Teaching Comparative Government and Politics

Friday, August 24, 2012

Yes, there are cleavages in China

Textbook authors are keen to impress on readers that the kind of ethnic cleavages seen in places like Nigeria and Russia are mostly absent in China. That oversimplification glosses over Xinjiang, Tibet, and the massive programs to encourage Han Chinese to move to provinces near the border.

Xinjiang

Keep in mind that Xinjiang is one of those places (geographic cleavage) where ethnic Uighurs (ethnic cleavage) who used to dominate the population are practicing Muslims (religious cleavage). Note that all those cleavages coincide, and you know what that means. Add to that the political tradition represented by the Chinese maxim, "Heaven is high and the Emperor is far away."

Fast and loose: The party’s interference in the observance of Ramadan stokes grievances in China’s north-west

Xinjiang, the vast region in whose west lies the old Silk Road city of Kashgar, has a history of tension between the ethnic-Turkic, mostly Muslim, Uighurs who used to make up most of its population, and the authorities, dominated by ethnic-Han Chinese. During Ramadan, which comes to an end on August 19th, that tension has been exacerbated by the government’s intervention in religious practice.

It has been discouraging, and in some places even banning, Communist Party cadres, government officials, students and schoolchildren from fasting and attending mosques during working hours…

Groups representing Uighur exiles say that this year the campaign has been more intense than usual. Xinjiang’s government has denied forcing people to break the fast. Hou Hanmin, a spokeswoman, was quoted by Global Times, a party-owned newspaper, saying that the government did, however, “encourage residents to eat properly for study and work purposes.”

This is resented by many Uighurs as yet another encroachment on their traditions. Kashgar is rapidly becoming a Chinese city like many others… In Xinjiang as a whole, Uighurs and other minorities are now outnumbered by Han Chinese.

Many Uighurs long for independence, which the region briefly enjoyed as East Turkestan in the 1930s and again in the 1940s… But independence is not on the cards, though anti-Chinese sentiment does at times turn violent—most dramatically in 2009 in Xinjiang’s capital, Urumqi…

Given this history, it seems surprising that the government should risk inflaming passions by interfering with religious observance. Exiled activists see it as fitting a pattern. “The whole idea,” says Alim Seytoff of the Uighur American Association, “is to secularise the Uighur people.”…

It is understandable that China is nervous about the spread of Islamist extremism. It has only to look at its own borders to see its consequences in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia…