[China] also opposes unrestrained expansion of anti-terror war, believing that terrorism will not be eliminated by military means alone, but by consorted political, economic, cultural and diplomatic efforts. (Guang 2004: 527)Intro
Since the September 11, 2001 attacks upon the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, the world has witnessed and cast measure upon the American response to terrorism and its efficacy. The same can be said of many large democratic states, whose actions remain heavily scrutinized. Less frequently mentioned or considered is China’s involvement in the International War on terror. Such an endeavour is no easy task considering China’s opaque political system, authoritarian control of the media, and often obscure leadership intentions. ‘That China is so large and complex that one can look there for proof of any thesis, and find it, complicates the situation’ (Johnson-Freese 2003: 52). To some, China’s support of the U.S.-led war on terror seemed to contradict its declared avoidance of state alliances, and jeopardise its obstinate position on protecting state sovereignty at all costs. Conversely, other analysts (Lai 2003) suggest that by aligning with the US after September 11, China has instead sought to strengthen its sovereignty and national unity by justifying its suppression of separatist movements in the North Western Xinjiang region (131). While China has a long history of often violent state control and equating independent religious activities and political dissent with the statutory crime of “separatism” (or more accurately translated, “splittism”), it wasn’t until it joined the war on terror that it unequivocally linked all dissenting voices in Xinjiang with terrorism. China now describes this once understated and secretive issue as an integral facet of the international war on terror. Despite a lack of media exposure in the West the “Xinjiang Problem” takes high precedence in China, and a recent internal security report concluded that ‘the independence movement in Xinjiang is the main threat to China’s stability, ranking concern over this above Tibet and unemployed workers’(Hyer 2006: 81). With an estimated one million troops stationed in Xinjiang (ibid), and no immediate external threat, their presence indicates the significance of ethnic unrest to China, and warns of the magnitude of violence that threatens the region.
The following paper addresses China’s approach to terrorism, specifically outlining how China’s position has changed after it’s involvement in the global war on terror. Beginning with a brief examination of the history and strategic importance of the Xinjiang region, this paper proceeds to describe China’s initial treatment of unrest as isolated crimes of separatism and splittism. This approach is contrasted starkly with China’s behaviour following the watershed event of 9-11, when it seized the opportunity to rally international support for its suppression of unrest in Xinjiang, deflect human rights criticisms, and counter U.S. influence in the region. China’s subsequent approach has been to broaden the definition of terrorism, exaggerate the threat that it poses, and violently confront opposition. Martin Wayne (2007) has recently suggested that China’s efforts have successfully kept the global jihad from spreading into its territory. As this paper counters, the lack of popular support for anti-government violence in Xinjiang is predicated not on China’s violent suppression, but rather on the moderate economic, social and political gains made in Xinjiang in the last 30 years. Consequently, unless China renews its efforts to address the valid social and political concerns in the region, viewing dissent as activism rather than terrorism, violence will invariably erupt in Xinjiang again.
History1
The Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, as it is officially known to the Chinese, or as Uyghur nationalists call it “Uyghuristan” or “East Turkistan”2, is a vast region that occupies a sixth of China in the North West3. Despite its immense size, Xinjiang contains great expanses of inhospitable dessert and mountains and as a result holds little more than 1 percent of China’s population, of which over sixty percent of Xinjiang’s eighteen million citizens are Muslims4. Under the Chinese Communists, Muslims were divided among ten official nationalities, with the Uyghur5 comprising an ethnic majority in Xinjiang (Gladney 2005a). Despite the Uyghur majority, migration of Han Chinese started in the 1950s when the army sent troops to occupy Xinjiang, and has increased at a rapid pace as China has sought to develop the region. The Han population of Xinjiang has risen from nearly zero in 1950 to more than 40% of the current population (Forney 2002). Despite coexisting, the Han and the Uyghurs share very few demographic similarities, as the Han speak Putonghua (Mandarin) rather than Uyghur, and enjoy higher levels of economic development, employment and literacy rates.6 Certainly, the rapid growth of the Han has contributed to ethnic tensions in the region, especially amid Uyghur nationalist accusations that this growth has come at their expense.
