[Joint House and Senate Hearing, 109 Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
CHINA'S CHANGING STRATEGIC CONCERNS:
THE IMPACT ON HUMAN RIGHTS IN XINJIANG
=======================================================================
ROUNDTABLE
before the
CONGRESSIONAL-EXECUTIVE COMMISSION ON CHINA
ONE HUNDRED NINTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
__________
NOVEMBER 16, 2005
__________
Printed for the use of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China
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CONGRESSIONAL-EXECUTIVE COMMISSION ON CHINA
LEGISLATIVE BRANCH COMMISSIONERS
Senate House
CHUCK HAGEL, Nebraska, Chairman JAMES A. LEACH, Iowa, Co-Chairman
SAM BROWNBACK, Kansas DAVID DREIER, California
GORDON SMITH, Oregon FRANK R. WOLF, Virginia
JIM DeMINT, South Carolina JOSEPH R. PITTS, Pennsylvania
MEL MARTINEZ, Florida ROBERT B. ADERHOLT, Alabama
MAX BAUCUS, Montana SANDER LEVIN, Michigan
CARL LEVIN, Michigan MARCY KAPTUR, Ohio
DIANNE FEINSTEIN, California SHERROD BROWN, Ohio
BYRON DORGAN, North Dakota MICHAEL M. HONDA, California
EXECUTIVE BRANCH COMMISSIONERS
STEVEN J. LAW, Department of Labor
PAULA DOBRIANSKY, Department of State
David Dorman, Staff Director (Chairman)
John Foarde, Staff Director (Co-Chairman)
(ii)
C O N T E N T S
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Page
STATEMENTS
Millward, James A., associate professor of history, Georgetown
University School of Foreign Service, Washington, DC........... 2
Starr, S. Frederick, chairman, Central Asia-Caucasus Institute,
Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International
Studies (SAIS), Washington, DC................................. 5
Southerland, Daniel, vice president of programming/executive
editor, Radio Free Asia, Washington, DC........................ 7
APPENDIX
Prepared Statements
Millward, James A................................................ 28
Starr, S. Frederick.............................................. 31
Southerland, Daniel.............................................. 33
CHINA'S CHANGING STRATEGIC CONCERNS: THE IMPACT ON HUMAN RIGHTS IN
XINJIANG
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WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 16, 2005
Congressional-Executive
Commission on China,
Washington, DC.
The roundtable was convened, pursuant to notice, at 10
a.m., in room 480, Ford House Office Building, David Dorman
(Senate Staff Director) presiding.
Also present: John Foarde, House Staff Director; Carl
Minzner, Senior Counsel; Steve Marshall, Senior Advisor;
Katherine Palmer Kaup, Special Advisor on Minority
Nationalities Affairs; and Pamela N. Phan, Counsel.
Mr. Dorman. On behalf of our Chairman, Senator Chuck Hagel,
and our Co-Chairman, Representative Jim Leach, I would like to
open this roundtable of the Congressional-Executive Commission
on China on how the Chinese Government's changing security
concerns in Central Asia may be having an impact on the human
rights situation in Xinjiang.
Before we get started, please note that this room has no
microphones and therefore neither the voices of our staff panel
nor our expert panel will be amplified. Each of us on the dais,
and our panelists as well, will try to speak up, but please
feel free to raise your hand during the course of the next 90
minutes if our volume begins to drop and you cannot hear. I
will try to indicate politely to whomever is speaking to raise
the volume level of his or her voice.
I would like to make a short opening statement, then we
will get right into today's discussion. As has been our
practice, I will introduce each of our panelists first and then
give each, in turn, 10 minutes to make an opening statement.
When all panelists have made their opening statements, each
staff member on the dais will have five minutes to ask a
question and hear an answer from our panelists, and we will
continue this for 90 minutes or until we run out of questions.
Over the past years, we have never run out of questions, so
I am sure that we will have to end things at 90 minutes with a
last question and hold the remaining conversation until the
next roundtable.
So with that, I would like to make a short statement and we
will get started.
The Chinese Government continues to strictly regulate
Muslim practices, particularly among members of the Uighur
minority. All mosques in China must register with the state-run
China Islamic Association. Imams must be licensed by the state
before they can practice and must regularly attend patriotic
education sessions. Religious repression in Xinjiang is severe,
driven by Party policies that equate peaceful expression of
Uighur identity and religion with terrorism and extremism.
Since the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991 and independent states
were established in Central Asia, the Chinese Government has
tightened controls over expressions of ethnic identity,
particularly among the members of the Uighur ethnic group in
the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region. Following the 9/11
terrorist attacks in the United States, the Chinese Government
has equated peaceful expressions of Uighur identity with
``subversive terrorist plots.''
In this regard, I would like to highlight the Commission's
deep concern about the recent sentencing of Uighur editor
Korash Huseyin for publishing an article by Uighur writer
Nurmemet Yasin. Mr. Yasin is currently serving a 10-year
sentence for writing the article. I would point to a line I
just saw in Professor Millward's written statement that says
``literature is not terrorism.''
The Xinjiang Government has increased surveillance and
arrested Uighurs suspected of ``harboring separatist
sentiments'' since popular movements ousted Soviet-era leaders
in Ukraine, Georgia, and Kyrgyzstan.
This roundtable will address the treatment of minorities in
Xinjiang, particularly the Uighur ethnic group, and explore how
China's security concerns in Central Asia and western China
affect human rights.
In its 2005 Annual Report, the Commission recommended that
the President and the Congress should continue to urge Chinese
officials not to use the global war against terrorism as a
pretext to suppress minorities' legitimate, peaceful
aspirations to exercise their rights protected by the Chinese
Constitution and the Regional Ethnic Autonomy Law [REAL].
With that, I would like to introduce Dr. James Millward,
who is Associate Professor of History at the Georgetown
University School of Foreign Service. Professor Millward is the
author of several books and articles on Xinjiang, including
``Violent Separatism in Xinjiang: A Critical Assessment,'' ``A
History of Chinese Kyrgyzstan,'' yet to be published, and
``Beyond the Pass: Economy, Ethnicity and Empire in Qing
Central Asia: 1859-1864.'' Dr. Millward holds a B.A. from
Harvard University, an M.A. from the School of Oriental and
African Studies at the University of London, and a Ph.D. from
Stanford University.
Professor Millward, please take 10 minutes for your opening
statement.
STATEMENT OF JAMES A. MILLWARD, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF HISTORY,
GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF FOREIGN SERVICE, WASHINGTON, DC
Mr. Millward. Thank you, Mr. Dorman. I would like to thank
you and the Commission for the opportunity to come down and
talk with you today.
The draconian policies, which I think in most of our eyes
are also counterproductive policies, of the Chinese Government
in Xinjiang today, I think, derive from several factors. One of
these, I think, is the lessons taken by the Chinese leadership,
particularly hard-line members of the Chinese leadership, from
the relaxation, or relative relaxation, of restrictions on
religion and expression in the 1980s.
With the emergence of a number of popular demonstrations,
and in particular with the events of the early 1990s, the 1990
Baren incident and other violent acts, the leadership, I think,
took the message that a little bit of relaxation can unleash a
lot of dissent and a lot of problems in the area. I think in
many ways they have continued under that understanding right up
to the present, even while relaxing political controls to a
certain degree in other parts of China.
But there are other reasons underlying the current policies
in Xinjiang. Another of those, of course, is fear of organized
terrorism, terrorist groups, or perhaps other sorts of violent
separatism. As I have argued in the publication which you just
cited about violent separatism, I think the public statements
and the public assessment of that danger by the PRC Government
is somewhat exaggerated. However, I hasten to add that I only
have access to
open-source materials on which to judge and I can only go from
my analysis of what is publicly said and available. So it may
be that, in fact, the threat of violence of one sort or another
is worse than it appears to me, and that might explain the
intensity of the PRC Government's concern about Xinjiang.
But I think that there is yet another reason underlying the
current policies, and that is a fear of foreign involvement, a
deep and abiding insecurity--and perhaps to our eyes an
irrational sense of insecurity--about China's control in the
region. I think, to a great degree, that sense of insecurity
arises from how Chinese see the history of Xinjiang,
particularly the modern history from the 18th century conquest
during the Qing period.
I have given in my written statement a little history
lesson. It is a history lesson through a fairly narrow frame, a
narrow lens. What I have tried to do is outline the history of
the last 250 years or so in Xinjiang as it is very often
portrayed in China, in Chinese materials, in history texts, in
statements by political leaders, even in schoolbooks, on Web
sites, and so on. Basically, it is a long list of ``foreign
interference in China's internal affairs,'' a Chinese term we
all know for foreign involvement in military and other sorts of
events in the region. I do not think I should go over it all
here, except to say that the lesson that one should take from
that view of history is not that current policies are
justified. I am not trying to say that current policies are
justified by this history, but rather that Chinese scholars,
Chinese leaders, to a certain extent Chinese citizens,
particularly Han Chinese citizens in the region, do in fact
believe this history, do in fact believe that there have been a
long chain of attempts by foreign powers to undermine Chinese
control of the Xinjiang region. And in particular, since the
1980s and 1990s it has been routine for Chinese officials to
blame the United States, either through insinuation, or
occasionally through outright statements, for supporting
separatism by lending aid and moral support to separatist
groups. This is always described in Chinese sources in very
shady and murky terms. But the effects of decades of this kind
of propaganda are real and I think it is often forgotten that
in authoritarian, non-transparent regimes, people often come to
believe their own propaganda. People come to believe their own
versions of history. In this case, moreover, there is at least
a certain factual core underlying this view.
Against that background, recent events in Central Asia--in
particular, the post-9/11 advance of U.S. military interests,
the arrival of U.S. military bases in the region, as well as
renewed military arrangements with both Pakistan and India, and
of course the ``color revolutions,'' all of these new factors
on the strategic scene fit into this historical framework, this
historical narrative of foreign threat to China's control over
Xinjiang.
I think that narrative is the framework within which
Chinese leaders and thinkers are predisposed to see these
events. They remember, much more than we do here, that there
was a CIA agent, Douglas MacKiernan, on the scene in Urumqi in
1949 who went off to meet Osman Batur among the Kazakhs, fled
to Osman's camp when the PLA took over Urumqi. And they see
MacKiernan's activity as the seeds of a CIA plot to undermine
PRC control and to support a guerrilla insurgency in Xinjiang,
much as the CIA later sponsored Tibetan guerrillas in Tibet.
