China and Xinjiang

Christian Tyler's book, "Wild West China: the Taming of Xinjiang", is a fascinating history of that vast territory to the north of Tibet. Tyler outlines the present situation there:

Judicial shortcuts are common, even traditional, in China. Current practice includes: arresting suspects' families, jailing suspects without trial, dispensing with defence lawyers, reaching verdicts in secret 'adjudication committees', handing down long sentences for political dissent, persecuting religious believers and hunting down pregnant women.

In Xinjiang, however, the repression goes deeper. The province has earned a reputation for vengeful treatment of dissidents which recalls Stalinist Russia at its worst. Treason can take the most trivial forms: insulting the government; using the term 'Eastern Turkestan'; planting the Eastern Turkestan flag; taking part in demonstations; copying or distributing banned religious newspapers; organising religious classes; possessing banned tapes of poems or songs; writing plays or poems with a political message; passing secret information to foreigners (such as journalists); publishing a history of the Uighurs in Chinese abroad; fleeing abroad; reading a banned foreign magazine; reading a newspaper; and swearing at a Han Chinese.

In order to ferret out such offences, surveillance is necessary. Informers are essential. For this the police rely on local 'security committees' which operate in every parish (xiang) and city block. They are the so-called 'mass-line' of police work. Not even Stalin thought of this. The Public Security Bureau, which is organised on military lines into brigades, regiments and battalions, has agents disguised as employees attached to every factory, school, business and government agency.

The readiness of the security forces to shoot unarmed civilians has been illustrated [earler in the book]. What has not been described is the torture routinely inflicted on suspects. Torture is said to be widespread in China, in spite of the country's adherence to the UN Convention against it, but it has taken a particularly ugly form in Xinjiang and Tibet. In addition to the usual beatings and kickings, the delivery of shocks by electric batons, the shackling and suspending of victims in painful ways, and the sticking of needles under nails or the extraction of nails with pliers, reports suggest that refinements peculiar to Xinjiang have been developed. They include injecting substances to induce incoherence or insanity; stuffing pepper or chilli powder into the mouth, nose and genital organs; and inserting horse hair or barbed wire into the urethra. One man tortured in Urumchi said he was made to wear a kind of metal helmet to prevent him trying to dull the pain by battering his head against the walls of the torture chamber. A former court official from Xinjiang told Amnesty that 90% of defendants complained of being tortured to extract confessions. [.....]

Xinjiang is the only province in China known to continue executing political prisoners. Between 1997 and 1999 Amnesty recorded 210 death sentences and 190 executions in the province, mainly of Uighurs convicted of political and religious 'crimes'. In succeeding years the execution of Uighurs continued at the same rate; one historian has calculated that this makes them, per capita, ten times more vulnerable to the death penalty than the Han Chinese.

Specific crimes for which the death penalty was to be used were listed in a handbook of April 2001 for one of the leadership's periodic law-and-order campaigns. In Guangdong province, for example, economic crimes - theft, fraud and corruption - were to be the primary target. In Shanghai executions were to help clean up the city for visitors to a meeting of the Asia-Pacific Economic Council. In Xinjiang, they were to 'solve the separatist problem' in two years. Thousands more Uighurs were imprisoned on charges of nationalism, separatism and religious extremism, and the torture and disappearance of Uighurs became commonplace.

After looking at some of the internal reports prepared for the Communist leadership about the problems in Xinjiang, Tyler continues:

Missing from all these analyses, however, is any hint that the authorities in Xinjiang might be abusing their powers. There seems to be no qualm, no hesitation, no flicker of doubt within the Party about the wisdom of its own policy, which amounts to this: punish the Uighurs for the slightest sign of dissent, and when they protest, punish them harder. There is nothing to show that the Party can see what is obvious to anyone who visits Xinjiang: that the Uighurs have been reduced to second-class members of the 'great Chinese family'. Absent, too, is any recognition of the anger caused by Han Chinese immigration, a wholesale transfer of population from the east which began as exile and which now flourishes on the foundations of China's desert gulag.

China, we're lead to believe, is the sleeping giant, the next superpower, now in the process of making a smooth transition to a capitalist economy. Can we really believe that in the light of what we know about what actually goes on there? This is a society where everything flows from the top down. What the Communist leadership seems to have learnt from the West is not an increased respect for human rights but an increased determination to make sure no one hears about their human rights abuses. Russia is often compared unfavourably with China in terms of managing the transition form communism, but Russia actually ditched their party rulers; China is still ruled by theirs, a rule without any legitimacy whatsoever. So will the Chinese empire implode like the Soviet empire did? Who knows? - we're in uncharted territory here. But you have to suspect that the 21st century is going to be a great deal more interesting for the Chinese than they might wish.

Comments

[lgude]

Well, not entirely uncharted. Viewed in the long context of Chinese history it has always been ruled by strong autocratic central governments that demand conformity. It has been a long time since I studied Chinese history but I sense nothing radically new here. I think they will become much more powerful and, as always, very much on thier own terms. That may well not include many western notions like human rights. A colleague just returned from Africa where he had to stay in a third rate hotel because all the first and second rate ones were full of Chinese. Evidently they are getting more heavily involved in Africa - turning economic success into greater projection of power. I hope that continuing engagement with China will lead to a lessening of the cultural gulf between us, but I don't think it was ever going to be easy.