From China’s perspective, the stability of Xinjiang is a high priority based on the strategic and economic value of the area7. Xinjiang is viewed as an important area to absorb high population growth from the Central and Coastal regions, and it is additionally home to several major nuclear testing facilities, due to rich reserves of uranium and copper. Also invaluable, is Xinjiang’s links to Central Asia,8 as it has the only major road to these countries. China ‘desperately want[s] to maintain hold of Xinjiang, fearing its loss would incite the [Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP)] collapse and possibly the secession of Taiwan and Tibet’ (Dwyer 2005: 89). Despite China’s ambition of unity, Xinjiang has a history of independence movements and since the mid-nineteenth century, there have been three rebellions that resulted in independent Uyghur states9. Following the turmoil and austerity of the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s was a period of liberalized cultural and political freedoms for the Uyghurs in Xinjiang10 (Dwyer 2005: 4). However, by the mid-1990s, China began to credit several isolated incidents of unrest in Xinjiang, as well as rising overt displays of Islam to the lax cultural and political freedoms of the 1980s. This initiated a wave of political and cultural crackdowns accompanied by ‘largely covert shifts in language and cultural policy aimed at further sinicizing the region’ (Dwyer 2005: 5).
Pre-9/11: Separatism/Splittism
China has been wary of ‘splittism’ since the 1950s, continually suggesting that it poses the greatest threat to national security (Dwyer 2005: 54). While the precise extent of the unrest in Xinjiang is obscured by unreliable and manipulated CCP data, internal official Chinese sources suggest that violent acts related to Xinjiang separatist movements numbered in the thousands in the 1990s and that ‘[i]n 1998 alone, more than seventy serious incidents occurred, causing more than 380 deaths’ (Lai 2003: 126). In response to this unrest the Chinese government implemented the ‘Strike Hard! Maximum Pressure!’ Campaign, aimed at eradicating the ‘three evils’ of separatism, terrorism, and religious extremism, although as Dwyer (2005) has noted, the campaign was primarily concerned with “splittists” rather than religious terrorists (54). As the name indicates, the campaign did indeed ‘Strike Hard,’ subjecting Uyghurs who expressed any government dissent to rapid, secretive, and summary trials, where the imposition of the death penalty was common. Vicziany (2003) has reported that Uyghurs executed for separatism was up to six times greater than their proportion of China’s population in the late 1990s (246). In addition to the covert policies which stifled cultural, religious and political freedoms for the Uyghurs, and the overt strong-handed policies of the ‘Strike Hard Campaign,’ the state also initiated the ‘Great Western Development Program.’ Recognizing the economic, social and political causes of unrest in Xinjiang, ‘Beijing hoped to lift the living standard of ethnic minorities, rid separatism of its economic catalysts, and minimize ethnic clashes and opportunities for the West to interfere’ (Lai 2003: 131), although the stated objectives of the program were limited to economic development11. In obvious contrast to China’s treatment of political unrest in Xinjiang after 9-11, both the threat and the state’s response to it were previously seen as a private domestic issue, rather than an international one. (Dwyer 2005: 54)
Appreciating that political unrest was not conducive to foreign investment in the region and fearful of Western intervention similar to NATO’s involvement in Kosovo, China principally downplayed and even denied the existence of ethnic conflict in Xinjiang. ‘Separatists were labelled as mentally ill and the whole problem was simply covered up’ (Luard 2003). Particularly when trying to raise foreign investment, Beijing portrayed any ethnic strife in the region as rare, implausible and criminal, rather than religious, or terrorist acts. Just four months before 9-11 CCP officials were declaring that the ‘[f]acts prove that Xinjiang is stable, security problems do not exist at all, and personal safety is completely guaranteed’ (Shicor 2006: 106).