This is a very present part of their historical
consciousness, and therefore it is not nearly as unreasonable
to Chinese as it seems to us that the United States would use
sympathy for Uighurs and support for Uighur human rights as a
shield or a cover for nefarious purposes.
I point this out, I suppose, to encourage those who are in
the business of expressing concern about human rights in China
to try to do it in ways that take into account these Chinese
anxieties, to try to assuage those anxieties as much as
possible.
This is difficult, I think, given the current U.S. efforts
to expand its military foothold in Central Asia, but I do not
think it would be impossible.
I believe I have used up my time.
Mr. Dorman. You have two minutes.
Mr. Millward. All right. In two minutes, I can go into more
Qing Imperial period history for you. The Zuo Zongtang conquest
is a fascinating subject!
Mr. Dorman. You have raised plenty for questions.
Mr. Millward. All right. Well, then I will leave it and
more can come up in the question period.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Millward appears in the
appendix.]
Mr. Dorman. Next, I would like to introduce Dr. S.
Frederick Starr, who is Chairman of the Central Asia-Caucasus
Institute at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced
International Studies. Dr. Starr is the author or editor of
over 20 books and 200 articles on Central Asian and Russian
affairs, including ``Xinjiang: China's Muslim Borderland,''
published in 2004. He is a trustee of the Eurasia Foundation
and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.
Dr. Starr, we welcome your opening statement.
STATEMENT OF S. FREDERICK STARR, CHAIRMAN, CENTRAL ASIA-
CAUCASUS INSTITUTE, JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF ADVANCED
INTERNATIONAL STUDIES (SAIS), WASHINGTON, DC
Mr. Starr. Thank you, Mr. Dorman. I should say that Jim
Millward contributed to that Xinjiang volume the most concise
and comprehensive short history of the region in any language.
Before beginning, I would just note that Chinese sensitivities
in this are, it seems to me, indistinguishable from Russian-
Soviet sensitivities with regard to Ukraine and the Baltic
countries and the Caucasus. The same language is used; the same
high historical evidence is brought forward. Chinese concerns
are real, but we should keep them in perspective. I should also
note that during the 1960s the Chinese were very glad to
cooperate with the United States and the CIA in Xinjiang in
their armed struggle with the Soviet Union that occurred on the
western border. This, too, is also part of the history.
I would like to speak of 10 areas concerning
democratization and human rights, and characterize their
condition in Xinjiang today; and then draw some very quick
conclusions.
First, are there free and fair elections? No.
Two, does there exist a parliamentary body or any form of
representative government? No.
Three, does the Turkic population enjoy equal legal or
economic rights with the Han Chinese? No. The number of Uighurs
in top government jobs has actually shrunk and they have
clamped down on Turkic entrepreneurship. Health indicators are
far better for Han Chinese than for Turkic peoples, et cetera,
et cetera.
Four, is the court system free of governmental
interference? No, no more than it was free in the USSR, from
which Maoist China borrowed most of its judicial institutions.
Five, does the government observe minimal international
standards for persons held in jail and labor camps? No. In
fact, the government has managed very successfully to prevent
information on this from getting out.
Six, do the Turkic peoples of Xinjiang have reasonable
access to income-producing employment and social services? To
some extent, but their access is worse than for Han Chinese.
Seven, is the practice of religion free from governmental
interference? You yourself have spoken to that, Mr. Dorman.
Eight, are domestic or international NGOs able to function
in Xinjiang? No. The most successful ones that have been set up
locally have all been closed down by legal action. These
actions have been very harsh, and in one instance, several
hundred people were killed as you know.
Nine, are there free media? No.
Finally, do citizens of Xinjiang have access to
international travel and contacts through which they could air
their concerns in relevant international forums? No, obviously.
That is the context. This is the result of Beijing's very
successful policy, ``Strike Hard, Maximum Pressure.'' There is
nothing subtle about it. Just this week that policy was
reaffirmed. It dates from prior to 9/11.
The impression of most of the scholars with whom I am in
contact is that most Turkic peoples in Xinjiang would be quite
content if rights implied in the name of the province, the
Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, were applied in practice.
They do not seek separatism. If separatism ever existed, it is
certainly dead within the territory of Xinjiang today. What
does exist is a moderate movement toward some kind of autonomy
that most people, I suspect, would be quite content with.
The point I want to raise, is this: since the collapse of
the USSR, we have been concerned with the fate of human rights
in the Caucasus and Central Asia. Our focus, and the focus of
your Commission, has been overwhelmingly on the independent
states that were formed out of the collapse of the USSR: three
in the south Caucasus and five in Central Asia.
But, of course, these countries are only part of their
respective regions. The North Caucasus includes Chechnya,
Ingushetia, Dagestan, et cetera. The greater Central Asian
Region includes Afghanistan and Xinjiang. Bluntly, we react
very differently to the
circumstances in the two situations. When any of the new,
small, relatively weak, relatively poor but independent states
stumble in the area of democracy, human rights, and religious
freedom, we editorialize against them, pass censure motions,
and heap public abuse on their leaders, whom we then refuse to
receive in the White House. We threaten to suspend or de-
certify them from our favor, and even bar humanitarian
assistance to them.
By contrast, when larger, rich and powerful states--
specifically Russia and the People's Republic of China--impose
their rule over other parts of the same regions with brutal and
primitive force, in the process assaulting the principles of
democracy, human rights, and religious freedom, we continue to
receive their leaders as honored guests. We rap their knuckles
but otherwise do nothing.
My point is that the United States, by its very founding,
placed itself on the side of national self-determination and
those seeking freedom from imperial rule. Now we seem to be
supporting the imperial powers. Our response to mischief in
struggling new states is much harsher than our response to more
serious offenses in large states. True, we are not giving a
pass to China and Russia in these respective regions as is
clear from the President's speech yesterday. But we are
certainly not pursuing these matters with anything near the
same intensity that we are pursuing less grave matters in the
new states.
Let me stress that I am not arguing against engagement with
the People's Republic of China, nor am I proposing that we give
a pass to governments in other parts of Central Asia and the
Caucasus when they commit abuses in the areas that we are
concerned with. Instead, I am suggesting that it is time that
we take our finger off the scales and start acting on our
values in a consistent manner. At the very least, let us stop
allocating rewards and punishments, engagement and rebukes on
the basis of whether a country is large or small, secure or
vulnerable, powerful or weak.
Thank you very much.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Starr appears in the
appendix.]
Mr. Dorman. Next, I would like to introduce Mr. Daniel
Southerland, who is Vice President of Programming and Executive
Editor at Radio Free Asia. Prior to joining RFA in 1996, Mr.
Southerland was a foreign correspondent in Asia for 18 years.
He served as the Washington Post Bureau Chief in Beijing from
1985 to 1990. Mr. Southerland was awarded the Edward Weintal
Prize for distinguished reporting in 1995 for a series on the
Mao Zedong years in China, and was nominated for a Pulitzer
Price in 1990 for his coverage of Tiananmen. He holds a B.A.
from University of North Carolina, an M.S. in East Asian
Studies from Harvard, and an M.S. in Journalism from Columbia
University.
Mr. Southerland, please take 10 minutes for your opening
statement.
STATEMENT OF DANIEL SOUTHERLAND, VICE PRESIDENT OF PROGRAMMING/
EXECUTIVE EDITOR, RADIO FREE ASIA, WASHINGTON, DC
Mr. Southerland. The Chinese Government has for many years
tightly controlled information reaching the Uighur people in
Xinjiang. But the government's controls over the media and
freedom of expression in Xinjiang appear to have grown even
stricter since the 9/11 attacks in the United States in 2001.
I agree, by the way, with Jim Millward that the Baren
incident, which I tried to cover from Beijing in, I guess it
was, 1990, was a kind of a turning point which needs to be put
in the record, because that had a real sharp effect in Beijing.
We had a great deal of trouble getting the story straight
because they barred foreign correspondents from going into the
area. There was one guy from Agence France-Presse who was there
who was escorted out of the area, so it did relate to
restrictions on mosque-building, I believe, which is still an
issue. So, that is very important.
This goes back a lot farther than the changes in Central
Asia and the 9/11 attacks. They just made things worse. There
was already a great deal of paranoia about weapons getting into
Xinjiang, and so forth, and there were some deaths that were
involved in that Baren incident.
The media is more tightly controlled in Xinjiang than in
any other part of China that I can think of, and I think that
would include Tibet, although perhaps it is equally tightly
controlled in Tibet. But the atmosphere certainly is more
repressive in Xinjiang than in any other part of China, perhaps
even including Tibet. As a result, broadcasting to the Xinjiang
Autonomous Region has constituted one of the most challenging
tasks undertaken by Radio Free Asia.
When it comes to Uighur-language broadcasting, RFA is the
only broadcaster that attempts to provide accurate and
objective news. We have some Saudi Arabian broadcasting, but it
is almost exclusively on religious matters. Taiwan, as far as I
know, stopped broadcasting in Uighur. There are Central Asian
broadcasts in Uighur, but these are edited so as not to offend
the Chinese Government.
The government itself broadcasts in Uighur, but censors the
information that is of most importance to the Uighur people,
that has the greatest relevance to the Uighur people. Foreign
correspondents do travel to Xinjiang, but rarely, and when they
go, they are on guided tours. So, RFA covers stories that no
one else covers, and the Chinese Government is doing things in
Xinjiang that it no longer does in many other parts of China.
Executions of political prisoners occur in Xinjiang. Books
are banned routinely, and they do not just ban the books, they
burn them. There is forced labor in Xinjiang that is not
occurring elsewhere in China. Restrictions on religious
education, of course, were mentioned. Textbooks are rewritten
so that Uighurs cannot recognize their own history. I actually
have two broadcasters working for me who were historians who
were trying to write the true history of the region, and they
had to flee because they were in danger.
Educational reform is another thing that we cover, where
the Uighur language has been replaced by the Chinese language.
This started at the university level and is now moving down to
the elementary level.
In this kind of an environment, it was mentioned that
literature is off limits, in many ways. Uighur writers are
particularly vulnerable. A writer who is promoting non-violent
dissent can be accused of advocating terrorism. In mid-2005,
RFA reported on the author that we mentioned, the author of a
first-person narrative, a fictional narrative or fable about a
young pigeon who commits suicide rather than sacrifice his
freedom. The authorities apparently read that story as an
indictment of China's heavy-handed ruling over Xinjiang and, as
you mentioned, gave the writer, Mr. Yasin, a 10-year jail
sentence.
