Chinese Riots Rooted in Conflation of Religion, Race and Class

Rather than Chinese government crackdown deaths, those in Urumqi today were mostly by rioters against their targets, with their respective and deep-seated identities as the ultimate causes.  The roots of the Chinese riots defy the easy categorizations upon which most media outlets depend in crafting 'breaking news' stories and weaving them into a series meant to attract your mouse clicks. Here is the gist and background of the situation as it is still unfolding.

 

Muslim Chinese (present in the northwest Xinjiang region since the times of Genghis Khan, c. 1200) have resented the central governments suppression of their religious practices, which in their recent communist manifestations were supposed to be alleviated by economic prosperity. Instead, the prosperity went mostly to ethnic Han Chinese of the region, creating a two-tiered society with Muslims at bottom and Han on top. A secessionist movement grew and violence erupted in the early 1990s, but all seemed to be quiet on the northwestern front until today.

 

While the roots of the conflict are thus clear, what remains unclear is the trigger for today's street violence in which about two-hundred were killed and many times more wounded from knives, home-made bombs and other weapons of minor destruction.  Confusing the roots of the conflict in the conflation of religion, race and class with its immediate causes (yet unknown), journalists have scrambled, speculated and spectacularized instead of getting their facts straight and relevant quotes, and leaving the commentary to the commentators. It was even suggested that the riots were meant to further tarnish China's reputation abroad. 

 

What Chiang Kai Chek did with nationalism first (1920s), and Mao Zedong did with communism second (1940s), was to use ideologically-defined traits to minimize or eliminate traits stemming from other traditions. These, of course, included religion, race and class, sowing the seeds of unrest. Expatriate Uyghur Groups like the World Uyghur Congress (WUC) in Munich and the US-based Uighur American Association played up the government response to the riots but said little about their compatriots use of violence, the instigation of which remains unclear to outsiders but not the root causes. This is when the value of the non-violence espoused by expatriate leader the Dalai Lama from nearby Tibet becomes obvious.

 

Most major news providers were desperate for a scoop, resulting in piecemeal coverage even compared to the Iranian protests. Reuters was most concerned with how the riots would affect Chinese markets, consumers and producers; AP and Huffington Post dug for civil liberties issues, and have yet to find one; CNN and Fox each sought pre-internet political intrigue in their own way, sticking close to government-fed lines (US and China) and pundit performances; the BBC characteristically did a little of all the above. They were all looking for the wrong thing in the right place. No Al-Qaeda here. What's news is what's not news: Twitter is shut down.

 

It may be that this uprising marks the rise of a time when not governments acting indirectly, but concerned and somehow connected people acting directly from one country can and do influence the events in and directions taken by another country without leaving their metaphoric armchairs.  That is, the expatriates and affiliates no longer need the instrument of government to carry out their plans abroad, although they may need to ensure that their plans are not prevented from being carried out from where they are or where they air aiming. 

 

So while Obama and Medvedev are busy making nice and getting rid of not enough nuclear weapons in the process, the Summer of 2009 is shaping up to be one of international protests perhaps comparable in scale to those of 1848, the year social uprisings were brutally crushed by newly empowered national governments around the globe.  Let's hope the current events of today work out better for everyone than those then, creating a future in which such upheavals have found more peaceful vehicles.

Comments

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