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Distant thunder: Separatism stirs on China's forgotten frontier

By Geoff Dyer and Jamil Anderlini

KASHGAR, China, 8 August 2008—Chinese police patrol the main square of Kashgar in China’s northwestern Xinjiang province on 8 August. Security forces killed five attackers who bombed a police station in China’s mainly Muslim far northwest on Sunday, state media said, in the latest violence there to coincide with the Olympics.File photo/AFP/Peter Parks/China

Over the past fortnight, more than 30 people have died in three separate attacks on police or government buildings in Xinjiang that represent the biggest outbreak of political violence in the region for more than a decade. Government officials have been careful not to draw strong conclusions and there is only limited information available. However, the succession of attacks suggests possible co-ordination between the different groups.

In the incident at Kuqa eight days ago, more than a dozen bombs exploded before dawn. Moreover, analysts have been surprised by reports that three young women were involved. “This could indicate that there is a new generation of militants in Xinjiang,” says Nicholas Bequelin, a Hong Kong based researcher with Human Rights Watch, the monitoring group.

“Coming as it does around the Olympics, it appears that some of the locals are sending a message that they do not support the central government’s policies in the region,” says Dru Gladney, a professor at Pomona College in California and an expert on Xinjiang.

Xinjiang — or “New Frontier” — is a vast province that covers a sixth of China and shares borders with eight countries, including Afghanistan and Pakistan. The Uighurs, the biggest ethnic minority in the region, are predominantly Muslim, speak a Turkic language and have close cultural ties with other groups in central Asia.

Like Tibet, Xinjiang has a disputed history. China claims to have exercised effective control over the region since the Han dynasty in the second century BC. Many other accounts describe centuries of waxing and waning Chinese influence and two brief attempts at independent statehood under the name East Turkestan in the 1930s and 1940s.

The depth of resentment in Xinjiang against Beijing comes as a surprise to many Chinese, especially given the region’s economic record. For most of the past three decades, Xinjiang’s economy has grown even faster than that of the country as a whole, expanding by 12 per cent in 2007. Its gross domestic product per capita is well below the prosperous east coast but higher than a number of other inland provinces.

There are plenty of Uighurs who feel they have benefited greatly from the boom. “If Uighurs do not get the good jobs, it is because they do not have the brains or education,” says one Uighur man who works in the construction industry in Korla. “If we were independent, we would be a poor small country that everyone would push around.” China’s population policies allow Uighurs to have more children than most Han Chinese, which encourages a view among many Chinese that they are a privileged minority.

Yet just as in Tibet, rapid-fire economic modernisation has not won the hearts or minds of many in the local population. Mass migration is one reason. In a 1950s census, shortly after the People’s Republic of China reasserted control over Xinjiang, the proportion of the population from China’s dominant Han group was 6 per cent. In the latest estimates, Han Chinese accounted for more than 40 per cent, similar to the number of Uighurs. Hundreds of thousands of migrants have moved to the region to work in the oil industry or in the large state-owned farms that have made Xinjiang China’s main producer of cotton and tomatoes.

Some of these projects have sparked conflicts over land and water rights. Around Kuqa, a dusty town of 400,000 on the edge of a desert, the cotton farms put heavy strains on water resources. A local environmental official says new policies have been introduced to limit the size of the farms and their water consumption.

But a few hours south of Kuqa, in rural Tarim County, long rows of brick houses are being built for Uighurs who officials say are being moved off their land to protect the region’s fragile ecology. Human rights groups attribute the resettlements to the diversion of water to cotton farms. “My new house is nicer than the [traditional mud house] I lived in but I have no way to make a living now,” says one recently resettled resident.

While there are hiring quotas, especially in state-owned companies, many Uighurs feel they are excluded from the best employment. This is particularly true for government jobs; according to the US Congressional-Executive Commission on China, in a 2006 recruiting campaign 800 of the 840 civil servant job openings in 2006 were reserved for Hans. “For Uighurs to get ahead you have to act Chinese and forget your ethnic distinctiveness,” says Mr Bequelin at Human Rights Watch. “People would like to have both.”

Moreover, just as in Tibet, economic modernisation has been accompanied by a hardline political strategy aimed at controlling the religious and cultural life of the province, and this has alienated many Uighurs. Indeed, Zhang Qingli, the Communist party secretary since 2006 in Tibet — who famously called the Dalai Lama a “wolf in a monk’s robe” — was previously deputy head of the party in Xinjiang.