As you can imagine, it is no wonder that we are under heavy
jamming from the Chinese Government. They use loud noise and
music to jam our broadcasts. The U.S. Government and the FCC
complain to the Chinese Government about this, and China denies
it is doing any jamming. Three years ago, officials of the
Xinjiang radio, a state-run radio broadcaster, and state-run
television revealed that they were investing nearly $40 million
in a new project designed to even more heavily jam
international broadcasts, and obviously we were a target. They
began building up their own Uighur broadcasting capability.
They also, in the year 2004, began trying to disrupt our
Mandarin, Tibetan, and Uighur call-in shows by using a certain
modem-driven automatic system to bombard us with calls so that
legitimate calls could not get through. We have managed somehow
to overcome that problem.
We get tips through this hotline, the call-in show from
Xinjiang, from people in remote villages who tell us stories
that would never get out unless they called us. One such story
came from a farmer, a herdsman who called to say that he had
gone to the local Uighur radio station in Ili to tell the
journalist there that there was a very lethal disease that was
killing cows and sheep, and they said they could not broadcast
it. Finally, somebody told one of the farmers, ``Why don't you
go to Radio Free Asia and give them a call and get the story
out?''
We have a Web site, which is heavily blocked by the Chinese
Government, but we do know that our news does get through via
proxy servers and ``human proxies'' who e-mail our reports or
post them. The stories get through in rather creative ways. In
March, when Uighur businesswoman Rebiya Kadeer arrived in
Washington following her release from prison--and I am sure you
all know that story. She spent five years in prison after
protesting against China's mistreatment of Uighurs. She arrived
at Reagan National Airport, and embraced her husband. We had a
photo of that embrace which went out via Internet to Xinjiang,
where the Internet police promptly blocked it, but not in time
to prevent someone from cutting and pasting and removing the
banned RFA address and moving the story along, so that when
Kadeer, within hours, called her children up, they had seen the
photo. So, information does get through, despite the
challenges.
Based on studies done by RFA's research department, the
atmosphere in Xinjiang is the most repressive of any region in
China that I know of. One study concludes, not surprisingly,
that the authorities have used the global war on terror to
justify harsh measures designed to stamp out dissent. In
contrast with other parts of China where people now feel free,
in private, to discuss personal matters, more so than when I
first went to China, certainly, and even political issues if
they do not challenge the Communist Party, many Uighurs dare
not discuss sensitive issues even with friends or family
members.
Internet usage is gradually spreading, chat rooms are
increasing in number, but accessing the Web sites of
international broadcasters remains an activity too risky for
most Uighurs to try, based on our research.
But for many Uighurs, RFA broadcasts remain a lifeline in a
hostile media environment. International broadcasts are the
only means for many Uighurs to get reliable news of the outside
world, as well as news about developments inside their own
region.
I think I went over the 10 minutes. I borrowed a minute
from Professor Starr.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Southerland appears in the
appendix.]
Mr. Dorman. Well, good. Thank you very much for excellent
opening statements. There is plenty of material for us to have,
I think, a good discussion.
As all of you know, the Commission staff has a
responsibility to report to our members, both in the Executive
Branch and Legislative Branch, on human rights and rule of law
issues in China. We attempt to do that in a way that is as
balanced, factual, and constructive as possible. One of the
areas that we have had a particular challenge in completing
this task involves Xinjiang, due to a lack of information. We
rely to a great extent on RFA and the work that Dr. Millward
and Dr. Starr, among others, have done in this regard.
Mr. Southerland noted in his opening statement that over
time, particularly over the last 5 to 10 years, there has been
less and less information on what is happening in Xinjiang. I
do not think I am misquoting Mr. Southerland. Yet, at the same
time, the sorts of reports and analyses we see on Xinjiang
suggest that the situation there continues to get worse. Could
each of you comment on the relationship, if any, between these
two phenomena? How is the lack of information impacting our
analyses of the current situation in Xinjiang?
A second and related question that I would ask each of you
to address concerns the issue of violent extremism. Both Dr.
Starr and Dr. Millward discussed this in their opening
statements. What is your assessment regarding the existence of
violent extremism in Xinjiang? Realizing that we do not have
solid numbers or percentages, but based on what we have and
what you have seen and heard, how good, how accurate can our
assessments be without more information? How would you assess
statements by the Chinese Government on this subject?
I will ask Dr. Millward to start.
Mr. Millward. Yes. I did some work on this question, I
guess, a year and a half ago. It is contained in my publication
that you mentioned before. My methodology in doing that was to
gather whatever I could from a search via Nexis and other
sources, and also to read Chinese official reports, white
papers, and some supposedly internal materials that have
nonetheless gotten out and were widely circulated in the West,
and analyzing these things against each other, looking for
internal consistencies and inconsistencies, particularly with
regard to the white paper on terrorism that was released in
January 2002.
I found a lot of inconsistencies, in particular, in the
long list of terrorist acts that the Chinese released in
January 2002, which was the first such ostensibly comprehensive
catalog that we've had. In this document, which contained lists
of past acts and lists of supposedly terrorist groups, did not
link up the two. In other words, there are many acts listed and
then there are names of, supposedly, many groups. But the list
does not--with a couple of exceptions--accuse particular groups
of committing particular acts. One of the exceptions was, in
fact, the 1997 Ili incident, which as we know from a good deal
of other reporting, was not a planned terrorist act at all, but
rather a demonstration and a clash between the state and Uighur
civilians in Ili that got out of hand. So from that and other
work with these sorts of sources, I determined that as far as I
can tell, the threat of organized militarist or militant
resistance or of terrorist acts has been exaggerated.
Now, I am always nervous saying that, because all it takes
is one big bomb somewhere to shoot a hole in my theory. So I am
very cautious. Of course, we recently had a release of a little
video by a group calling themselves the Lions of the Tianshan
in which they threatened Chinese military and intelligence and
other sort of state targets in Xinjiang and in China proper and
urged Uighur and Han civilians not to come out to the
ceremonies to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the founding
of the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region. It is very hard to
know what to do with a press release such as that video from a
group we have not heard of before, and there are various ways
to interpret it. We have not seen any action by this group, is
all that I can say.
Now, I need to say one more thing. You prefaced your
question with the comment that ``it seems things are getting
worse and worse'' in the region. Now, that is perhaps true from
a certain point of view, but I am not sure that it is entirely
true. I will not go into my reasons for that, since the thrust
of your question is----
Mr. Dorman. We base much of what we do here on what people
like you help us understand. I am referring to reports pointing
to a worsening situation--and not that I am disputing them--
just asking for your impressions and analysis of how we should
look at these reports.
Mr. Millward. I see. All right. Well, then, very quickly,
Professor Starr himself referenced, at the beginning of his
written statement, that when you go to Xinjiang you see
increasingly modernized cities, you see the results of oil
revenue and of development efforts, and so on. I have not been
there, for a year, year and a half or so. The Chinese
Government is not routinely granting me visas at this point,
which I think is not smart on their part because of what I am
about to say, which is that, when I was there a year and a half
ago, many of my views about the state of things in Xinjiang
were moderated by what I actually saw on the ground. Just as
one example: I had heard before I went that the old city of
Kashgar had been virtually razed and people had been moved out,
and so on. This had been portrayed as a plot or a planned
government campaign to clear out this old city, which was hard
to control and hard to police, and was seen as a source of
dissent. Now, when I got to Kashgar, yes, there had been some
demolition, particularly around the area of the Idkah mosque,
but the demolition was nowhere near as widespread as I had been
led to believe.
Moreover, I found that other places that had been slated
for demolition and urban renewal, had in fact been saved. The
reasons both for the planned demolition and for not demolishing
these areas had to do with local business interests, local
government, and plans for development and various deals going
on. I have heard similar stories for other cities besides
Kashgar. Hotan was one
example.
In other words, what is actually going on here is a common
problem of local government in cahoots with developers, of
local government officials having some sort of idea of what the
city should look like, but not necessarily thinking through all
of the implications of that. In the Kashgar case, I heard it
was another company, a tourist company--a Chinese domestic
tourism company which itself had a deal for tourism in
Kashgar--which got in touch with local authorities there and
said, ``What, are you crazy? If you tear down this old town,
that is it for this kind of tourism.'' And the local government
retreated from some of its plans for demolition and rebuilding
in the old city of Kashgar. So, these situations on the ground
are much more complicated than one can learn from abroad.
Finally, a slight impression I got, which was that,
although relations between Uighur and Han continue to be very
tense on an interpersonal level, you can feel this almost
palpably, and it is worse than 10 years ago--on the other hand,
the ``embourgoisment'' effect, the middle class effect, that we
see in many parts of China, of people--indeed, as was
predicted--becoming better off, who are beginning to benefit
from the economic reforms, are in turn moderating, tempering
some of their discontent as a result of that. This is
affecting, certainly, some Uighur urban dwellers as well as Han
dwellers.
Now, this development is anecdotal. I have no survey
evidence to back this up unfortunately. Indeed, a survey to
that effect would not be possible in the current climate in
Xinjiang. Nonetheless, one gets these sorts of impressions. So,
very cautiously then, I would suggest that the impression of a
ticking time bomb, or a bubbling cauldron, or whatever metaphor
you use to imply that things are ramping up to some sort of
inevitable crisis--that may not be the case. Of course, none of
this is to downplay the severity of human rights abuses that
are going on, or the extent of religious controls, and other
things mentioned in the press and the CECC report.
Mr. Dorman. Thank you. I have used more than my five
minutes, but if either of you would like to comment on the
original question, you will have that time and I will pass on
my next round.
Dr. Starr.
Mr. Starr. First, on the information, I think your
proposition is right: no news is bad news. Second, on violence,
there has been a good deal over the last decade. There are
people blowing up Communist Party headquarters, offices, and
doing that sort of thing, and it is not at an end.
I think, though, what one has to do here is make a serious
distinction. First of all, there is, and has been, some
violence,
terrorism, if you will, of the Islamic and Al Qa'ida flavor,
not surprising considering that Xinjiang borders Afghanistan
and Pakistan. Neither of these seem to be on the rise. On the
contrary, the Chinese authorities seem to have put a pretty
firm stop to it.
With Afghanistan, of course, after 2001, we did a huge
favor to the Chinese interests in Xinjiang as we took that in
hand. But also, many Pakistanis who were heading up to
Xinjiang, trading along the Kharkoram Highway, selling plastic
bottles and chadors, generally did not get a very good
reception, and they generally have not had a good reception
because they have a bad habit of drinking everything in sight
and messing with local Turkic females, which does not endear
them to the local Turkic peoples. So, I would not say that that
is a major issue.
