Violence in China kills 160

[JimW]

Jim, i was reading something today which suggested that the State was deliberately fostering Han chauvanism to combat the social dislocations that the expansion of capitalism is bringing with it - is this something that you've noticed happenning?

There's definitely been an attempt to substitute patriotism for socialism as the binding ideology - having presided over the shift from one of the most equal societies in the world to one of the most unequal in a couple of decades and all the rest of the dislocations, they've had to look for something else to legitimise party rule and that's been that they've made the nation (as opposed to the people) 'rich and strong' (富强) and restored it to its rightful place as a great power etc.
The intention wouldn't have been to foster Han chauvinism as such imo, but it will have been the unintended consequence of the cack-handed way they go about fostering patriotism (their propaganda inevitably reflects the Han values of the state) and inability to treat non-Han minorities on anything like there own terms - entirely paternalistic (they love a song and dance!), divisive (different family planning quotas, combined affirmative action and discrimination) and unable to allow the kind of cultural freedoms which would actually matter (e.g. religious worship for Muslims and Tibetan Buddhists, some say in development, i.e. not knocking down the old bits of Lhasa and Urumqi with no consultation).
So I'd say they desperately don't want to foster ethnic divisions, but are trapped in their own narrow praxis which means they'll keep doing it anyway.
ETA: On the recruitment of Uighur workers to go to Guangdong en masse I'd add that to the list of paternalistic programmes handled badly. The 'good intentions' are to have minorities benefit from the increased incomes that working away (打工) brings and which they have worse access to due to geographic, language and prejudice barriers, but again it's handled by a top-down bureaucracy that makes the experience one of being ordered about by the state. I saw the same thing in a report I did ages ago on 'relocation poverty alleviation'. It was a necessary and generous policy on the face of it to get people living in appalling conditions in marginal mountain land in West Guangxi etc to start new lives in better conditions, but the way it was run created all sorts of problems and resentments - both in the communities receiving the relocated and those moved. Same one-size fits all grand social engineering run by corrupt rent-seeking arseholes not surprisingly managed to make a good thing pretty miserable.

 

[YouSir]

The article below from the Uyghur Human Rights Project is interesting. It states that Uyghur women workers from the Kashgar area are heavily pressure to migrate to Guangdong. But the state motivation for this is unclear. Is it an economic one or is it the reverse of ethnic cleansing?

http://www.uhrp.org/articles/2353/1...ghur-workers-at-Guangdong-factory-/index.html

If it follows the Tibetan example then it's very possibly the latter. I know depressingly little about the Uyghur situation but it's a known Chinese tactic to eliminate minorities by rebalancing/unbalancing populations.

 

[JimW]

If it follows the Tibetan example then it's very possibly the latter. I know depressingly little about the Uyghur situation but it's a known Chinese tactic to eliminate minorities by rebalancing/unbalancing populations.

Care to expand? Reads like utter bullshit.
The Chinese state has behaved colonially but has never engaged in ethnic cleansing or anything like it. There has never been a tactic of "eliminating minorities". One outcome of mass Han migration into traditional minority areas, like central Tibet or Xinjiang has been to change the local demographic make-up, but that's a function of ideas of modernity, not ethnic cleansing. Otherwise why do they allow non-Han people to have more children than Han families?

 

[YouSir]

Care to expand? Reads like utter bullshit.
The Chinese state has behaved colonially but has never engaged in ethnic cleansing or anything like it. There has never been a tactic of "eliminating minorities". One outcome of mass Han migration into traditional minority areas, like central Tibet or Xinjiang has been to change the local demographic make-up, but that's a function of ideas of modernity, not ethnic cleansing. Otherwise why do they allow non-Han people to have more children than Han families?

I didn't intend to accuse them of ethnic cleansing (nor did I think I really had), but that planned alteration of demographics does, imho, serve the purpose of removing the form of ethnic minorities which mixed with the measured supression of traditional culture would ultimately lead to the erroding of a given ethnic group.

 

[JimW]

I didn't intend to accuse them of ethnic cleansing (nor did I think I really had), but that planned alteration of demographics does, imho, serve the purpose of removing the form of ethnic minorities which mixed with the measured supression of traditional culture would ultimately lead to the erroding of a given ethnic group.

That's the bit I'd be interested in a cite for - the idea that it's planned with a view to altering the demographics, rather than having that as an inevitable consequence.
It might seem like a bit of semantics, but I reckon it's important to make the distinction as some of the cruder analyses that imagine they're all about crushing minorities obscure what's really going on.
I mean, the (兵团 bingtuan) military settlements were certainly planned, but it was far more about securing the border regions and economic development AFAICS. This of course raises the question why they couldn't achieve that mobilising the people already there, but as I said above the state continued the colonial relationship of former regimes.

 

[upsidedownwalrus]

Precisely - there's the slight mileage they got out of using the "War on Terror" rhetoric to frame East Turkestan separatists as Al-Q allied terrorists (which would hardly be surprising if it was true in part), but the whole dynamic is almost entirely Chinese - the mishandling of minorities policy discussed in the Asia Times article David Dissadent linked and the general fact that no-one likes being occupied by colonialists.
Of course, the CIA was arming and training Tibetan guerillas out of Mustang in the 70s so they had a case with the Dalai Lama.

