The issue in China

ARTICLE: Clashes in China Shed Light on Ethnic Divide, By EDWARD WONG, New York Times, July 7, 2009

Good piece by Wong on Uigher unhappiness over Chinese economic and cultural policies.

Reminds me of crowding out phenomenon with Hispanics and Native Americans in U.S. West in late 19th C. Preferences favor the inflowing population from the more advanced East.

That local resentment never quite disappears ...

Comments

[David Dunn]

I made my first trip to Xinjiang (or East Turkestan if you support independence) in March of 2009. I was only able to visit Urumqi as I attendeed a meeting for power generation engineers. Some things struck me: 1. Xinjiang is so enormous that people fly much more than in the rest of China. 2. The Uighurs and the Han live in separate worlds. The vast majority of Uighurs speak Chinese quite poorly. That was a shock. Virtually none of the Han speak Uighur, so you have real communication issues. 3. Compared to East China, much more of Xinjiang is dominated by state-run enterprises. That works against the Uighurs. You see Chinese companies integrating Xinjiang into their national organizations, but Uighurs are left out. For the Uighurs more companies doing business westward toward Central Asia, rather than eastward back to the rest of China would help them. 4. From a previous life in the oil industry I know that Xinjiang's geology is VERY complicated, which means that the highest oil field expertise and technology would yield more marginal benefit in Xinjiang than many other areas. The problem though is that Chinese state-run industries are pretty bad at running the kind of operation you would need to harness these resources. China would be better served in allowing foreign oil companies to have concessions and develop Xinjiang oil and gas reserves, however this probably won't happen any time soon. 5. Urumqi air pollution is as bad as I've seen in China. Evidently the city is surrounded on three sides by mountains. Visibility was frequently only a few 100 meters. Western expertise and technologies would also be very helpful in this regard, but again I don't see much happening soon. The solution is more interconnectivity to the OECD countries, but China is not doing a very good job carrying this out with respect to their state-run industries.

[Tom Barnett]

David,

Incredibly helpful.

Writing on the subject now for WPR column on Monday. Not an easy topic.

[David Dunn]

I don't know how China gets out of their problems in Xinjiang. (Xinjiang, by the way means 'new border or boundary'). You see real pushback to regional development, which has come to mean letting the Han come in and dominate the provincial resource extraction industry and related infrastructure. Assimilation is going to be difficult because unlike some other people's China has assimilated, the Uighurs are going to be really tough. They are so fundamentally different: linguistically, religiously and culturally. But without some level of assimilation the Uighurs are going to have a tough time filling a significant proportion of the skills-intensive jobs in the extractive industries. A repressive strategy also may be difficult to carry out. The Uighurs are part of the great number of Turkic peoples of Central Asia. I saw that Turkey had "expressed concern" over the July 5 incident, which is now know in China as "75" just as the Tiananmen massacre of June 4, 1989 is known as "64". So while the Tibetans have lots of friends in the West, the friend of the Uighurs in the East should not be dismissed. What I think China should do is 1. Promote greater Xinjiang autonomy and 2. Allow multi-nationals greater access to resource development, but I think the CCP arguments against that would be that those policies would set a bad precedent (i.e. CCP firm control is better) and that inviting multi-nationals in would be a. an admission of China needing help b. set another bad precedent of reducing "China's" control of their own natural resources. For me, while Tibet might be resolved with pure repression, Xinjiang will be more difficult since Xinjiang is an important area for natural resource extraction.