What is a concern, is the other kind of violence. That is,
to use old Communist rhetoric, related to national liberation
movements. Now, this sort of thing will be back. It is not
dead. This has been the concern. I think we really have to make
a distinction that we have blurred in recent years between
those who, in various parts of the world, are seeking
legitimate forms of autonomy within a given state or who are
seeking independence.
What happened here in America at Concord Bridge in 1775 was
an act of violence against a legitimate state. We as colonists
claimed it was illegitimate. North Carolinians, during the
Revolution, regularly practiced what we would have to call
terrorism. And the very style of American warfare during the
Revolution certainly did not comport well with what was
considered civilized fighting in that day.
I think the same issue exists, of course, in the north
Caucasus. Just to say that someone has acted violently is not
the end of the issue. I mean, it seems to me we can reasonably
say, ``Look, you have got a serious problem on this autonomy
issue. You promised it in name, but there is no functioning
administrative decentralization and autonomy. Deal with it.''
Mao Zedong himself gave the
region that name.
Finally, as to the question of general prosperity, I would
just remind you that it is the urban moderates who have been
the leaders of this movement--they always are, of national
independence movements--and not the really poor in the
countryside. If that is the case, you can expect more trouble,
not less.
Mr. Dorman. Good. Thank you.
Mr. Southerland.
Mr. Southerland. I would just add a word. You mentioned at
the beginning of your question that there is less and less
information available. I think that is partly because people
have grown more fearful. I mentioned earlier that the
atmosphere has not gotten better.
I think another reason for this might be that some of the
most articulate and intelligent Uighurs have actually fled,
managed to get out, so we are beginning to see how we have a
significant population of Uighurs in the United States. These
are people who might be able to describe a situation from
inside that they simply could not survive in Xinjiang. So, it
does not tell you very much, except that it is harder to get
information.
On the violent extremism, I think Jim Millward has really
made a very good contribution in documenting that it has not
shown an upward trend. I hope I am quoting him correctly. I
also suspect that once he looks more deeply into this, or
others look more deeply into it, we are going to find that a
lot of these groups that make grand declarations and so forth
are very divided among themselves. I think there is an
incredible amount of factionalism in these groups, which means
that they may be very small indeed.
We are gratified that in the countryside, where a lot of
people have really been left behind by this economic boom, the
oil wealth, and so forth, that we do have quite a few
listeners. We get these calls, as I mentioned, from farmers. It
takes a lot of guts for a farmer to get the number. There was a
Reuters reporter or a wire service reporter in one of these
earthquake-stricken areas once who had a Uighur come up to him,
and he had written the RFA phone number down and he said, ``I
am going to call these people, get the story out.''
So, I am not putting down the courage of people. I think
there are still a lot of courageous people. But there is an
atmosphere of fear. I think the boom is real, but it has
benefited mostly Han Chinese. It is always a question of
relative deprivation. There is a gap. Some Han Chinese are
indeed getting very wealthy. When a Uighur gets too wealthy, he
or she is likely to be co-opted, or put under a lot of
pressure. Rebiya Kadeer is perhaps the perfect example of
someone, a moderate, but her wealth and her influence were too
much for the government to bear and so she was jailed for
spurious reasons.
Mr. Dorman. Good. Thank you. I would like to thank all of
my colleagues on the dais for their understanding. I will not
ask a question in the second round.
I would like to turn things over to my colleague, John
Foarde, who is Staff Director for Mr. Leach, our Co-Chairman.
John.
Mr. Foarde. Thank you, Dave.
Thanks to all three of our panelists for coming this
morning to share your expertise with us on this important
issue.
I was struck by a comment that Dr. Millward made during his
presentation about a longstanding perception in China of U.S.
involvement in supporting, for lack of a better term,
``splittism'' in Xinjiang. I wondered--and I would address this
to both Dr. Millward and Dr. Starr--when you travel to Xinjiang
or travel to China and discuss these issues with your
counterparts, do you hear them play these themes, and is there
a difference between the types of things that you might hear
from an ethnic Han interlocutor or an ethnic Uighur, or an
Uzbek or a Kazakh in Xinjiang?
Mr. Millward. Yes, there is a difference between what you
will hear from an ethnic Han or an ethnic Uighur, and it breaks
down along the lines you would expect. In talking with Chinese
scholars, including a director of an institute that deals with
frontier issues with whom I am well acquainted, I think there
is sort of a question of etiquette here. They do not bring this
up directly in your face, and we are quite friendly. Where you
see it is in their writings, and particularly in more policy-
oriented writings, of which we have a few that have come out
recently. Reading these, I am struck by the frequency with
which the NATO intervention in Kosovo has been brought up, and
I am sure once the history of the ``color revolutions'' filters
through into these writings in a year or so, I am sure they
will be brought up in the same light. I hear that, in fact, the
color revolutions are being discussed in conferences as well.
It is these sorts of things that make me take the position I
have taken today.
Also, I gather impressions from conversations with Chinese
graduate students here in the United States, those working in
humanistic fields and social sciences who are reading Chinese
news on the Web, who are reading Web sites, and so on. A
comment from one student really struck me. He thoroughly
believed that the entire body of American-Sinological research,
particularly research on modern Chinese history, had been
conducted with a goal of undermining the Chinese state. He
said, ``Oh, well, of course it is all about strategic goals and
strategies.'' He believed this. Now, part of this comes from
the fact that in China, history is very much the handmaiden of
politics. But another part of it, I think, comes from very
strong underlying nationalistic belief--which this generation
of young Chinese holds perhaps more than the Cultural
Revolution generation--a nationalistic feeling and a distrust
of foreign motives, when we are presenting what we see as
friendly, or perhaps stern but friendly, concerns.
Mr. Foarde. Dr. Starr.
Mr. Starr. Obviously, this is the official line, and we are
dealing with a state where that counts. We should not be
surprised at expressions of high indignation and outrage. The
official policy of China today is very akin to the official
policy of the Soviet Union toward minority peoples in its last
20 years, namely, that with prosperity you will bring about a
kind of ``merging of peoples'' of their different cultures
might continue as a kind of ethnographic museum, but on all
things that count their cultures would have merged with free
imperial people. Yet this will not happen. The percentage of
Han Chinese in Xinjiang is less than the percentage of Slavs in
Kazakhstan at the time of independence. Even if that percent
greatly increases, as I believe is now inevitable with the
expansion of the railroad to Kashgar and beyond, there will be
a crisis.
Stanley Toops, a scholar at Miami University in Ohio, has
proven beyond any doubt that when you build a railroad in China
it leads to large-scale migration, no matter what the
government's policy is. That being the case, I think you can
realistically expect that the percentage of Han Chinese will
increase, the polarization of incomes will increase. I think
you can expect also, increased tension over water usage, which
is more severely limited in Xinjiang than anywhere else in
Central Asia, and national and ethnic tensions will grow.
Whether it has a religious flavor or not, I am confident that
this ``national liberation current'' will not go away. If
Beijing's rule trips or stumbles at any future point, of
course, then it could become a problem that embraces all China.
Mr. Foarde. Thank you. I know my colleagues want to ask the
panel questions, so I am going to pass the questioning on at
this point.
Mr. Dorman. I would like to turn over the questioning to
Dr. Kate Kaup. Before I do that, I think each of you know that
Kate is responsible for setting up the roundtable. You have
each met her.
I would like to mention that, just over a year ago, our
Chairman tasked John and me with finding someone to assist the
Commission to better understand minority and autonomy laws and
policy in China. Kate has been with us just a year now, and
unfortunately she will be leaving the Commission at the end of
this month, so this is her last roundtable. I wanted to
publicly say thanks to Kate for doing a great job over the past
year.
Ms. Kaup. Thanks very much.
Mr. Dorman. With that, I would like to pass the questioning
to you.
Ms. Kaup. Thanks, Dave, and thanks to the Commission. It
has been a very productive year. I would like to thank our
three panelists for participating today and for providing such
useful testimony.
I would like to start by asking Dr. Millward a question,
and then ask the other panelists to also comment.
Jim, in your written statement you make four
recommendations. Your second recommendation notes that many of
the human rights violations occurring in Xinjiang may actually
be a result of local corruption rather than being mandated or
encouraged by central policy. You recommend, therefore, that
the U.S. stance should be cooperative, and that we might
consider engaging in more local development initiatives,
granting minorities' business grants, and aiding in Chinese
state programs to defend minority interests and ethnic civil
rights. I have two related questions for you, and would be
interested in hearing comments from our other panelists also.
First, are there any signs that the central government is
trying to step in to stop local corruption and local
governments' violations of minority rights? Second, as Dr.
Starr pointed out in his testimony, the Chinese Government has
cracked down on local NGOs and on foreign NGO initiatives in
Xinjiang to such a degree that it is practically impossible now
for international NGOs to enter into Xinjiang. Given this type
of repressive environment, I am wondering if you could expand a
bit on your recommendation and give us some idea of how the
United States and the international community, as well as
minorities in Xinjiang themselves, might try to strengthen
local initiatives and cooperative programs.
Mr. Millward. All right. First of all, let me slightly
modify the way you characterized my statement. I was not
implying that human rights violations, in general, are purely a
local phenomenon. In that comment, I was speaking primarily
about more economic issues, issues of hiring, perhaps, issues
of urban renewal, for example, as I said before, that sort of
thing.
So to answer the first part of your question then, again,
my sense is based on anecdotal information. One thing we have
to remember in dealing with China is the very real tension
between the locality and the center, the region and the center.
The dynamic is often that things go wrong on a local level, and
if they go wrong enough, then the center will step in and do
something about it. But, generally, the center is limited in
what it can find out about events on a local level because it
is listening to information that is filtered up through the
chain of command, which is precisely the Party and the
government itself. So any sense that China has some kind of
totalitarian control over what is going on is false,
particularly in a region as far away as Xinjiang with such
particular local problems--that is not the case at all.
One example I can give is the one that I already mentioned
of urban renewal and development efforts in the city of
Kashgar, which were finally slowed down when the center found
out some of the ethnic implications and the extent of local
concern about this plan. I believe that there are other cases
like that. Certainly it is not in the central state's interests
to let the urban populations of Xinjiang's cities become too
alienated over this sort of thing. I do not have enough
information to really go any further than that.
Now, as far as the willingness of Xinjiang authorities to
allow foreign initiatives and NGOs to operate there, obviously
this is a big problem. I think the current situation has become
extremely tense and the Xinjiang authorities, in particular,
are very concerned about interacting with foreign entities
unless they are simply investors. This may or may not last.
