War shrines, Uyghur separatists, poison scarves and douchebags

 
The excellent quasi-new China blog Rectified.name has an interesting post (also here on Batur’s Autonomous Region) on Uyghur multi-millionaire / separatist leader Räbiya Qadyr having, in a stunning display of far-right douchebaggery, recently visited Yasukuni War Shrine in Tokyo and donated 100,000 yen to an organisation supporting Japan’s claims in the Senkaku / Diaoyu Islands kerfuffle.  The current Dalai Lama’s claim that she is a ‘paradigm of non-violence’, is, I suppose, a propos - paying respect to actual war criminals and fanning the flames of territorial disputes seems about the proper fare for the ‘non-violent’ activism of the sort the Dalai Lama tends to encourage.

Speak of the devil, the blog post goes on to cite an article in Wired Magazine about a rumoured plot by the Chinese government to assassinate the Dalai Lama by lacing a scarf or a follower’s hair with contact poison.  Of course, given how numerous Dalai Lamas tended to die suspiciously early deaths, quite possibly due to political infighting (pious mystifications and romanticisations of their own history aside), his paranoia does have at least some precedent.  Yet there are numerous problems with any such attempt:  like the assassin herself dying, let alone the question of why the Chinese government would want to assassinate an old man now when they would have had ample opportunity and motive to do so earlier; say, in 1959, when he was actually relevant.

Let us be clear (and I have tried to stake out this middle ground before).  The economic conditions in Xinjiang and Tibet are wretched, and must be changed.  The Chinese government deserves a great deal of credit for having made several attempts to overcome those conditions, but they could absolutely do more.  They could protect the local industries and local businesses in these regions rather than encouraging further the sort of economic integration which benefits rich Han Chinese on the coasts.  They could do more to dissuade ethnic and regional stereotyping beyond the standard neoliberal ‘we are a multi-ethnic society and those problems don’t exist here’ angle, which is as annoying in China as it is in the United States and elsewhere.  They could enable and encourage regional governments to experiment with different models of governance, particularly ones which do not toe the neoliberal line (*ahemChongqingahem*).  But none of these shortcomings can excuse or necessitate reductionist ethno-nationalism, secessionism or the kind of chauvinist posturing and douchiness (expressive word, that; thank you, Dave Lyons) displayed by, in this instance, Räbiya Qadyr.