Uighurs - and the rest of China. They will have to allow the Uighurs to perpetuate their language and their culture. And they will have to ensure equal opportunity for all. In other words, the Chinese Communist leopard must change its spots.
© Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company
No comments:
Post a Comment