I know there was some disagreement between Xinjiang
officials and Beijing over the treatment of the Rebiya Kadeer
case, and I think that is an indication of disagreements at a
high level in China over Xinjiang policy. So, it may be that
other sorts of foreign initiatives and contacts may become
possible in the future; certainly, if presented in a more
cooperative manner, they are more likely to go through.
Environmental issues might be a good way to start this
because this is an issue that Xinjiang authorities recognize as
very serious. If there are ways, in a scientific or non-
political way, by which environmental issues can be dealt with
and in which NGOs or U.S. organizations can offer assistance,
then that might be a way into this problem.
Mr. Starr. I would not be too sanguine. I think your point
that many of the specific problems trace to clumsy actions by
local administrators is obviously true. This is always the
case.
In the independent parts of Central Asia, the training of
local administrators offers a great opportunity to bolster
human rights and democratization. Unfortunately, the United
States has not undertaken this, nor have the Europeans.
The people with the greatest capacity to mess up democracy
and human and civil rights are the local administrators
assigned there by the Ministry of Internal Affairs.
The United States has refused to work with ministerial
bureaucrats in many countries of Central Asia because we
thought we could solve all problems by working through NGOs.
Yet NGOs are perceived in terribly negative terms in many
places now, because they are hiring a lot of rich kids from the
capitals, giving them Toyota Land Cruisers with radio
telephones, and then those NGO staffers flaunt their foreign
wealth before the local civil servants, all of whom are
miserably paid, totally untrained, and in dead-end jobs to
which there is no alternative. Naturally, local officials come
to hate these people from NGOs.
Now we have a great opportunity, in all the independent
states of Central Asia and the Caucasus, to work with the
ministries of internal affairs, train its local administrators,
and give them better pay, as we in fact are doing in
Afghanistan. This will fundamentally change the environment. It
is our utter refusal to do this in Uzbekistan that is largely
responsible for the mess that we have helped create there.
Now, in Xinjiang, the situation is totally different,
unfortunately. You still have a Communist Party that has de
facto and de jure control. Normal citizens' rights do not exist
in Xinjiang. The whole web of juridical and other institutions
that now exist in the rest of the region are absent here.
Therefore, I would suspect that not only would Chinese
officialdom be unwilling to engage in the kind of collaboration
I have mentioned, but would see it as extremely risky.
What I am suggesting is, that at the end of the day, the
fundamentals do count. Even though there is a lot of money
flowing in Xinjiang today, thanks to oil and gas; the old
fundamentals remain. The Chinese Government understands that
its citizens' rights are limited, which accounts for its
extreme sensitivity.
Mr. Southerland. I agree with Professor Millward, that
there is no unified, totalitarian approach. I think the
influence of the military and the state security forces in
Xinjiang has grown over the years, so anything you try to do
could be partially negated by their influence.
Since the recent events in Central Asia, the presence of
these heavy-handed types has grown in Xinjiang. You see more
military, more displays of force, such as you saw recently
during the anniversary of the, what was it, 50th year founding
of the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region. They are a big factor
in all of this. So, I would not be optimistic at all that you
could engage in--I mean, I think it is a good idea to try to
share in development initiatives, but I would not be
optimistic, partly because of the suspicion of the United
States and so forth.
I think that you are not going to see an improvement in the
rule of law, which is partly what you are talking about, with
the local administrators, because I noticed, for the media,
which is what I study, that you do not have cases such as you
have in the rest of China, where people are wrongly accused of
committing a crime and then are somehow redeemed when the
father or the wife goes on the petitioning trail. You do have
cases elsewhere in China where they actually can get a guy out
of jail who was totally wrongly accused. I do not see that
happening in Xinjiang. So, again, this rule of law, which is a
very good area to work in, I do not think is susceptible to our
influence, or anybody else's influence from the outside.
Mr. Dorman. Good. Thank you. Next, I would like to
recognize Steve Marshall, who is a Senior Advisor to the
Commission. Steve.
Mr. Marshall. Very interesting. I cover Tibet and I see a
lot of interesting parallels, and some very important
differences, too.
I would like to ask a question about security versus
rights, and then tie that into the existing structure of
autonomy law in China. On one hand, you have China, a nation, a
state, that ideally would probably like to do anything they
think is necessary to protect the security interests of the
state, their ability to promote policy, and so on. On the other
hand, you have individuals, groups of individuals, ethnic
groups, who would probably equally like to do whatever they
could to promote what they feel are their interests. So, on one
hand, you could have tyranny on the part of the state, or you
could have anarchy or a broken state on the other hand.
Now, ultimately you are going to have something in the
middle, trying to protect the interests of the state, and
trying to protect the interests of groups and individuals. In
China, in areas like Xinjiang, the main law addressing that is
the Autonomy Law. Do you see any part of what that law covers
that could provide some relief--realistically provide some
relief--in either the civil or the religious part of life that
Uighurs could enjoy, and that other ethnic groups could enjoy
there, that would not endanger--realistically endanger--state
security and therefore draw pressure from the Chinese
Government? Is there anything within that law that you perceive
as a means by which Uighurs could, for example, have some
space?
Mr. Starr. The flip-flops of Chinese policy are really a
caricature of our notion of Chinese policy as a rather stately
and long-term affair.
It has not been this way in Xinjiang. The older generation
remembers the tough old times. A middle generation, now in full
bloom of advanced adulthood, has known a relatively open
situation. And then you have those who considered the very grim
circumstances of the past seven, eight years to be normal.
Chinese officials are worried--and I think with some
reason--that better governance and greater autonomy will not
elicit a burst of gratitude, but rather will elicit much more
explicit demands for the political and ethnic autonomy that is
embodied in Xinjiang's official name. That is the terrible
paradox the Chinese have created for themselves.
Mr. Millward. I agree that it is a paradox. In the 1950s,
when initially promulgated, before the leftward lurch from the
late 1950s and the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural
Revolution after that, the way in which the autonomy law was
initially implemented left open a possibility of a real
autonomy in the region, more or less as it is implied by the
word ``autonomy'' and in terms of the law. There were numerical
quotas stated for numbers of
nationality--non-Han--cadres in government. The number of
Uighur cadres in south Xinjiang Government, for example, was
meant to exceed that of Han Chinese. So, there was a very
idealistic program. Obviously, that was never fully
implemented, and the Chinese Government, particularly since the
1980s, has been retreating very quickly from that. Some Han
scholars are writing in appalled tones that such quotas were
ever even suggested.
I read one re-interpretation of the autonomy law. The
Chinese term for autonomy is ``zizhi,'' self-rule. This scholar
wrote that in the past this term was completely misinterpreted
in China by
Chinese authorities. He now argues that a ``Zizhiqu,'' or a
self-governing region, does not mean it is going to be governed
by the predominant ``nationality'' there in that region.
Rather, it means it is to be governed by all the
``nationalities'' of that region. In Xinjiang, as we know, the
Han are now 40 percent. So, with that kind of sleight of hand,
he turned the whole initial rationale of the autonomy system on
its head.
Ultimately, this goes back to a Stalinist approach to
nationality issues. The very term ``nationality,'' which has
always been a tricky one to translate, was semantically
borrowed from Russian. We see another way in which China is
retreating from its early policies toward minority peoples in
how they are now translating the Chinese term ``minzu,'' which
they used to call ``nationality'' and infused with political
meaning. They are now translating the same term as ``ethnic''
or ``ethnic group.'' The official name of what used to be the
State Nationality Affairs Council is now the State Ethnic
Affairs Council.
Well, what does this mean? This means, to me, I think, that
they are adopting a more American-style approach to ethnic
difference within a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural society and
retreating from the political implications of the nationality
system--with the implicit promise of certain rights to a
certain territory, which they initially borrowed from the
Soviets. That being the case, although I like the idea of
autonomy as perhaps a solution to the problems in Xinjiang
today, if only they would implement it as promised, I see that
as unrealistic, given how quickly the Chinese have been
retreating from the earlier meanings and uses of the concept.
Mr. Marshall. Thanks. Dan?
Mr. Southerland. Nothing to add to that.
Mr. Starr. Just a note. What we are discussing is a problem
of imperial policy, bluntly put. It must be understood to the
broader framework. In the Soviet case, after a very tough
period of rule under Stalin, in the 1970s and early 1980s
Moscow told all the non-Russians to rule themselves. They did.
This produced grand corruption, and a not bad life for many.
Then Gorbachev showed up and declared that ``we have got to
clean this up.'' The ensuing purge created that genuine passion
for independence that we observe all over the region today.
I do not see a comfortable dynamic here. If there is any
ray of hope from the Chinese perspective, it is that Xinjiang
as an autonomous region, has some legal grounds for asking to
be treated differently from the rest of the PRC society. It is
not clear that the Chinese will perceive this possibility. So
far, the answer is definitely no. But this constitutes a legal
rationale for offering Xinjiang a degree of autonomy that is
not possible for other provincial units of China.
Mr. Marshall. Thank you.
Mr. Dorman. I would like to recognize Pam Phan, who is a
Commission Counsel and handles the Commission's criminal law
portfolio. Pam.
Ms. Phan. Thank you to the panelists for coming this
morning.
Actually, I am interested in, and would like to pose
questions broadly to the entire panel regarding, two processes.
The first is the defining of crimes. The second is the
punishing of criminal activity. I am going to go more
specifically into those questions.
Dr. Starr, you had mentioned that as recently as this week,
there has been a reaffirmation of the ``Strike Hard''--yan da--
campaign in Xinjiang. The question that I would like to pose
with respect to that is: is this ``Strike Hard'' campaign
focusing on ordinary crimes of rape, murder, arson, etc., or is
the focus on activity that the Chinese Government chooses to
characterize or define as crimes of terrorism, crimes of
subversion, crimes of disruption of public order? So in other
words, is the ``Strike Hard'' campaign really being used as a
pretext to crack down on activities that are being engaged in
by Uighurs?
With respect to the punishing of criminal activities, Mr.
Southerland, you had mentioned that in Xinjiang we have seen
executions of political prisoners, as well as forced labor, not
occurring elsewhere. I would just like to see if anyone on the
panel could elaborate on those developments.
Mr. Starr. A further note on the ``Strike Hard'' policy: it
is
focused above all on separatism, with only a subordinate role
for religious extremism.
Mr. Southerland. I would agree. The yan da campaign is
obviously aimed at suspicious characters, not at what we would
normally consider, let us say, ordinary crimes such as rape
cases and so forth. I do not think there is any doubt of that.
