:: Balbir Punj

Is China heading for another Tiananmen?

Balbir K. Punj

July.17 : The haste with which China’s President Hu Jintao left the Group of Eight (G-8) summit even before the Group of Five (G-5) or United States President Barack Obama could reach the meeting venue, gives a measure of the serious developments he is facing at home. The riots and other disturbances in China’s far western Xinjiang region are more extensive and serious than the world has been led to believe due to censorship that the Communists exercise on all news and out-going messages.

The world outside China hardly knows anything about Xinjiang. Earlier known as East Turkistan, Xinjiang borders Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India to the west. Once a flourishing Buddhist centre, the whole of Central Asia was swept by Islam, with only Tibet being able to retain its Buddhist traditions.

For China, Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, is a vital economic asset. The Taklamakan desert hides 94 billion barrels of oil and gas, three times that in the US. Reports of the great economic progress of China hide the fact that this prosperity is largely in the eastern coastal region and the further west you go the greater the economic distress.

The Indian Communists ceaselessly worked with the British and the Muslim League to vivisect India and create a theocratic Islamic Pakistan. The Chinese Communist leadership, in contrast, ruthlessly suppressed all ethnic minorities to create a unified China with an exclusive Han influence. No wonder, the Uighurs’ language, culture and even religion is perceived as being under threat.

Xinjiang’s bordering republics are all Muslim-dominated and though the regimes in these Central Asian countries have managed to keep Islamic fundamentalism at bay, the stirrings have spread throughout Central Asia. The outrage among the Uighurs at being systematically reduced to a minority and the increasing tapping of their oil and gas for the benefit of the Han-Chinese is also being exploited by Islamic fundamentalists.

There were reports that President Hu has been in touch with Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari on the issue of increasing infiltration in the area by Islamic zealots. Nothing could be more ironical. For four decades, China has backed Pakistan against India. It supplied Islamabad with sensitive technologies that ultimately led to the development of the Islamic bomb and missile facilities. And now Mr Hu is complaining to Mr Zardari about the Islamic militants! That too when Mr Zardari himself confessed the other day that it was a big mistake for Pakistan to nurture terrorists.

When India was facing terrorism of the Pakistani variety, all global powers, including China, were looking the other way when told about Pakistan’s policy of using terrorism as a part of its strategic tool to destroy India after having failed repeatedly to confront it with military might.

As of now very few details are filtering through Urumqi on the state of revolt of the ethnic Uighurs against "Sinoisation" of their land. The sudden decision of Mr Hu to return from the G-8 Summit may be a prelude to his taking over personally the quelling of the ethnic anger and reassertion of Han authority over its minorities. China’s minorities, excluding Tibet, are stated to be eight per cent of its 1.3 billion population.

What is noteworthy is that Mr Hu has the notoriety of having implemented "Sinoisation" of Tibet previously. That may be yet another reason that he wants to handle the challenge to the Communist authority from the Uighurs all by himself. His Prime Minister Wen Jiabao is already in charge of the Uighur revolt. The entire international community is keenly watching whether China would once again enact another Tiananmen. Incidentally, this year is the 20th anniversary of the Beijing students’ revolt that shook the Chinese Communist leadership. The revolt was crushed using Army tanks and complete censorship. Much the same is being enacted in Urumqi.

While the Indian Communists have a sordid record of pandering to the whims of minorities at the cost of national interest, the history of Communist rule in Soviet Union, China or elsewhere has been to ride roughshod over minority cultures, opinions or anything that calls it anti-national or a "bourgeois conspiracy".

Even within the Communist parties, conformity is enforced with an iron hand. History has recorded in detail the trials staged by Stalin against his own comrades, the forcible move of entire ethnic minority populations in the erstwhile Soviet Union in the 20s and 30s and the Maoist’s repetition of similar horrors in China of the 60s and early 70s leading to the so-called "cultural revolution".

Many analysts see the Uighur revolt as an expression of anger at China’s development policy that is based on the superiority of Han nationalism, with the Han culture lording over people who are not ethnic puritans and are perceived as "barbarian" .

The Xinjiang invasion by the Hans closely follows the policy adopted by Beijing in Tibet. The Tibetan region is now flooded by Han migrants enticed to settle in the Himalayan plateau region with many goodies thrown in. Its other pincer is the deliberate suppression of Tibetan language, culture, religion and whatever that makes for Tibetan pride in their millennia-old civilisation.

Thus, there is enough evidence to believe that Mr Hu’s sudden return from the Italian encounter with other global leaders was a signal to the world that there would be no let-up in Beijing’s policy on Xinjiang or Tibet and that the Communists would be uncompromising in hammering home their power and authority, unmindful of global outrage. Shades, perhaps, of what our own Communists did in Nandigram and their Kerala comrades did in Kannur?

Balbir K. Punj can be contacted at punjbk@gmail.com