Posts Tagged ‘Uyghur’
an interminable conversation 7: East Turkestan and the question of genocide
the uneasy life…
Canto: So several years ago I was invited, sort of, to take over an English class for NESB students at Wandana Community Community Centre in Gilles Plains, a north-eastern suburb of Adelaide, here in sleepy South Australia. Some of the students had been coming to my class in the city, because they were unhappy with their then teacher at Wandana. My city class had people of all ages, from 16 to 60, Indians, Africans and Europeans. The Wandana group was always women, of Middle Eastern appearance, most but not all wearing hijabs. So I accepted this offer, and found myself in the pleasant company of a lively group of women, many of them young mothers taking advantage of the community centre’s creche facilities. During introductions I asked about their native countries. There were a couple of Iraqis (Kurds in fact), one Afghani, and a large number of women from East Turkestan, a country I’d never heard of. I’d heard a bit about the ‘Stans’, but other than Pakistan and Afghanistan I wasn’t sure of any other names or locations…
Jacinta: East Turkestan is their name for Xinjiang Province in north-west China.
Canto: You’re spoiling my story. I just accepted that there was a country called East Turkestan, and that these women were Muslim, and seemed to know each other well, and liked to ask political questions and engage in argument, and seemed to amusingly dominate their husbands who came to pick them up after class. I became friendly with the centre’s social worker, also from East Turkestan. She it was who ‘recruited’ me to Wandana. She spoke perfect English, and filled me in on the East Turkestan story. The region was, as you know, called Xinjiang Province by the Chinese, and had been part of China for some time, but its inhabitants were clearly not Han Chinese, and saw themselves as completely separate as a people, if not as a nation. So I was intrigued, but just accepted it as one of the anomalies of cultures and nations…
Jacinta: Like the non-existent but presumably real Kurdistan?
Canto: Precisely…
Jacinta: Life is weirdly unfair like that, when you have cultures or language groups that would make sense as properly official nations, with their recognised boundaries, their vote at the UN, their good or bad governments, and then you’ve got made-up nations, created by exterior forces, like Afghanistan, and dozens of African nations decided at the Berlin Conference of 1884-5 or the Balkan and other states at the Other Berlin Conference of 1878, or was it the other way around?
Canto: Yes, nations are often such arbitrary creations and then their inhabitants get all nationalistic and xenophobic and irrational about ‘their’ piece of land. Anyway, my thoughts on East Turkestan took a different turn when the social worker asked me to help write a letter to the Federal Immigration Minister regarding her brother, an Australian citizen who had returned to his native region for a holiday and had ended up in prison in Kazakhstan, across the border from Xinjiang. I was assured that he had done nothing wrong, but I couldn’t get any more details apart from the claim that Uyghurs (she didn’t use this term, which I didn’t know about until after I’d left Wandana) were being arbitrarily imprisoned in the province, and if they fled to Kazakhstan they were also in danger, due to dodgy dealings between that country and China. Anyway, I left for more lucrative pastures shortly afterwards, but I very much doubt that our letter had the required result.
Jacinta: That Adelaide suburb, Gilles Plains, apparently houses the largest Uyghur community in Australia.
Canto: Yes, and since I left Wandana, more than a decade ago, the oppression of the Uyghur people has worsened – or maybe I just know more about it. It seems their region was kind of in the way of the Belt and Road project, and/or some of the population there were getting uppity about autonomy, and certainly not conforming to a one-China ideology, so the Party started getting aggressive, which bred more Uyghur violence, which led to mass disappearances and ‘re-education camps’ and some talk about using them as fields for harvesting organs.
Jacinta: Yes, these claims have been aired for years, and of course strenuously denied by the Party, though a paper was quite recently published in the American Journal of Transplantation(!), entitled ‘Execution by organ procurement: Breaching the dead donor rule in China’, which purports to find evidence of such things, though as far as I can see, no evidence is provided as to specific ‘donors’.