I think it is also meant to instill a certain amount of fear
and trembling on the part of people that it is aimed at, so it
is like a show of force, partly. There is a constant ``Strike
Hard'' campaign going on anyway, it is just that they make
periodic announcements. I know there was an earlier one, and
now we had trouble figuring out whether the latest one is a
totally new campaign or just a continuation. I see it as sort
of a steady part of this atmosphere.
On the forced labor issue, we know that this is happening
from villagers, who call us up and tell us that they are being
told to turn out for a certain period of time and work on a
road, or work on a construction site, or a development site,
some of which results in Uighur villagers being displaced or
basically thrown off their land. It also extends during the
summer months, during the cotton harvest, even to
schoolchildren.
We recently got a story about kids being sent out to these
camps where they have to work, not quite the same as the adult
forced labor, but another version of this which I had never
seen occurring elsewhere in China, since the Cultural
Revolution, anyway. So, it is just all part of the pretty harsh
atmosphere that I think we have tried to lay out for you.
Ms. Phan. Thank you.
Mr. Dorman. Next, I would like to turn the questioning over
to Carl Minzner, who is a Senior Counsel on the Commission.
Carl.
Mr. Minzner. Thanks very much to all three panelists. I
have a two-part question. First, often when people talk about
Xinjiang, there is a focus on the Han and the Uighur
populations. While those two are the largest populations, there
are also Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Tajik, and a large number of other
minorities as well. How are they faring in the current climate?
To what extent is the crackdown that you have all mentioned
directed primarily at Uighurs as opposed to other minorities?
My second question, which is both for Professor Millward
and for Professor Starr, is: you were talking about improved
implementation of the autonomy laws as perhaps one possible
solution toward addressing some of the problems occurring in
Xinjiang. What would this imply for these other minorities?
One thing that you saw in the Soviet Union was that as
Georgia moved toward more of an autonomous, independent status,
there were groups such as the South Ossetians that started
making claims that their rights were not being protected. So
what would a move toward autonomy, under the Regional Ethnic
Autonomy Law, mean for these other minorities, and what would
their attitudes be toward this type of move?
Mr. Starr. With regard to these other minorities, first of
all, they, like the Uighurs, have been pushed out of the trade
with neighboring countries with which they would normally have
had close links. All such trade is in the hands of the Han
Chinese today. I know the owner of the biggest market in
Central Asia, Dardoi Market in Bishkele, Kyrgyzstan. He reports
that all the traders from the PRC there now are Han Chinese.
Second, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization has, as part
of its mandate, constrained the sovereignty of the three
adjoining states, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstan, to
the degree that citizens with full rights in those states have
actually been imprisoned and turned over to the Chinese for
activities on their territory. This is not a complete answer,
but I would say the evidence is that there is a kind of equal
opportunity control here.
Now, with regard to your allusion to Ossetia, I do not
think that is quite the case. The South Ossetian crisis exists
because the Russians have used it as a lever against Georgia,
just as the Russians handed out Soviet passports to Kazakhs and
Kyrgyz in Xinjiang in the 1960s, as a way of getting at the
government in Beijing. For example, in Germany, in Saxony,
there is a very ancient, partly Slavic people called Sorbs.
Anybody with an I-E-T-Z-S-C-H-E in his name is a Sorb.
Nietzsche was obviously a Sorb, and they were totally absorbed
into the German people. There is something like that happening
among Turkic peoples of Xinjiang, in that the term ``Uighur''
is coming to have, almost, a meaning of ``Turkic.'' Now, I do
not know how far this will go. Clearly, though, ``Uighur'' has
become a kind of organizing label for Turkic peoples of the
region. There are even Tajiks who call themselves ``Uighur''
and they are not even Turkic. In the process, certain
identities and ethnicities are being marginalized.
Mr. Millward. Just talking about Central Asia generally, I
think there is a phenomenon we might call ``crypto-Uighur.''
Particularly in Uzbekistan, where, unlike Kazakhstan and
Kyrgyzstan, the Uighur groups and minorities in Soviet times
and since were not as well treated, the Uighur identity was not
as well recognized. Everyone there is Uzbek. Then something
about Xinjiang or Uighurs will come up and they will say, ``Oh,
well, actually I am a Uighur.'' There is a famous singer for
whom this was the case--it suddenly emerged that she was
Uighur, despite being a famous Uzbek singer who sung the
national anthem at public events. I notice this quite a bit.
So, that may be part of what Fred is noticing here. Besides
Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, other groups in Xinjiang in
general, this is an area where we do not have a great deal of
information, in part because I think everyone is looking at the
larger population group of the Uighurs and has been, to be
honest, neglecting the situations of the smaller groups.
The general impression is that most of the tension is
reserved for Uighur, or is a question of Uighur-Han relations.
In private, random conversations with some Kazakhs, I heard
negative comments: ``Oh, the Uighurs do this, the Uighurs do
that, the Uighurs do not have culture,'' and so on, in a way
that surprised me, or would have surprised me if I had expected
a Turkic solidarity or a Muslim solidarity. Indeed, there have
been state policies aimed at
dividing these groups.
This leads me to the second half of your question, which is
the implication of autonomy laws for other minorities. Even as
it was initially designed, the autonomy law in Xinjiang, whose
inauguration 50 years ago we just celebrated, was gerrymandered
in such a way as to undermine the potentiality of Uighur
control. Although it is officially called ``the Xinjiang Uighur
Autonomous Region'' but, there are no county-level districts
which are Uighur autonomous counties. The autonomous districts
were created in the 1950s from the bottom up, with each
district of the county, prefectural, and other levels given the
names of other groups--not ``Uighur.'' It is only the region as
a whole that is called ``Uighur.''
Now, obviously if you were to fully implement this, and if
each autonomous district was supposed to be governed by the
name on the doorplate, then in fact you would have no Uighur
counties at all, no local level government by Uighurs at all.
In fact, that is not the case--there are many Uighur local
officials, but it shows how the system, as it was designed, was
never really intended to be implemented in such a way that a
geographic region named for a ``nationality'' is administered
predominantly by that nationality. In fact, the system was used
very strategically by the state to play off one minority
against another. In this regard, actually, the nationality
autonomy system has structurally been to the benefit, at least
to certain members of other minority groups, at certain times.
Mr. Southerland. I really cannot add much to that, except
that I would agree that the government has tried to play off
one minority against another. I would like to see a study of
how the Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, and Tajik have done in Xinjiang. I
suspect we would not see any great success stories in their
case either, because historically, if you look at people
leaving the Xinjiang region, it includes also a number of
Kazakhs, for example, who have left because it was more
comfortable to go to another country. I suspect that Kazakh,
Kyrgyz, Tajik government positions in Xinjiang that have any
real power, are pretty limited. So, I do not think it is a
great success story, although it may be that in some of these
autonomous counties they have done a little better than others.
Mr. Dorman. Good. Thank you.
We have just five minutes left. But based on the notes that
are being passed to me, I think we could easily fill 90 more
minutes with questions.
What I will do, is turn the last five minutes to Dr. Kaup,
and that might be enough time for a question or two.
Ms. Kaup. I would like to get two questions in. The State
Ethnic Affairs Commission [SEAC] Web site devotes an entire
section to explaining the government's policy of shipping Han
cadres into the border areas. The first priority of the policy,
as stated by the SEAC, is for these Han Chinese to ``combat
domestic and foreign hostile forces' vain attempts to split the
motherland.'' It also justifies sending Han Chinese into the
border regions to help lead economic development and to assume
leadership positions for which there are not enough educated
minorities to fill.
So I have two related questions. The first is that I gather
from your testimony thus far that you think perhaps the
economic development strategy that these Han cadres are being
sent in to lead is not successfully integrating the minorities
as the government proposed. What changes or additions would you
recommend, and why?
Relatedly, is the government doing all that it can to
promote education among ethnic minorities to ensure that they
get an even chance to secure good jobs in an effort to weaken
major ethnic tensions?
Mr. Starr. Well, I should not use the word ``paradox''
again but this situation is full of paradoxes. On the one hand,
as was said earlier, this is a government that has
extraordinary power on the ground, de jure and de facto. Yet,
at the same time, it does not control some very obvious things,
such as the movement of peoples within its borders. It would be
nice if one thought migration to Xinjiang is under the control
of government forces, but it is not.
These forces are so big that government cannot control
them. Again, I cite Toops on the demographic impact of
railroads. To repeat, I think the potential for a new flood of
immigrants to Xinjiang is very real. I do not think this is
something the government has created or that it would be able
to stop it.
Similarly, I think that the basic policy changes that are
needed are those that are required in any larger polity that is
extraordinarily centralized. I think that the fate of the
Uighurs will remain a subset of the fate of China as a whole.
No one here has argued for the likelihood that Beijing will
make an exception of Xinjiang and grant it greater autonomy,
even though it has a rationale for doing so readily at hand. No
one is arguing this, and I do not know anyone who does so.
Therefore, the subject that you are convening here today is
no longer just the fate or governance in Xinjiang. It concerns
the future of government as such in the People's Republic of
China. Will there even be a degree of decentralization and
self-government? If so, the natural result of such a change in
Xinjiang that would be along the direction of your question. If
decentralization and self-government go nowhere in China as a
whole, do not expect for Beijing to make an exception of
Xinjiang.
Mr. Millward. Two very fraught issues here, and the word
``paradox'' comes to my mind again.
First of all, on the question of population flows, it is a
complicated situation. Xinjiang, on the one hand, suffers from
brain drain, to the extent that those people, be they Uighur,
or particularly Han, with the economic and intellectual
wherewithal to move east to China proper, tend to do so. This
is a problem on which they have commented. It does affect the
ability to develop the area. On the other hand, Xinjiang also
suffers--or benefits, depending on how you look at it--from the
flow of labor from the east into Xinjiang. This is the aspect
of this issue that Western commentators have most focused on.
We tend to decry such immigration as a deliberate attempt to
submerge the Uighur population in a grand sea of Han Chinese.
I, too, have enough sense of Uighur culture and of the
region's particular characteristics to feel wistful at the
changes you can see happening to a city like Kashgar, since the
railroad has been opened, with an influx of Han population. But
I think the United States really has to think about how we
express concern over this issue, because we have wanted free
movement of people in China. We want a free labor market. We do
not advocate controls on people moving around. This was the
bad, old China, now we are seeing the results of the good, new
China. We do not maintain in this country, any more, ethnic
regional enclaves.