Human rights groups and academics say that, particularly in the aftermath of the attacks in the US of September 11 2001, the Chinese authorities stepped up their interference in religious life. “Political re-education” campaigns directed at imams include regular lectures from party officials and heavy pressure to inform on suspicious activities. The imam at a small mosque on the outskirts of Korla said he would only give an interview if local Communist party officials were present. Anyone under 18 is banned from entering mosques.

Even in the tiny villages in Tarim County, Uighur spies working for the Chinese security apparatus watch for any sign of dissent or criticism of state policies and quickly report to the local police station. Foreign reporters visiting the region are questioned by these spies and followed by security officers. “There is a sort of aggregator effect from all these years of crackdown on the Uighur population,” says Yitzhak Shichor, professor of Asian studies at the University of Haifa in Israel. “Sooner or later it was bound to erupt.”

Although the Tibetan issue is much more high-profile, given the global fame of the Dalai Lama, in some ways Xinjiang is an even more sensitive issue for the Chinese authorities. Xinjiang is now the country’s leading producer of oil and gas and is the conduit for energy pipelines from central Asia. Moreover, a protracted period of unrest could quickly become a regional incident given the strong ties between Uighurs and the populations of neighbouring central Asian countries. The risk of neighbours meddling in Xinjiang was one of the reasons the Chinese pushed for the creation of the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation, a grouping that brings together China, Russia and several central Asian countries and whose charter calls for joint action against separatist groups.

After 9/11, the US and several other countries listed the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (Etim) — the group many Chinese officials name as the main threat in the region — as a terrorist group. However, diplomatic help on other fronts has been less forthcoming. “It makes it hard for the EU to give support to China when most of their diplomatic activities are lobbying us to prevent the activities of groups that have no terrorist links but which China sees as a threat to the Communist party,” says John Fox, a fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations.

So what sort of threat does China face? In the wake of the recent wave of violence, there is very little agreement between experts either within China or abroad about whether the country really faces a new militant insurgency and if there is any foreign involvement .

Although Chinese officials made a number of high-profile warnings about terrorism before the Olympics — claiming in July to have arrested 82 on suspicion of planning to sabotage the games — the recent attacks have received little publicity in local media and no groups have claimed responsibility. In one of the few specific comments, Qin Gang, a foreign ministry spokesman, said last week that “there is some evidence showing that behind these attacks there might be East Turkestan forces.” Other official statements have provided little further detail. Wang Lequan, Communist party secretary for Xinjiang, warned last week that China faced a “life or death struggle” against the “three evil forces” of terrorism, separatism and religious radicalism.

One of the most interesting questions is whether the attackers had outside help. Since 9/11, Beijing has portrayed any conflict in Xinjiang as part of the global war against jihad. More recently, some Chinese officials have said China is being infiltrated by Hizb ut-Tahrir, a group that seeks to create a pan-national Muslim state.

A group calling itself the Turkestan Islamic party has released two videos claiming responsibility for other unexplained explosions in China and — even though there is much scepticism about the existence of this group, let alone its claims — the presence of such videos with heavily jihadist overtones worries some analysts.

Rohan Gunaratna, a Singapore-based terrorism expert, believes that Etim still has a presence in northern Pakistan and links to al-Qaeda, which could leave China vulnerable to militants slipping across the border — although he adds that Chinese policies towards the Uighurs are pushing some of them towards Islamic radicalism.

Li Wei, director of the counter-terrorism research centre at the China Institute of Contemporary International Relations, says there is no evidence so far that the recent attacks had foreign links. “The attacks are more likely to be by separatist groups,” he says. “Religion might be a cover but separatism is their main purpose.”

Prof Gladneya, of Pomona College in California, says evidence of sympathy for terrorist groups in Pakistan or elsewhere remains thin. “There has definitely been a rise in Islamic conservatism in Xinjiang,” he says. “But I have not seen signs of real support for global jihad or for Islamic radicalism.”

Even the level of co-ordination between the attacks is unclear. Some analysts say the amateur nature of the weapons used — knives and home-made explosives — suggest unsophisticated local groups with little training. While some Uighurs may support independence, they say, many only want more autonomy.

“These do not appear to be acts of some terrorist organisation which is being planned from the other side of the border,” says Prof Shichor at Haifa University. “We do not have a lot of information but it looks more like personal grievances of people who are using the Olympics to do something.” The Olympics have brought attention but little clarity to the fractures running through Xinjiang.

Copyright © 2008 The Financial Times Limited

Published in Financial Times