Canto: So all of this Uyghur stuff has been brought back to mind by my reading of the book China Panic, by David Brophy, a historian of Uyghur nationalism and a senior lecturer in modern Chinese history at Sydney University. Chapter 6 of the book is called ‘Human rights and Xinjiang’, and it provides much interesting and sobering background info. It seems that the Uyghurs, and Muslims in general (not all Uyghurs are Muslim), have become the Party’s new villains, replacing the Falon Gong of recent years. Promoting their faith to their fellows can elicit a hefty prison sentence. As with the Party’s treatment of Tibetans, but more so, Uyghurs’ visible and behavioural differences from bog-standard Han-ness are seen as a security threat. They’re also stigmatised as ‘backward’, hence the re-education gimmick, which taps into the standard racism that will be familiar to Australians who know our history of stealing indigenous children and providing them with a proper Christian education. With the USA still under the influence of the post-September 11 ‘war on terror’ it was hard to garner too much sympathy for the Uyghurs from that country and its allies, including Australia, but the lack of response, and worse, from Muslim countries has been disappointing, to say the least. Here’s how Brophy puts it:
In fact, at the most recent meeting of foreign ministers of the Organisation of Islamic Co-operation, they went so far as to ‘commend the efforts of the People’s Republic of China in providing care to its Muslim citizens’ – an appalling stance.
It seems that some of these countries had their own problems with minorities, and felt that crack-downs in the name of ‘national solidarity’ were justified – and of course there’s the question of valuable financial ties with China. And there was also just plain ignorance about Uyghur identity, at least early on.
Jacinta: Well, think of the Palestinians – it seems nobody is on their side, certainly on a national level, outside the Middle East.
Canto: Well, I’ve read at least two books by Palestinians about their history and their plight. And there are pro-Palestinian movements and groups, here in Australia and elsewhere, but the Uyghurs don’t have that profile…
Jacinta: I bet they have some articulate spokespeople and writers…
Canto: They’d have to be outside China. But that’s worth exploring. Anyway, Wikipedia has an article, Uyghur genocide, which says it straight, and makes for sickening reading.
Jacinta: So what is to be done?
Canto: The big question. China under The Party is, unsurprisingly, more than reluctant to sign up to any human rights conventions. As Wikipedia puts it:
In December 2020, a case brought to the International Criminal Court was dismissed because the crimes alleged appeared to have been “committed solely by nationals of China within the territory of China, a State which is not a party to the [Rome Statute of the ICC]”, meaning the ICC couldn’t investigate them.
The lack of public awareness and sympathy for these people, who could be described as just as in thrall to their religion as many United Staters are to theirs, might also be due to the lingering ‘war on terror’, and the consequent anti-Muslim prejudices evident here in Australia as elsewhere. All we can do here is highlight the plight of these people, and counteract propaganda against them, which is going on here, courtesy of Chinese pamphleteers, young people who I suspect know nothing about the real situation.
Jacinta: That’s an important point. A recent study found that the Chinese have far more faith in their government than, for example, Russians have faith in theirs. I presume that’s because Russians are more connected to the WEIRD world than the Chinese, most of whom have never at any time sniffed the chance of getting out from under paternalistic fascism. Their media has been far more controlled for far longer. Though still, there is hope from expat Chinese, and even temporary residents, students who express love for being in a ‘freedom country’, if only for a few years.
Canto: Well, you may have gotten this idea about China’s faith in their government and its media from the Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe, episode 893, in which, in its science or fiction section, Steve Novella trumped most of the Rogues with the item – ‘Reported trust in the media in 2021 was highest in China at 80%, and lowest in Russia at 29%, with the US in between at 39%’, which turned out to be ‘science’. As Novella pointed out, this was reported trust. It may well be that the Chinese population, after what they’d been through with Mao and the Tiananmen crack-down, and now with their latest thug, wouldn’t dare to stand up against the ubiquity of state media.