Hmm.

I do remember something after 9/11 where Washington was a bit confused about China. Did they support the Chinese in their fight to suppress Islamist terrorism? Or did they back the freedom fighters against the Evil Commies?

And I'm sure there was an increase in the Chinese calling both the Uighurs and Tibetans terrorists after 9/11. Not sure though.

There are striking similarities between Chinese attitudes to Tibet and Xinjiang and old British ones. The British always defend colonialism in India by saying 'Well we built them railways and schools'. Yet those people don't realise that people simply object to being ruled by a foreign power.

Similarly, the Chinese often bring up tokenistic pro-minority rulings (Which also anger poor Han people, to add insult to injury) without seeing that it's just about people not wanting to be controlled by someone else.

I do think the Tibet issue is more complex than many westerners think, mind you.

 

[upsidedownwalrus]

Care to expand? Reads like utter bullshit.
The Chinese state has behaved colonially but has never engaged in ethnic cleansing or anything like it. There has never been a tactic of "eliminating minorities". One outcome of mass Han migration into traditional minority areas, like central Tibet or Xinjiang has been to change the local demographic make-up, but that's a function of ideas of modernity, not ethnic cleansing. Otherwise why do they allow non-Han people to have more children than Han families?

Yeah - this is the problem. Like it's often cited that one million Tibetans died during the GLF. Yet this was not a nazi-style genocide. It was not a systematic ethnic massacre. It was starvation caused by the same stupid policies that killed many tens of millions of Han at the same time. If it was really comparable with the holocaust, Hitler would have wiped out half of Germany at the same time as the concentration camps (and I mean 'mainstream' German society, rather than 'the other').

The stronger parallels are probably with Britain and Ireland, mind you, and things like the potato famine.

 

[isitme]

races don't have any part in socialism tho. although china is not really a socialist country, i think the criticism of the fact that they don't respect ethnicity in their attempt to organise china is pretty strange coming from the left

why would they? their aim is to make china the most powerful country in this century. not to make china the most powerful country this century while respecting the ethnic blah blah blag

 

[machine cat]

I can see both sides of the coin. Obviously there has been what we in the West see is unlawful supressions of the ethnic minorities such as the quashing of riots and those who speak out against the Government, but that goes for the Han too. The Government also celebrates the country's minorities. Their language is taught in schools and a vast majority of them are allowed to retain their traditional lifestyles. Some choose to do so, some don't and some are sadly moved to those awful red-bricked 'villages' in the middle of nowhere with fuck all to do.

What is more worrying, at least for me, is the lack of respect, and stereotypical viewpoints the general population of Han citizens have for some ethnic minorities. For example, my wife says she barely had any problem being Mongolian, however ask a lot of Han what they think of the Uighurs, you would frequently here "thieves," "drug addicts," "trouble makers" etc etc

I don't know where this comes from, but as I said before, something like this was bound to happen sooner or later.

 

[upsidedownwalrus]

races don't have any part in socialism tho. although china is not really a socialist country, i think the criticism of the fact that they don't respect ethnicity in their attempt to organise china is pretty strange coming from the left

why would they? their aim is to make china the most powerful country in this century. not to make china the most powerful country this century while respecting the ethnic blah blah blag

Yeah - that's what I mean - the bad things that happened in Tibet weren't at all racial.

Some Tibetans joined the Chinese communists in attacking the monasteries and so on, while I think the Dalai Lama does genuinely want to do good in the context of today (and isn't the Evil Wolf the government say he is), the regime he was part of was pretty monstrous. It was more Taliban than paradise (minus some of the extreme misogyny perhaps). I think if many Western people heard about it they might change a lot of their views.

 

[upsidedownwalrus]

I can see both sides of the coin. Obviously there has been what we in the West see is unlawful supressions of the ethnic minorities such as the quashing of riots and those who speak out against the Government, but that goes for the Han too. The Government also celebrates the country's minorities. Their language is taught in schools and a vast majority of them are allowed to retain their traditional lifestyles. Some choose to do so, some don't and some are sadly moved to those awful red-bricked 'villages' in the middle of nowhere with fuck all to do.

What is more worrying, at least for me, is the lack of respect, and stereotypical viewpoints the general population of Han citizens have for some ethnic minorities. For example, my wife says she barely had any problem being Mongolian, however ask a lot of Han what they think of the Uighurs, you would frequently here "thieves," "drug addicts," "trouble makers" etc etc

I don't know where this comes from, but as I said before, something like this was bound to happen sooner or later.

Oh yes - that IS True. Even my brother in law, who speaks very good English and is relatively open minded, told me to watch out for Uighurs as they're all thiefs.

TBH there were times in Wuhan when I quite enjoyed going to chat to the Uighurs cos they were more like European people (Greek, Turkish) and it was interesting to see people who looked like that and yet were part of a country which Westerners usually think of as entirely East Asian.