Beijing’s approach to the conflict in Xinjiang of aggressive suppression and forced assimilation inevitably resulted in violent tension in the years prior to 9-11. Many Uyghurs, particularly young males from Xinjiang’s major cities, reacted to Beijing’s restrictive and oppressive policies with demonstrations of resistance. Although, as Gladney (2005a) has observed, this resistance showed little uniformity and while some groups supported violent separatist tactics, others promoted peaceful ecological causes, or greater religious freedoms, native language training, programs to prevent and treat AIDS, or even anti-alcohol campaigns. During this period the Western Development Project made marked industrial, and employment gains in the region, and as Sautman (1998) has noted, the ethnic minority affirmative action policies of the Chinese government, succeed to a degree in reducing tensions in the region (96). Despite limited resistance in the early 1990s, by all accounts, previous to 9-11 ‘terrorism’ in Xinjiang had been subsiding significantly (Shicor 2006: 106). Yet in the wake of 9-11, after years of denying the existence of ethnic tension in Xinjiang, the CCP abruptly changed tactics and ‘initiated an active diplomatic and propaganda campaign against “East Turkestan terrorist forces;”’ (Becquelin 2004: 39) a label that has since come to describe any Uyghur suspected of separatist or splittist activities.
Post-9/11: Terrorism
China’s ‘Strike Hard!’ campaign drew heavy criticism from human rights organisations as well as the International Community in the years preceding 9-11. Moreover, the Chinese leadership was acutely aware that increased unrest in the region could possibly provoke Western Intervention. China was particularly concerned with the implications of NATOs involvement in Kosovo in 1999 with the proclaimed goal of protecting an ethnic minority people from aggression and ethnic cleansing by the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Thus, beyond its own concern with rebellion in the region, China also needed to address international accusations that its suppression of the Uyghurs was anti-Muslim. China, increasingly dependent on predominately Muslim nations for energy and export markets, could not risk alienating these nations with its violent campaign against ‘splittists’ who shared a language, culture and religion, with many of these nations. As early as 1997, an ethnic riot in the Xinjiang city of Yining that left no less than nine Uyghur Muslims dead and several hundreds arrested, brought condemnations from Turkey and warnings from Saudi Arabia about the ‘suffering of [its] Muslims whose human rights are violated’ (Gladney 2003: 459). Consequently 9-11, provided China with the opportunity to include Xinjiang in the international war on terror, elevating the conflict from minority suppression to an international counter-terrorism campaign.
A fundamental ambition of this international campaign has been to broaden the definition and criteria of terrorism to meet the current needs of China’s leadership. Dwyer (2005) has demonstrated a ‘clearly demarcated shift’ in Chinese rhetoric describing the Uyghur nationalists since 9-11 from ‘separatists’ to ‘Islamic terrorists’ (x). This research also indicates a distinct paucity of Chinese-language mention of the phrase ‘Uyghur Terrorism,’ suggesting ‘that this discourse on terrorism is actually intended for an international audience, not a domestic one’ (57). By all accounts, China’s relabelling of ‘separatists’ as ‘terrorists’ has had it’s intended effect in the West as ‘[m]ost Western media, which previously had paid little attention to [Xinjiang,] have followed suit, equating these fringe separatist groups with terrorists’ (ibid: x). For the first time ever, Chinese authorities provided specific details about the violence in Xinjiang in a January 2002 White Paper. The paper, describing the activities of alleged ‘East Turkestan’ Uyghur terrorist organizations, highlighted accused bombing and assassination campaigns ‘consisting of more than 200 incidents resulting in 162 deaths and 440 people injured, the most recent incident taking place in 1998’ (Becquelin 2004: 39). Any study of the conflict in Xinjiang finds these exact same statistics cited repeatedly throughout both Chinese and Western academic and official literature. However, Shicor’s (2006) research indicates that the credibility of these numbers is highly speculative. The White Paper also ‘asserted that Uyghur organizations had received training and funding from Pakistan and Afghanistan, including direct financing from Osama Bin Laden’ (Becquelin 2004: 39). The White Paper went as far as to include legally registered organizations12 in its list of terrorist organizations, asking for cooperation from the international community in their prosecution. Subsequently, in the US’s efforts to enlist international support for its own war on terror, it ‘agreed to cosponsor the inclusion of a little-known Uyghur organization, the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM), on the UN list of terrorist organizations linked to Al-Qaeda and subject to asset freezing’ (Becquelin 2004: 40). The U.S. and UN came under criticism for siding with China without any outside validation of the government’s claims, in addition to a ‘lack of evidence that these groups even continued to exist given that the last recorded incident was in 1998, and the glaringly opportunistic timing of the disclosure’ (ibid); the effect was to justify China’s actions, and bolster its counter-terrorism efforts.
