Xinjiang 3 months after the riots

Interesting piece in the BBC today:

A tale of two cities under siege

Urumqi is a city under siege - there are patrols of soldiers and armed police in full riot gear everywhere.

In a 10-minute walk along the city streets you are likely to encounter four or five of them, each composed of a dozen or so men.

The tension is evident - few people are prepared to speak about what happened here, and none openly.

One Uighur woman spoke to us in secret about the events of 5 July.

She witnessed the murder of two ethnic Chinese by a gang of Uighurs.

"People were going crazy," she said. Altogether, 198 Chinese died that day.

Then, two days later, Chinese gangs carried out revenge killings of Uighurs.

No official figures have been issued, but the woman thought about 10 Uighurs had been killed.

House arrest
The authorities are very nervous about the presence of foreign journalists.


Access to ordinary people was limited by authorities. Everywhere we went in Urumqi my television team and I were followed, sometimes by three unmarked police cars at a time.

And when we flew on to Kashgar, where many of the more militant Uighurs involved in the riots came from, the police detained us at the airport.

We were allowed to stay in Kashgar until the next morning, but everywhere we went a contingent of police followed us and prevented our filming or interviewing anyone.

It was clear they thought we had come to meet Islamic fundamentalists, and were determined to stop us.

That night, we were kept under house arrest at a hotel in the centre of Kashgar.

Ethnic violence is something that worries the Chinese government deeply. It threatens the cohesion of the entire country.

Most disturbing of all for the Chinese authorities, though, is the growing influence of Islamic extremism

The immediate cause of July's rioting seemed small enough - rumours spread that two Uighur workers had been killed by the police in south-east China, thousands of miles away.

Yet the hostility towards ethnic Chinese which many Uighurs in Xinjiang feel is so intense that trouble broke out at once.

The origins for this hostility are complex. The Chinese government has often treated Uighurs generously, offering promising students places at good universities and making it easy for them to work elsewhere in China.

Yet many remain wretchedly poor. Now the poverty-stricken areas of cities like Urumqi and Kashgar are being knocked down and new housing is being built, but this often increases local resentment.

People see it as a direct attack on their traditions and culture.

Worried
Over the years, ethnic Chinese immigration into Xinjiang has sometimes been encouraged by Beijing and sometimes not, but the net result is that in Urumqi, their own capital city, Uighurs are now in a minority.

There are increasing signs of separatist feeling among them. The discovery of oil has convinced many Uighurs that if they were independent, they could be a viable state.

Most disturbing of all for the Chinese authorities, though, is the growing influence of Islamic extremism.

Uighurs say it scarcely existed before the mid-1990s, and that China was slow in waking up to the challenge.

Now there are plenty of mosques, particularly in Kashgar, where fundamentalist Uighur imams are active.

The Chinese Communist Party, always nervous when any rival organisation or movement starts to attract support, has responded with the creation of new task forces.

Known as "social stability teams", they act partly as social security workers, addressing grievances, and partly as the eyes and ears of the authorities. Many Uighurs have been recruited to the teams.

We came across some of them in the slum area of Gulistan, a Uighur stronghold in Urumqi, as they were going from door to door.

They work closely with the undercover police, and in Gulistan they co-operated with the eight or more in plain clothes who were following us around.

Urumqi itself is quiet now. The big deployment of soldiers and police has ensured that.

But in Kashgar the authorities seem far less confident. Three months after the rioting, it is all too clear that the Chinese authorities have not yet got the situation under full control.

And they are plainly worried.

By BBC world affairs editor John Simpson

Should we be searching for Singapore's soul? (Part 1)

I had just finished reading a book by Philip Pan, Out of Mao's Shadow: The struggle for the Soul of a New China.

The book started with a powerful presentation of the Tiananmen Massacre and a very stark contrast: before the communist revolution, the Nationalist party used water jets to quell student protests. But when the communist party came to power, they used guns and tanks in response to the students' demand for democratic reform and an end to corruption.

But what hit me harder, was the conclusion of the book, which I felt mirrored some of the issues we face here in Singapore. This is what he said in the concluding chapter:

The internet has emerged as an important venue for people with shared interests...to gather, talk and organise...The hard truth, however, is that many people aren't looking...[the communist party's] "patriotic education" classes in the schools have dulled the public's curiosity...the government has grown expert at manipulating public opinion, especially rallying nationalist sentiment to its side...The party's most important advantage, of course, is the wave of prosperity that it has been riding for more than a quarter century...the wealthiest and most influential tycoons...are the most likely to owe their wealth to the one-party system and the least likely to challenge it.

Indeed, this paragraph can be used to describe exactly Singapore. Singaporeans are very much plugged in to the world wide web, but yet to find people interested in discussing social issues in Singapore - the wrong attitudes we are having towards fertility and aging population problem, the importance of preserving our dialect as a fast disappearing link to our history and ancestry - is not so easy.

Indeed, from the western point of view business development is supposed to be good for democratic development. But the nature of business development in Asia is so different and they fail to understand that in a country where the private sector is nurtured by the state, the business community will be the last people to champion democratic reform.

A friend recently commented to me: "I'm less concerned with saving the world than saving my bank account". Indeed, the government has done a good job of setting the priorities for Singaporeans.

Is the Western media biased against China because it is a rising global power?

The Olympic's opening ceremony and the build up to the event has been shrouded in both praise and protests from the Western world (in particular).

While this major event has been China's chance to showcase its new prowess to the world, it has also opened China to significant criticism on issues ranging from human rights abuse to pollution.

But the West has been criticising China for decades. Why is this time so significant? And is this another case of western imperialism - an attempt by the West to impose its standards of freedom and democracy on a country that is not ready for such an order, which the Europeans and Anglo-Saxons themselves took centuries to establish?

Everyday I read the news from the region, the US and UK, there is an indelible "us-them" complex, with finger pointing on one side and blame shifting on the other. Yet, I have read other academic journals that have very convincingly argued that the rise of China is not necessarily a threat to the US and its allies, apart from their ego.

And the more they try to defend their egos, that have been failing along with their economies, the more they are actually fanning nationalistic pride in China, that has been rising and spreading like a bush fire, both to the detriment of China and the West.

Still, I think we, as Asians, are over reacting a little to all this criticism, which is good for China. If it were not the Olympics, I dare say we would be much more receptive to Western censure on China.

That said, I do agree with the stance that this is another case of the West trying to impose a one-size-fits-all definition of human rights and civic liberties on a country with a completely different historical path and socio-cultural context, not to mention political structure and ideology.

If history has taught us anything, a sudden change imposed from the top can be catastrophic, often resulting in the opposite of the desired outcome. Russia's Glasnost policy (1985) which opened up freedom of press fully and suddenly, contributed to Gobarchev's fall, and Russia today is none the freer.

China must and will open up freedom of press and civil liberties, but at its own pace, when its people are ready and matured enough to handle these new freedoms. Trying to impose the kind of freedoms and human rights standards that the West enjoys on a people who have not had any experience with such freedoms can only result in abuse, and ultimately a draconian backlash from the communist party and further clampdown on what little freedoms the Chinese people enjoy today.

*The Olympic cartoon is from: http://politicalhumor.about.com/od/politicalcartoons/ig/Olympics-Cartoons/