Oh, and the bird on one of the yang rou chuan stalls was very hot in a very un Chinese way and very flirty.

 

[upsidedownwalrus]

Oh fucking hell, I'm such a fucking fence sitter, ooh I can see the good and bads element of everything.

*Smacks self over face with large pile of Guardians*

 

[machine cat]

Oh yes - that IS True. Even my brother in law, who speaks very good English and is relatively open minded, told me to watch out for Uighurs as they're all thiefs.

TBH there were times in Wuhan when I quite enjoyed going to chat to the Uighurs cos they were more like European people (Greek, Turkish) and it was interesting to see people who looked like that and yet were part of a country which Westerners usually think of as entirely East Asian.

Oh, and the bird on one of the yang rou chuan stalls was very hot in a very un Chinese way and very flirty.

Yeah, I used to like hanging out with the Uighurs is Beijing for the same reasons as you (yangrou chua'r and hash = ).

A lot of Uighurs are thieves, true. My bag was slahsed by a Uighur near Shenzhen train station once. However, my bag was also the target for lots of Han thieves around the country too.

 

[machine cat]

Oh fucking hell, I'm such a fucking fence sitter, ooh I can see the good and bads element of everything.

*Smacks self over face with large pile of Guardians*

fence sitting is what one does in/after China when they simpley can't be arsed with childish, nationalist arguements anymore

 

[JimW]

This review of Wang Lixiong's Wo de Xiyu, ni de Dongtu is on point:

In the form of memories of prison conversations with Mokhtar, Wang Lixiong sketches out a preliminary analysis of the “Xinjiang problem,” which he believes has entered a phase of “Palestinization.” He begins with some anecdotal examples of what he calls the Han “colonial attitude,” citing the resistance to “Urumchi time”[1] among local Hans, and their worship of Wang Zhen (1908-1993), Party secretary of Xinjiang from 1949 to 1955.[2]
While in Mao’s times all “nationalities” were submitted to equal oppression, Wang concludes that since the 1990s, which he isolates as a turning point, Uyghurs feel they have not benefited from the same treatment as the Han. After 1989, the Center adopted a “nip all destabilizing elements in the bud” policy (Ba yiqie bu wending de yinsu xiaomie zai mengya zhuangtai, p. 66), and increasingly resorted to pan-Chinese nationalism, strengthening the sympathies of Xinjiang’s Han population, but increasingly alienating Uyghurs. Wang writes:

I have always been surprised at the government’s wishful thinking in believing it could merge China’s 56 nationalities into one under the artificial concept of “the Chinese nation” [Zhonghua minzu], and make them face the outside world with an identical outlook. (…) On the contrary, each nationality can also use nationalism for its own goals, strengthen its internal cohesion through nationalism, and justify separatism and independence in its name.” (p. 59-60)

Part 2 here:http://thechinabeat.blogspot.com/2009/03/chinese-intellectuals-and-problem-of_18.html

ETA: And i think that goes along with the point I was making in reply to butchers above, that there hasn't been active promotion of Han chauvinism, it's been this 'pan-Chinese nationalism', but that ends up as effectively the former for the reasons we were discussing.

 

[butchersapron]

Here's a nice calming proposal from Li Zhi

To those who committed crimes with cruel means, we will execute them

(Also, internal class competion for work driving wages down in the special zones and all that)

 

[pinkpumkin]

I found this article about the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) involvement in Xinjiang which would give some credibility to the Chinese govts claims of outside interference. I haven't check the background of the author so it cold all be bull. What do you think?

http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article11961.html

 

[AnnO'Neemus]

Oh yes - that IS True. Even my brother in law, who speaks very good English and is relatively open minded, told me to watch out for Uighurs as they're all thiefs.

TBH there were times in Wuhan when I quite enjoyed going to chat to the Uighurs cos they were more like European people (Greek, Turkish) and it was interesting to see people who looked like that and yet were part of a country which Westerners usually think of as entirely East Asian.

Oh, and the bird on one of the yang rou chuan stalls was very hot in a very un Chinese way and very flirty.

I was walking with a Chinese friend in Beijing, just off Dongjimen, there was a food kiosk with a Turkish looking guy serving behind the counter. I asked my friend: "What's a European doing serving street food?" because it is a very peasant-from-rural-China-moved-to-Beijing kinda thing to be doing.

He told me the guy was Chinese, and I didn't believe him, because he sooooooo looked European and not Chinese, so I went and asked and yep, he was Chinese.

It is interesting to know that there are Chinese people who 'look European' - we know so little about China and all the different provinces and ethnic minorities, we stereotype too much and are too ignorant of the complexities.

 

[upsidedownwalrus]

Yeah - although let's face it, it's easy to see why we make that confusion, when 'Chinatown' consists of basically Han chinese culture, or when Chinezse people themselves refer to the language 'Chinese', when if Chinese was a political rather than cultural entity, Tibetan and Uighur could just as much be classed as Chinese as Mandarin.