As the Chinese Foreign Ministry's Zhu Bangzao has explained: ‘We think terrorism should be opposed no matter where it manifests itself, where it comes from - and no matter who the perpetrators and their targets are’ (Lam 2001). Clearly, such an approach allows the Chinese leadership a carte blanche in their domestic campaign against terrorism. Following the UN’s support of China’s anti-terror efforts, the government proceeded to categorise all pro-independence groups, and in fact all dissent in Xinjiang, under the label of “East Turkestan,” equating non-violent activists with Islamic terrorist organizations. However, China faced a distinct problem in its war on terror: despite its increased attention to terrorism in Xinjiang, actual violent terrorist acts had nearly ceased after the late 1990s. To account for this lack of activity, ‘the Chinese authorities simply argue that “separatist thought” is the new approach followed by the same terrorist organizations that previously used violent tactics. This allows a dissenting writer or a non-violent group advocating minority rights to be tarred with the terrorist brush’ (Becquelin 2004: 43). Progressively, China has begun to prosecute what it refers to as ‘spiritual terrorism’ (Marquand 2003) which largely consists of public dissent, expressions of dissatisfaction, or even chanted verse that is critical of the government, as was the case of a young Uyghur poet arrested at a concert hall during a performance in 2002. The Chinese Government asserts that the terrorists have changed strategy since 9-11 and are now ‘ideologically attacking’ China, instead of their ‘former frequent practice of engaging in violent terrorist operations’ (Becquelin 2004: 43). Having sufficiently broadened the scope and reach of its anti-terrorist campaign, China has also renewed its efforts to forcefully assimilate the Uyghurs.
This new and harsher regime forces Islamic clerics to undergo ‘patriotic education’ sessions, and Uyghur officials are barred from religious activities, as are all children. Attributed to China’s efforts to modernise and develop the West, the use of the Uyghur language has now been outlawed in schools and universities. The perception among some analysts is that ‘Sept. 11 gives hard-liners the excuse for the crackdown they want’ (Forney 2002). Since 9-11 the state has ‘has rounded up thousands of terrorist suspects, large weapons caches, and printed documents allegedly outlining future public acts of violence’ (Gladney 2005b). Xinjiang now has the highest number of executions per week in China (ibid).
The future in Xinjiang: Activism?
