Bad news from East Turkestan

Photo courtesy Xinhua News Agency

Xinhua News Agency reports that over 150 people have been killed in East Turkestan's capital, Urumchi, after a massive ethnic riot between Uyghurs and Han Chinese, precipitated ostensibly by a smaller brawl in a factory in Guangdong 广东 Province in southern China. The Chinese government has blocked most internet access and Twitter, according to the International Herald Tribune's report. Predictably, both the Chinese government and Uyghur human-rights advocacy groups are now blaming each other for the violence, which was put down with police force.

This is depressing news indeed. The humanitarian plight of the Uyghurs of East Turkestan (or Xinjiang 新疆) might not be of as much concern as the plight of the reformers in Iran at present in the eyes of our own news media, but their struggle for recognition is a long-standing one. The Chinese government has made massive leaps and bounds of progress over the past couple of decades in terms of economic development in these areas, but the legacy of imperial domination and exploitation (whether it acknowledges that legacy in such language or not) still rests upon it, and it shows. The primary beneficiaries of this economic development have, by far and away, tended to be Han Chinese - while the Uyghurs who were supposed to have benefitted from it have been largely pushed to the side in cities like Urumchi. According to the Uyghur-American Association, many Uyghurs have not been seeing the benefits of the Great Western Development Strategy (西部大开发战略) even in the form of basic employment. As a result, crime is rampant, and over 90% of East Turkestan's Muslims live below the poverty threshold (while Han settlers continue to claim the good-paying jobs and control the region's wealth). Thus, it stands to reason that ethnic relations might get a little strained, and it paves the way for more dangerous forms of extremism and nationalism.

Violence like this is always regrettable. I pray for the people of East Turkestan, I pray for a swift and just end to the violence and I pray that the Chinese government comes to realise that the systemic injustice they have been perpetrating on the Uyghurs (and on other economically-marginalised minority groups) is not sustainable.