China’s Ethnic Unrest

Asia:NZ contributor Vaughan Yarwood analyses the fallout from the disturbances in Urumqi in June 2009, and explains how the controversy reached New Zealand and Australia.

Please note that the views expressed by the author of this feature do not necessarily reflect the views of Asia:NZ.

On 26 June 2009 two Uighurs died in clashes with Han Chinese at a toy factory in the Guangdong town of Shaoguan in Southern China. Some 118 people from both groups were injured in the fighting, which erupted after a disgruntled worker falsely accused six Uighurs of raping two girls at the factory.

The Guangdong deaths, in turn, triggered street protests by Uighurs in distant Urumqi, the capital of their traditional homeland, the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, formerly East Turkestan. On 5 July, mass unrest in Xinjiang left 156 dead and more than 1,000 injured. Some 1,500 were arrested as the violence spread, its seriousness underscored by the hurried return of President Hu Jintao from the G8 summit in L’Aquila, Italy on 8 July.

The Turkic-speaking Uighurs, Muslims with a history of periodic autonomy and even independence, are now a minority in Xinjiang, which in recent years has seen an influx of Han Chinese keen to take advantage of the region’s oil and petrochemical-driven economic development.

Uighurs claim they are becoming marginalised, despite an official policy of positive discrimination for minorities, and that the government has fostered large scale immigration of Han Chinese to dilute Uighur influence, exaggerating the separatist threat to justify repression. For its part, Beijing claims Uighur separatists have received training and indoctrination from militants across the border in Afghanistan and that they are associated with al-Qaeda.

The recent unrest in Xinjiang has been blamed on separatists outside China, and in particular the exiled Uighur leader Rebiya Kadeer. Kadeer, a former laundress turned millionaire, is an astute business woman and philanthropist, who made her wealth largely through cross-border trade after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Before her arrest in 1999, she was said to have been China’s seventh richest individual. Jailed for stealing state secrets — she claims they were local newspaper reports posted overseas to her husband, Sidik Rouzi, a former political prisoner — Kadeer was released in 2005 on health grounds. Now based in the United States, she heads the World Uighur Congress which represents the Uighur diaspora.

In July 2009, the Chinese embassy in Canberra opposed her visit to Australia, claiming that the unrest in Urumqi was ‘instigated, masterminded and directed by the World Uighur Congress headed by Rebiya’. This stance was supported by the Chinese Foreign Ministry, whose spokesperson, Qin Gang, said ‘we resolutely oppose any foreign country providing a platform for her anti-Chinese, splittist activities’.

The visit went ahead and while in Australia, Kadeer launched her biography, gave a televised address to the National Press Club in Canberra and attended a sold-out screening of a 53-minute documentary about her work as an activist and human rights campaigner, 10 Conditions of Love.

China requested that the documentary be withdrawn from the Melbourne International Film Festival and when this was refused, several film makers from China and Taiwan withdrew their own films from the program — some say as a result of pressure from Beijing. The action followed what China claimed was unfair media reporting of the imprisonment of Australian Rio Tinto executive Stern Hu.

In a further sign of rising tension between Australia and China, in August Vice Minister He withdrew from a proposed visit to Australia to attend the Pacific Islands Forum Post-Forum Dialogue. China was instead represented at ambassadorial level. A senior officials’ meeting between the two countries was also cancelled.

In response, Australia’s Foreign Minister, Stephen Smith, reiterated that the country ‘respects the territorial integrity and sovereignty of China over the western provinces’, and added that any further action by China as a result of Kadeer’s visit would be ‘a matter of regret’.

Despite the conciliatory words, evidence accumulated that the disagreements were beginning to have an economic impact, with The Australian newspaper reporting a growing view among Chinese business leaders that Australia was sinophobic.

On 12 August, Maori Television attracted similar protests from Beijing when the broadcaster announced its intention to screen 10 Conditions of Love in New Zealand. The Chinese Embassy’s deputy head of mission, Zhou Heng, asked Maori Television to cancel the scheduled screening, saying that the documentary distorted the reality of China’s treatment of its ethnic minorities. The broadcaster’s chief executive, Jim Mather, declined to do so, claiming its right, ‘free from political and/or editorial interference, to broadcast the stories of indigenous people both from New Zealand and throughout the world’.

On 31 August, Maori Television announced that 10 Conditions of Love would be followed by a screening of Xinjiang Urumqi July 5 Riot: Truth, a Chinese-government supplied documentary that presented the official view of the ethnic unrest between Uighurs and Han Chinese.

The producer of the Kadeer film, John Lewis, dismissed the Chinese documentary, saying that it contained no Uighur voices. Lewis encouraged the Maori community ‘whose own history resonates so strongly with the Uighurs’ to invite Kadeer to New Zealand to tell her side of the story.

The gesture turned out to be unnecessary. On 5 October the Green Party announced that Kadeer would visit New Zealand the following week to hold public meetings in Auckland and Wellington to draw attention to the plight of the Uighur people.

The Secretary General of the United Chinese Associations of New Zealand, Jim He, expressed disappointment at the visit, but said that he expected less controversy than there had been across the Tasman, soon after the Xinjiang riots, when ‘emotions were running high’.

Days before the announcement of Kadeer’s New Zealand visit, Taiwan banned her from visiting the island, claiming that the World Uighur Congress had links to the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, an organisation classified as a terrorist organisation by the United States.

Kadeer has always strenuously denied such connections.

- by Vaughan Yarwood

Fact Box: A Hidden Plurality

China is widely thought of as a largely homogeneous Han society with a scattering of ethic minorities that add fashionable colour to the country’s fringe provinces of Xinjiang, Tibet, Inner Mongolia and Yunnan. According to census statistics, in 2000 these minorities — 55 in all — totalled 104 million people, or about nine per cent of the country’s population. In Kadeer’s homeland, Xinjiang, Han Chinese, the country’s majority ethnic group, currently comprise about 40 per cent of the region’s population and Uighurs 45 per cent.

There is a more complex diversity at work than such figures show, however. The Han Chinese identity is itself far from uniform, and includes such disparate groups as Cantonese, Hakka and Fujianese and embraces eight mutually unintelligible languages.

Dru Gladney, President of the Pacific Basin Institute at Pomona College in California and a noted China specialist, says recognition of the country’s minorities helps divert attention from these very real differences within the broader Han community. Gladney believes threats to stability in China are more likely to come from civil unrest and even ethnic unrest from within the so-called Han majority.

‘We should recall that it was a southerner, born and educated abroad, who led the revolution that ended China’s last dynasty’, he says.

- by Vaughan Yarwood

Photo: The central bazaar in Urumqi, sourced from Wikimedia Commons.