As China is remiss to admit, terrorist violence in Xinjiang has been subsiding significantly since the late 1990s. Of the supposed hundreds of Uyghur terrorists, who China suggested had collaborated with the Taliban or Al-Qaeda, only twenty-two were ever detained by the U.S. at Guantanamo Bay. Most of them were later released after a U.S. military tribunal declared that ‘they had just been in the wrong place at the wrong time’ (Shicor 2006: 107)13. Ultimately, only seven Uyghurs were ever identified by the U.S. as terrorists (ibid). Despite China’s claims that it is fighting a war in Xinjiang on Islamic terrorism there is little credible evidence to substantiate this. Though Uyghurs are indeed Muslims, it is more likely that they see their cause as anti-colonial, not Islamic. As Hyer (2006) has noted, extreme Uyghur nationalists can often be heard to chant ‘sha han mie hui (kill the Chinese and destroy the Hui [a Chinese Muslim minority]’; 80). Incidentally the Hui Muslims, who are China’s largest Muslim minority, have never seriously faced charges of terrorism or separatism (Gladney 2005b), possibly due to easier assimilation based on their Chinese ethnicity. Murat Auezov, the former Kazakh ambassador to Beijing, has proposed that the ‘Uyghurs are struggling to preserve their cultural identity against an officially sanctioned mass influx of Han Chinese into their region’ (Hyer 2006: 80). This indicates that the ‘Xinjiang Problem’ has less to do with Islamic terrorism than it does with China’s integration and development policies in the region. Consequently, China's rhetorical effort to combine all Uyghurs under the title of ‘Eastern Turkestan’ terrorists is misleading. ‘To be sure, a small minority of these organizations do endorse terrorism but they are small, marginal and—to judge by the outcome—not terribly effective’ (Shicor 2006: 103). Not only are these efforts misleading, but China’s related efforts to suppress Uyghur language, culture, and religion have the distinct possibility of reigniting violence in the region. Thus it is counterproductive to attribute the recent lack of violent terrorist activity in Xinjiang to China’s anti-terrorism campaign. What is more likely is that the stimulation of the local economy over the past thirty years is contributing to stability. Since the launch of the Western Development Program residents in Xinjiang, ‘especially those in northern parts, have witnessed a noticeable lift in their material lives, and consequently economic incentives for supporting separatists have been reduced’ (Lai 2003: 134); although, it is increasingly becoming clear to the Uyghurs that this limited development is coming at a tremendous cost. Xinjiang has begun to serve as a ‘dumping ground for the rest of the country,’ (Chen 1994) as well as hosting more than 40, 000 convicts from all over China in Xinjiang’s many Labour-reform camps, the region is also used to conduct nuclear-weapons testing. ‘Uyghurs morbidly joke that they have grown “blacker, shorter and stupider” since the tests began some 30 years ago’ (ibid).
Most noticeable to the Uyghurs has been the enormous influx of Han Chinese, mostly sponsored by the Chinese government, in an effort to Sinicize the region. This immigration has strained Xinjiang’s land and ecological resources, exerted a strong pressure on the Uyghur language and culture, as well as created competition for employment. Since the late 1980s Chinese oil companies have flocked to Xinjiang and currently employ more than 20,000 workers, virtually none of whom are Uyghur (Chen 1994). Islam has not made terrorists out of the Uyghurs, instead ‘Chinese encroachment on the region’s natural and cultural resources has made activists and nationalists out of formerly apolitical minority people’ (Dwyer 2005: 4). The ‘Xinjiang problem’ is not religious terrorism, rather it is ascertaining how to genuinely incorporate the Uyghurs into the region’s economic and political processes, as well as assure their right to cultural and religious freedom. Chinese immigration into the region cannot remain unchecked if the cultural and religious autonomy of the Uyghurs is to be guaranteed. Addressing the valid social and political concerns of the Uyghurs is not accommodating terrorists, but it may very well pre-empt the transformation of activists into terrorists. Erkin Alptekin, the 65-year-old leader of the World Uyghur Congress contends that the sporadic violence of the 1990s was the result of formerly peaceful activists who ‘lost patience’ with China. While condemning their response, he suggests that those ‘Uyghurs involved likely concluded that violence was the only way to “draw the attention of the international community” because “the international community only reacts when conflict breaks out” (Lawrence 2004).