Mr. Starr. Well, there are the Indian territories.
Mr. Millward. Well, I should say we do not create them any
more. But if something like that were to come up again, it
might be a question. I am not sure that the model of Indian
territories is one that we would necessarily want to suggest to
China. It is a question. This is a problem.
A very similar problem concerns that of education. Chinese
officials would answer your question about whether or not they
are doing their best to raise the standards of living, the
educational level of people in Xinjiang, and they would say,
``Look, we have a new program to render more uniform the
educational system so that all people in Xinjiang are literate
in Chinese.'' Well, as we know, this has been a very
controversial change in the educational system. But again, we
have had the same debates in the United States over bilingual
education.
By and large, over the last 50 years, China has been, if
``liberal'' is the word you could use, very liberal in
permitting and encouraging bilingual education and a
multilingual system at the official level, something which the
United States has not done.
There are, of course, arguments both ways. Obviously,
knowledge of the majority language, the language of official
business, the language of commerce, is important to members of
any society if one is to get ahead. On the other hand, no one
wants to have the language forced upon you or your children.
I do not have an easy answer to this, except to say that by
ratcheting up tensions over these issues and in an automatic
sort of way implying that these policies are aimed at some sort
of cultural genocide, I do not think those kinds of accusations
are going to be useful.
Mr. Dorman. I think, with that, we will have to,
unfortunately, call the roundtable to an end. I will apologize
to our panelists for keeping you five minutes longer than 90
minutes. It was certainly a very important conversation. So,
with that, I will call this roundtable to a close.
Thank you very much.
[Whereupon, at 11:35 a.m. the roundtable was concluded.]
A P P E N D I X
=======================================================================
Prepared Statements
----------
Prepared Statement of James A. Millward
NOVEMBER 16, 2005
One of the many international repercussions of the events of 11
September 2001, was a shift in the official PRC public position with
regard to separatism in Xinjiang. From a stance generally playing down
the threat of violent unrest in the region (no doubt in the interest of
encouraging foreign investment), PRC and Xinjiang authorities instead
chose to highlight possible linkages between Uyghur separatism and
international Islamist movements and Al Qa'ida. While this shift has
been widely seen as an attempt to seek ``cover'' for a crackdown on
Uyghurs in Xinjiang that has resulted in many human rights abuses, in
fact, that crackdown had been ongoing for several years before 9-11.
Less often noted is the fact that the shift occurred at the precise
moment when the United States inaugurated a robust and unprecedented
military presence in former-Soviet Central Asia--and China's backyard.
Though the official Chinese reaction to the advent of U.S. military
bases in Central Asia was muted, Beijing and Urumchi almost certainly
greeted this development with great alarm.
Outside of China, many scholars and observers of Xinjiang believe
that the PRC has exaggerated the extent of the current terrorist threat
in Xinjiang and mischaracterized the nature of Uyghur separatist
dissent as exclusively Islamist and terrorist. I myself have argued
that while several violent separatist incidents and demonstrations that
turned violent occurred between 1990 and 1997, the situation since then
has been calmer, probably due to the effectiveness of security
operations in Xinjiang. Likewise, while some Uyghur groups organized
and publicized their cause from Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan in the 1980s
and 1990s, the formation of the SCO and China's growing trade,
diplomatic and security arrangements with the Central Asian states have
largely curtailed Uyghur freedom of organization in the region, and
effectively eliminated the threat of cross-border separatist enclaves.
Nevertheless, the PRC remains extremely concerned over the region,
ratcheting up restrictions on the practice of Islam in Xinjiang (but
not elsewhere in China), policing Uyghur cultural expression,
prohibiting even peaceful expression of dissent, and in other ways
continuing a crackdown that produces obvious disaffection among Uyghur
and other non-Han ethnic groups in the region, not to mention
continuing criticism from abroad.
The question, then, is why, given robust economic growth and
ostensible stability in Xinjiang, the PRC remains so worried about it
that its policies there invite international opprobrium and exacerbate
the very ethnic tensions it hopes to diffuse? One answer may be that
the threat of a militant separatist or terrorist campaign is actually
greater than it appears. There may be secret information shedding light
on this, but from the open source materials available to me, it does
not seem to be the case.
Here I wish to focus on another possible answer. Chinese insecurity
about Xinjiang is based on a 200-year history of outside involvement
and intervention in this frontier region. The Chinese view of the
region's history stresses foreign interference above all else as the
source of trouble in Xinjiang from the 18th century to the present.
Against this background, and viewing Xinjiang's past as they do,
Chinese see both the U.S. military presence in Central and South Asia,
and the precedent of the ``color revolutions,'' as a real threat to
security in Xinjiang.
historical review: a focus on foreign involvement in xinjiang
The modern epoch of Chinese control over the Xinjiang region began
in the mid-eighteenth century with the Manchu Qing dynasty's conquest
of the region. At the time, the Qianlong emperor justified Xinjiang
conquest as a defensive necessity arising from a decades-long war with
the Zunghar Mongols. Following the conquest, the Qing established an
administration in Xinjiang and encouraged settlement and agricultural
reclamation by Han and Hui Chinese. In this respect, Beijing's approach
to Xinjiang in the 18th and 19th centuries more resembles Russian
eastward expansion into Siberia, or even the westward expansion of
European settlers across North America, than it does the episodes of
Chinese projection of power into the Xinjiang region from over a
millennium earlier.
Though it is often stated in western writings that the Muslim
occupants of Xinjiang chafed under and frequently rebelled against Qing
rule, troubles in the region in imperial times resulted more often from
invasion than from local rebellion. From the early through mid-
nineteenth century, Qing rule in Xinjiang was disrupted several times
by invasions from Khokand (in modern Uzbekistan). The spark for a major
rebellion in the 1860s-1870s was domestic and ethno-religious; but this
movement by local Chinese Muslims (Hui) and Uyghurs was soon taken over
by Yaqub Beg, an adventurer from Khokand, who imposed a regime largely
with his own Central Asian troops. The Ottoman empire and British
empire opened contacts with Yaqub Beg's emirate, and London attempted
to broker an agreement between the Qing and Yaqub Beg's representatives
to establish an independent buffer state under Yaqub Beg's rule in
Xinjiang. Meanwhile, Tsarist Russia took advantage of the disruption to
annex much of northern Xinjiang.
In late nineteenth-century Qing court debates over whether to
reconquer Xinjiang, advocates of reconquest echoed the earlier
arguments of the Qianlong emperor that control of the Xinjiang was
vital to the security of the capital. This point of view won the day,
bolstered by the growing threat from Russia, which had expanded into
Manchuria and only returned northern Xinjiang to the Qing after
concerted diplomatic efforts backed up by a Qing threat of force.
Russia nonetheless extracted many commercial concessions, and over
subsequent decades aggressively expanded its economic interests in
Xinjiang.
The transition from Qing imperial to Chinese republican rule was
accompanied in Xinjiang, as elsewhere in China, by devolution to
warlord control after 1911. Two decades of misrule led to rebellion in
the 1930s and the formation in 1933 of the short-lived Eastern
Turkestan Republic in Kashgar (southwestern Xinjiang). This was a
local, largely secularist republican movement, the culmination of years
of Uyghur intellectual ferment inspired by Islamic modernist trends
emanating from Russia and Turkey and disseminated through new schools
in Xinjiang. Turkey
expressed solidarity with the new ETR, but provided no tangible aid.
Still, this Turkish connection has led Chinese scholars ever since to
brand Uyghur separatist movements ``pan-Turkic.''
Other states likewise took interest in Xinjiang during the
tumultuous 1930s. Japan followed events there closely, and its Kwantung
Army even drew up a personnel roster for the puppet government it hoped
to establish in Xinjiang. This was mere fantasy, but Soviet
intervention was very real: Soviet air power, advisers and troops
helped quell the various warring factions in Xinjiang and establish a
client, Sheng Shicai, in the Governor's office in Urumchi. Soviet ties
with Xinjiang continued to expand, especially in the north, which grew
increasingly integrated economically with the Soviet Union.
The Nationalist (Guomindang) Chinese government managed to
reestablish some influence in Xinjiang in the early 1940s. However,
northern Xinjiang was soon roiled by an anti-Chinese rebellion that
gave birth to another separatist government. This movement began
Islamic and strongly anti-Chinese; however, it soon fell under Soviet
influence if not outright control, and turned secular and socialist and
scaled back its initial anti-Chinese vitriol. This new government,
initially also known as the Eastern Turkestan Republic, governed
northern Xinjiang from 1944 until 1949. PRC scholars and ideologues
officially treat this ``Three Districts Revolution,'' as it is known,
as a chapter in the Chinese revolution, and represent the Soviet role
as fraternal and secondary to the efforts of Chinese revolutionaries.
Privately, however, Chinese who know about it regard this second ETR as
a Soviet effort to collude with separatists to carve a pro-Soviet
client state much like the Republic of Mongolia out of China's Xinjiang
flank.
Communist Chinese assumption of power in Xinjiang in 1949 was
uncontested, as the ETR in the north was a socialist ally, and the
Guomindang general in charge of southern Xinjiang opted to surrender
the region and his troops. The one group that did openly resist,
however, were Kazakhs under Osman Batur. Chinese scholars and
politicians make much of the fact that the last U.S. official in the
Ti-hwa (Urumchi) consulate, CIA agent Douglas MacKiernan, met with
Osman before the Communist takeover and fled to Osman's camp on the eve
of the PLA arrival in Urumchi. Though the PLA easily defeated Osman,
MacKiernan's involvement is seen as a U.S. plot to support an anti-
Communist guerilla resistance in Xinjiang similar to the later CIA-
sponsored resistance in Tibet.
During the 1950s, PRC minority nationality policies in Xinjiang
were remarkably liberal and in theory culturally pluralistic. During
the Great Leap and Cultural Revolution eras, however, and especially
following the Sino-Soviet split, pluralistic policies gave way to a
wave of Han chauvinism and the lurch toward radical Maoism. Even as
Uyghur and other ethnic cadres were being purged for alleged Soviet
sympathies, the USSR seemed to lend credence to those charges by
massing troops and sponsoring a ``Xinjiang Minority Refugee Army'' to
engage in maneuvers along the Sino-Soviet frontier. There were nearly
continuous skirmishes, and some serious clashes, on the Xinjiang border
from the late 1960s through the early 1970s.
