Unnecessary evil: China's Muslims aren't terrorists. So why did the Bush administration give Beijing the green light to oppress them?

Washington Monthly, Dec, 2002 by Joshua Kurlantzick

In almost every respect, the real Xinjiang is a very different place from that which Beijing portrays to the world--and which all too many in Washington have accepted. Though there are Islamist groups in Xinjiang, the real issue is regional autonomy, the struggle of a religiously and ethnically distinct people to resist domination by Beijing and annihilation by the country's dominant ethnic group, the Han Chinese.

Twice during this century, the Uighurs of Xinjiang, a province which encompasses nearly one-sixth the area of China, actually did declare independence. After the last Chinese dynasty collapsed, the Uighurs established independent republics of East Turkestan (a common Uighur name 'for Xinjiang) in 1933 and, again, in 1944. But the 1944 republic was abolished when Mao's Communists took power in 1949, and Xinjiang was incorporated into China. From the early days of Communist rule, Beijing attempted to establish stronger Chinese control over Xinjiang, primarily through resettlement policies. The policies worked: While only 300,000 Han lived in Xinjiang in 1949, more than 8 million Chinese now live in the province, out of a total of roughly 19 million residents. But in the late 1970s and 1980s, as Deng Xiaoping opened Chinas economy, Beijing relaxed its grip, allowing significant economic and sociopolitical liberalization in Xinjiang.

After the 1989 Tiananmen riots and several incidents of violent Uighur separatism in the early 1990s, Beijing backed away from sociopolitical liberalization in Xinjiang. Some of the separatist incidents were indeed frightening--including a rash of bus bombings in Urumqi and assassinations of local government officials. But Beijing's reaction went too far. The government reasserted control over all religious institutions and accused thousands of Uighur writers of "advocating separatism," a broad term which often means little more than producing works in the Uighur language. Hundreds of artists were jailed and reportedly tortured. The security services also incarcerated prominent Uighurs who might have served as effective advocates for Xinjiang autonomy, men and women such as Rabeya Kadeer, a leading businesswoman whose husband lives in America.

Uighur Smear Campaign

An already bad situation deteriorated rapidly after September 11. Shortly after the al Qaeda attacks on America, China began a massive propaganda campaign designed to convince its citizens, the international media, and foreign countries that the small number of Uighur separatists who do exist had trained in Afghanistan and developed close ties to al Qaeda. Less than a month after the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were attacked, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Sun Yuxi announced that "efforts to fight East Turkestan [i.e. Uighur] terrorist forces should become part of the international efforts [against terrorism.]" Senior Chinese ministers accused Uighur groups of "belonging to the bin Laden clique" and charged that over 1,000 Uighurs had migrated together to Afghanistan to train in al Qaeda camps. Chinese government flacks took journalists on closely-monitored tours of the region. The PR specialists alternatively touted Xinjiang as an ideal tourist destination--still a long shot, given that tour guiding in the province consists largely of screaming at clients and pushing them from place to place--and telling hair-raising stories of terrorists waiting around each corner. Most farfetched, Beijing prepared a detailed report which alleged that bin Laden had pledged large sums of money to fomenting Islamic rebellion in Xinjiang, an assertion American terrorism experts discount completely.