Jacinta: So it’s up to outsiders to speak up, and to encourage Uyghur expats to speak up, to allow them a voice and provide a listening ear and a sense of due outrage at the horrors being inflicted upon them.
References
David Brophy, China panic: Australia’s alternative to paranoia and pandering, 2021
Modern China and the Uyghur people
Uyghur youngsters – from the East Turkistan Australian Association
A dozen or so years ago I began teaching English at a community college in the north-west suburbs of Adelaide. I didn’t know it at the time, but the area was home to the largest Uyghur community in Australia. The word ‘Uyghur’, of course, meant nothing to me, nor did the English name they gave to their homeland – East Turkistan. My classes were filled mostly with middle-aged Moslem women, along with Vietnamese and other Asian nationalities. Some of them wore hijabs, others didn’t. They – the Uyghurs – were an interesting lot, feisty, chatty, politically aware and close-knit. Over time I learned to my surprise that they weren’t quite ‘middle-eastern’, whatever that vague term means. Or at least they were more eastern than middle, geographically speaking. Had I been forced to guess their nationality, I’d have said maybe Iraqi or Afghani – I had only a vague impression of the various ethnicities – Uzbek, Tajik, Khazak, Pashtun, and their histories of interaction and/or tension. So I was surprised to learn that the Uyghur people live within the current borders of China – specifically, a large, sparsely populated region north of Tibet, which the Chinese call Xinjiang – which translates, interestingly, as ‘new frontier’. Knowing this, of course, alerted me to the probability of tensions in the region, or worse.
This was fully confirmed when the Uyghur social worker at the community centre, with whom I’d become friendly, asked me to help her write a letter to the Australian authorities for assistance in the case of her brother, an Australian citizen, who had been incarcerated in neighbouring Kazakhstan while on a visit to his home region. She explained that the Kazakh government had long been currying favour with the Chinese authorities by rounding up anyone who might favour East Turkistan independence. She also assured me that her brother, while resistant to the brutalities of China, was anything but a terrorist, and wanted nothing more than to return to his family.
I don’t know if our letter had any impact (I very much doubt it), but everything I’ve learned about the region since has, when I’ve turned my attention to it, gripped me with the usual impotent rage I’ve felt whenever a weaker nation, or culture, or person, is harassed and bullied by a stronger one.
Uyghur is a Turkic language, most closely related to Uzbek, and many Uyghurs live in Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan as well as in the ‘Xinjiang autonomous region’, their principal homeland. The term ‘autonomous’ is risible these days, as the Uyghurs are under increasingly intense surveillance and pressure from their Chinese overlords. Arbitrary arrest and imprisonment is commonplace, and the number of Uyghur inhabitants has dropped from around 76% in 1949, when China annexed the region, down to 42% today. In the same period the population of Han Chinese has risen from around 6% to 40%. It’s a situation that immediately makes me think of Palestinian Arabs under the sway of the Zionist movement since early in the 20th century. To describe it as ethnic cleansing by stealth would underplay the brutality and consequent suffering.
In his very thought-provoking little book The dawn of Eurasia, Bruno Maçães provides a more subtle and certainly less emotionally-charged account of China’s modernising movement, a movement which has little patience for ethnic diversity and the preservation of traditional cultures. Of course, nations like Australia and the USA are also struggling with the rights and aspirations of traditional indigenous cultures in the light of a relentless modernism, but both of these ‘western’ nations seek to accommodate those cultures under a framework of individual freedom (more or less). Maçães notes that China’s modernist ‘dream’ is more collective, requiring everyone to ‘get with the the program’.
I should point out that Macaes is talking about the Chinese government’s dream, one first iterated by Xi Jinping, who clearly wants to make a distinction between what one might call European, or European-style, liberalism and what he personally wants his country to be. The question of what ‘the Chinese people’ actually want or have dreams about – well, it’s moot. Nobody can say, certainly not Xi.
Nevertheless Xi and his cohorts are wielders of massive power, and for the time being they’re suppressing all but their own manufactured vision of the Chinese future. Maçães writes of a document distributed within the CCP shortly after Xi’s public maundering about the Chinese dream:
It outlined the main political perils the Party leadership was urged to guard against, all of them located within the ‘ideological sphere’ and calling for an ideological response. The document started by denouncing those who replace the Chinese dream of national rejuvenation with an obverse ‘constitutional dream’, imported from the West and claiming that China should strive to catch up with the West by adopting a form of constitutional government and following Western political models. Linked to this, a second false trend attempts to promote Western values as ‘universal’, claiming that the West’s value system ‘defies time and space, transcends nation and class, and applies to all humanity’. The document then goes on to complete a full indictment of Western political ideas, including an independent civil society, economic liberalism and freedom of the press. The General Office is particularly insistent on the principle that ‘the media should be infused with the spirit of the Party’. Criticism by the media must be managed, supervision supervised. Those who deny this principle are looking to use media freedom in order to ‘gouge an opening through which to infiltrate our ideology’. By allowing mistaken ideas to spread, critics will disturb the existing consensus on which road to take and which goals to pursue, and ‘disrupt our nation’s stable progress on reform and development’.
Bruno Maçães, The dawn of Eurasia, pp125-6
This is truly chilling stuff. The chances that an ‘existing consensus’ can be found regarding China’s future are about as likely as finding proof of the existence of some god or other, and needless to say, this fake consensus finds no place for the Uyghur people or any other minority culture within China – in fact they’re clearly in the way of what the current dictatorship deems to be progress, and nothing illustrates this so well as the city of Khorgos in Xinjiang, right on the border with Kazakhstan.
If you haven’t heard of Khorgos, you’re not alone. The city didn’t exist 5 years ago, but now it’s full of skyscrapers and already has a population of 200,000. It has been built as a major component of China’s ‘Belt and Road’ economic infrastructure project, which seeks to connect with central Asia and Europe as a means of facilitating trade, cultural exchange, financial ties and the like. Ambitious young people are being attracted there in large numbers, from all over China and other distant parts. The place apparently does have a multicultural feel, but only from a high-flying, business perspective – though cheap labour from the surrounding country side (e.g the Uyghurs) is an essential part of the plan. The Belt and Road future, if it can be pulled off, will mean that freight services will be able to shift products overland from China to Western Europe in a fraction of the time and at a fraction of the cost of current maritime transport. Interestingly, China has been turning its back on seaports, due to environmental congestion and high labour costs, and building more inland cities such as Khorgos. The future, as China sees it, lies with ‘a new network of railways, roads and energy and digital infrastructure linking Europe and China through the shortest and most direct route’ (Maçães).
The Chinese government is arguing – no doubt sincerely – that its Belt and Road project will provide great opportunities for those who get on board with it, and that includes not only the Uyghur people, but the peoples of the Eurasian region, including Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia, to name a few. This vast region is seen as a reservoir of barely-tapped economic potential, and the Belt and Road is being sold as a grand tide lifting all boats between and within Western Europe and China. But of course there are critics as well as fierce opponents. The growing presence of Chinese on the borders of and within Kazakhstan, for example, has seen protests there which have threatened the stability of the Nazarbayev regime (Nazarbayev resigned as President of Kazakhstan in March this year, but essentially still runs the country). Russia, India and a number of Western European nations have expressed grave concerns – Russia in particular is seeking to build its own rival economic network, and ‘infiltration’ of the project into Pakistan and Kashmir is creating regional tension. Obviously, any threat of a Chinese ascendancy outside its borders, given the Chinese government’s totalitarian control of its own people, is of global concern. The only way to allay those concerns, at least from a western perspective, is liberalisation within China, and a full recognition of the diversity of its people, in cultural, ideological and other respects.
Reference
Maçães, Bruno, The dawn of Eurasia: on the trail of the new world order. 2018