Conclusions
Although the benefits of including Xinjiang in the larger war on terror may have been obvious to China’s leadership directly after 9-11, gradually the costs of this endeavour are weighing heavily on the security of the region. China’s mistaken perception that cultural accommodation was the cause of unrest in the 1990s, rather than the solution to it, will only heighten the possibility of a violent resurgence. ‘The lesson that history teaches us about using massive military force against terrorism is that it tends to create more terrorists’ (Light 2002). China’s war on terror, though different in many ways from the war on terror being fought in the West, is similarly torn between the compromise of human rights or national security, and likewise is failing to recognize that ‘human rights is the best guarantor of national security’ (Ignatieff 2002). Ultimately, China’s preoccupation with terrorism has obstructed any efforts to improve the livelihoods of the disenfranchised and impoverished in Xinjiang (Petersen 2006: 63). Even the U.S. has remained unwilling to allow China to obscure the reality that ‘[t]he legitimate economic and social issues that confront the people in Western China are not necessarily terrorist issues and should be resolved politically rather than using counterterrorism methods’ (Taylor 2001). Erkin Alptekin highlights the limited opportunities for engagement that face young dissatisfied Uyghurs in Xinjiang’s ‘Han World.’ He pragmatically explains that ‘if they rise up against their Chinese rulers, they will be “slaughtered and the world would just watch…Is it worth it just for publicity that we send our people to death?”’ (Lawrence 2004). China’s opportunity to engage the Uyghurs may nearly have passed, after which the possibility exists that Xinjiang’s assortment of activists, separatists, and splittists may be provoked and consolidated as genuine terrorists.
Appendix A14
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1 Although a complete history of the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, and it’s ethnic majority, the Uighurs, is beyond the scope of this paper, Gladney 2003, Gladney 2005a and Lai 2003 offer insightful accounts. When possible footnotes are used to include further historical details.
2 A term that is outlawed under Chinese separatism laws.
3 See map, Appendix A.
4 ‘Recent demographic shifts suggest that there are more Muslims living in China today than there are in Malaysia, and more than in every Middle Eastern Muslim nation except Iran, Turkey, and Egypt (and about the same number as in Iraq)’ (Gladney 2005b)
5 The Uighur are often mistakenly referred to as ‘Chinese Muslims,’ when they are in fact ethnically Turkic. Ethnically Chinese or Han Muslims do, of course exist, and are predominantly referred to as Hui. Although they make up an ethnic minority in Xinjiang, the Hui are greater in numbers throughout China than the Uighur.
6 It is difficult to overstate the differences between the Han and the Uighurs and as Matthew Forney (2002) has noted they are so different that they “can't agree on what time the sun rises. Uighurs set their watches to Central Asian time; Chinese to Beijing's two hours earlier” (Forney 2002).
7 It is estimated that nearly 80% of the coal, gold, jade, and precious metal reserves in China are in Xinjiang, which accounts for one third of China’s production of petroleum and natural gas. (Wang 2003: 574).
8 Xinjiang borders eight countries: Mongolia, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India.
9 The Kashgar Emirate in 1864-1877; the Turkish Islamic Republic of East Turkestan (TIRET) from 1933-1937; and the Eastern Turkestan Republic from 1944-1949, supported by the Soviet Union. Each independent state was eventually reclaimed by Chinese forces (Gates & Oresman 2003:17).
10 Officially, Chinese minority policies allowed for exemptions from the one-child birth program, special scholarships to secondary and higher educational institutions, tax relief, and bi-lingual education schools that teach in the local minority languages up through university. ‘In addition, minority government officials are actively recruited in order to promote a sense of participation in governance. Nevertheless, the Chinese Communist Party, which has many fewer minorities and is generally the final authority in areas of governance, continues to exercise the greatest power in the region.’ (Gladney 2005a)
11 The Western Development Program had the stated economic aims of correcting regional inequality by generating domestic demand in the aftermath of the Asian Financial Crisis, expanding domestic markets and pushing forward structural reforms in the interior regions. See Lai 2002 for a general description of the program and Lai 2003 for broader explanations of the program as it relates to the Xinjiang separatist movement.
12Included in the list was the East Turkestan Information Centre (ETIC), based in Munich, and the World Uighur Youth Congress (WUYC), an umbrella organization that unites various exiled Uighur organizations from around the world. ‘Both groups advocate non-violent and democratic change and have been documenting human rights abuses in Xinjiang’ (Becquelin 2004: 41-42).
13 The release of the Uighurs held in Guantanamo resulted in diplomatic tensions, as the U.S. ignored Chinese demands for extradition of the prisoners, releasing them to Albania instead, amid fears that they would face persecution if returned to China.
14 Map courtesy of Human Rights Watch.
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