CONCLUSION
It is a cliche, but nonetheless true, that the Chinese pay more
attention to history than we do in the United States. The narrative I
have presented above is factual, if one-sided (a more nuanced version
of Xinjiang's past, one that includes a Uyghur perspective, would of
course be more accurate). It represents how Chinese view the region's
history, and in China more polemical versions of this narrative,
stressing ceaseless foreign efforts to ``split Xinjiang from the great
family of the motherland,'' are staple fare in history texts, on web
sites, and in the speeches of political leaders. Through the 1980s and
1990s Chinese officials routinely insinuated that U.S. machinations
underlay Uyghur separatist sentiment. Many Chinese believe this.
Chinese scholars writing on contemporary Xinjiang regularly reference
the NATO intervention in Kosovo and, now, the ``color revolutions,'' in
discussing the international context of Xinjiang separatism. I have no
reason to doubt their sincerity on this point either.
I do not intend to justify draconian policies in Xinjiang by saying
they derive from a skewed understanding of history. Nevertheless, if we
recognize the long history of foreign involvement in the Xinjiang
region, and understand that many Chinese leaders believe their own
propagandistic polemics of foreign threat, we may better understand
what seems like intransigence with regard to Xinjiang. Moreover, we may
see how the advent of U.S. military bases in Central Asia and
Afghanistan, enhanced U.S. military cooperation with Pakistan and
India, together with the example of American involvement in the ``color
revolutions'' in former Soviet lands, could exacerbate Chinese
anxieties. Finally, by understanding how Chinese view Xinjiang security
against this historical background of foreign involvement and
intervention, we may learn to shape our expressions of concern in more
effective ways.
What might some of those ways be?
Human rights: Continued vocal, high-level expressions of
concern over human rights, civil rights, religious rights and cultural
autonomy for Uyghurs and other groups in Xinjiang, such as those
expressed in the reports of the Congressional Executive Commission, are
important and effective. Efforts by the U.S. State Department and NGOs
have achieved real successes both in helping individual prisoners of
conscience (Rabiya Kadeer) and in informing an international public
about Xinjiang conditions. Tursunjan Emet, who has recently been
imprisoned for ten years for writing a story about a blue pigeon, might
be a good next candidate for special attention. Literature is not
terrorism.
Development: Uyghurs in Xinjiang and their supporters
abroad frequently complain about inequalities arising from the rapid
development of Xinjiang, in particular regarding allocation of jobs and
resources to Han versus other ethnic groups and the urban renewal
efforts. Many of these problems involve racial discrimination and local
corruption, and are deplorable, if not alien to our own experience in
the United States. By treating them as part of a master plan emanating
from Beijing, however, we do not help the situation. The U.S. posture
here should be constructive: sharing experience in local development
initiatives, minority business grants and other state programs to
defend minority and ethnic civil rights will be more effective than
broad accusations.
Chinese migration into Xinjiang: reports by human rights
groups and by this Commission have pointed out examples of the
recruitment of Han laborers and settlers to move to Xinjiang. Insofar
as these are official policies, they merit criticism as
counterproductive to the very goals of development and raised standards
of living for all Xinjiang residents that the PRC espouses. But
expressions of outrage at the very fact that Han Chinese are moving
into Xinjiang may be misplaced. It is common to cite the statistic that
Han now represent over 40 percent of the Xinjiang population, compared
to only 5 percent in 1949. However, Uyghurs are not dying out. While
their relative proportion of the Xinjiang population has declined, in
absolute numbers they have nearly tripled since 1949. The United States
supports the lifting of Chinese controls on residence, the rights to
internal travel, and the creation of a free labor market. In the United
States, we would not now advocate or create exclusive ethnic or racial
territorial enclaves--would we suggest that the PRC do so in Xinjiang?
We cannot reasonably insist that Han be excluded from a province
comprising a sixth of PRC territory. There are, however, severe
environmental restraints on development in many parts of Xinjiang, and
on these grounds we could suggest that a rational development strategy
would not involve massive in-migration to a desertifying, water-poor
region.
Security: It is not constructive to accuse the PRC of a
lack of transparency or excessive military budgets while the United
States is simultaneously expanding its military presence in Central and
South Asia. We must recognize that from China's point of view, the
United States appears to have been working since 9-11 to build a new
arc of bases and allies in their backyard, and that this seems
consistent with a policy to ``contain'' China. If the United States
wishes to collaborate on terrorism, reassure China of our intentions
and simultaneously reduce perceived threats in Xinjiang, it would be
wise to engage with the Shanghai Cooperation Organization as a body,
rather than pursuing a series of bilateral arrangements with its
members.
Notes:
James Millward, Violent Separatism in Xinjiang: A Critical
Assessment, Policy Studies # 6 (Washington: East-West Center, 2004).
______
Prepared Statement of S. Frederick Starr
NOVEMBER 16, 2005
A visitor to Xinjiang today will find much to admire. The land is
austere but beautiful, and the great oases that ring the Taklamakan
desert are verdant. Thanks to oil and gas production it is a prosperous
territory, at least in a statistical sense, with more production than
any other non-coastal province of China. Oil wealth has turned the once
somnolent Turkic town of Urumchi into a humming metropolis. The newly
opened railroad to Kashgar will doubtless produce the same result in
that historic center of Turkic and Muslim life.
The problem is that nine-tenths of the inhabitants of the new
Urumchi are Han Chinese who have only recently settled in a province
whose population was 98 percent Turkic only three generations ago. The
same process is beginning in Kashgar, Xinjiang's second city.
Meanwhile, the oases on which the majority Uyghur and other Turkic
peoples live are very poor by comparison.
This is a common problem of development and has certain parallels
in the expansion of Russia, Australia, Brazil, and the United States.
What is noteworthy is how the Chinese government has dealt with it. For
a generation and a half after 1949 Beijing took a hard line to impose
its control, using tough top-down controls whenever necessary. After
1985 it shifted to a softer approach, focusing on economic incentives,
affirmative action in education, and a respectful place for the Turkic
Uyghur language in public life. Then in the late 1990s, concerned over
what it terms ``splittism'' or separatism and radical Islam, China's
government shifted back to a policy that is harsh to the point of
brutality, as is implied by the very name of its campaign in the
region, ``Strike Hard, Maximum Pressure! ''
This policy continues today, and with devastating consequences.
Thousands have died in confrontations with the police, including some
300 young people in the northern town of Ili who, in 1997, dared to
mount an independent campaign against alcohol abuse. In terms of nearly
all the commonly accepted indexes of democracy and human rights, the
situation in Xinjiang is lamentable.
Permit me to touch briefly on ten areas that should be of concern
to your committee. I do so as the editor of a multi-year study of
Xinjiang funded by the Luce Foundation and carried out by the Central
Asia-Caucasus Institute at Johns Hopkins University's Nitze School of
Advanced International Studies. Some eighteen scholars, most of whom
know Uyghur and other local Turkic languages as well as Han Chinese and
all of whom have carried out research in Xinjiang, contributed to the
study, available as a book entitled Xinjiang: China's Muslim Borderland
(M.E. Sharp). The comments that follow are based on research findings
of this book but I take sole responsibility for their contents.
So, let us ask:
1. Are there free and fair elections in Xinjiang? No, any
more than there are in other areas of China with the partial
exception of Hong Kong.
2. Does there exist a parliamentary body or other form of
representing public opinion at the governmental level? No. The
Communist apparatus is alive and well in Xinjiang and is safely
controlled from above from Beijing. At its best, the Party is
capable of discerning public discontent and even acting on it.
But even this minimal form of responsiveness is done for the
Turkic peoples and not by them.
3. Does the Turkic population, which is still a slight
majority, enjoy equal rights with the Han Chinese? For a decade
after 1985 something approaching this occurred, but by 2000
political, economic, social, and religious rights of the Turkic
peoples were again being systematically repressed. The number
of Uyghurs in top government posts has shrunk, the government
has clamped down on Turkic entrepreneurship, health indicators
are far better for urban Han Chinese than for Turkic peoples,
and Muslim practice is severely
restricted.
4. Is the court system free of governmental interference? No,
any more than it was free in the USSR, from which Mao's China
borrowed many of its judicial institutions and practices.
5. Does the government observe minimal international
standards for the maintenance of persons held in jails and
labor camps? No. Worse, Xinjiang's jails are subject to so
powerful an information blackout that information on even the
most egregious instances of brutality can takes years to leak
out, or may go totally unreported.
6. Do the Turkic peoples of Xinjiang have reasonable access
to income-producing employment and social services? No. Nearly
all the most remunerative employment in Xinjiang is in Han
Chinese hands, and when Uyghur businesswoman Rebiya Kadeer
become one of the most successful entrepreneurs in China she
was jailed for eight years. Higher education is now conducted
entirely in Han Chinese, and any Turkic parent wishing for
younger children to get ahead will avoid placing them in those
lower schools that teach in Uyghur.
7. Is the practice of religion free from governmental
interference? No. The return to ``hard'' policies toward the
Muslim majority in Xinjiang after 1985 gave rise to a very
small but active strain of Islamic extremism in Xinjiang.
Moreover, during the 1990s the province was subjected to
influences from Taliban Afghanistan and fundamentalist areas in
Pakistan. The effort to suppress these led to a general and
indiscriminate crackdown on Islam in Xinjiang, including
mainstream and traditionalist Sunni practice and the Sufi
orders that once flourished there. One of the latter was
suppressed only this August.
8. Are domestic or international NGOs able to function in
Xinjiang? Nearly every attempt at self-organization and
voluntarism by indigenous Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, and Tajiks
has been suppressed, in some cases with the loss of hundreds of
lives. Foreign NGOs do not operate on the territory of
Xinjiang.
9. Are there free media in Xinjiang? No. Not only that, but
Beijing, through its Shanghai Cooperation Organization and
other forms of diplomatic pressure, has successfully stifled
free expression on Xinjiang-related issues in the neighboring
sovereign states of Kazakhstan, the Kyrgyz Republic,
Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan.
10. Do citizens of Xinjiang have access to international
travel and contacts through which they can air their concerns
in relevant international media and forums? No. International
travel and communications by Turkic citizens of Xinjiang is
severely restricted. Even the border trade with Kazakhstan,
Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan is now largely in the hands of Han
Chinese. Internet access in Turkic towns is extremely limited
or nonexistent. As a result, Xinjiang's indigenous population
has no way of projecting its voice to the world. The emigre
community of Xinjiang Uyghurs, Kazakhs, etc. is active but the
small number of its members and pressure from Beijing assure
that its voice is barely audible.
Beijing believes that its ``Strike Hard, Maximum Pressure''
campaign is a prudent response to a genuine threat of religious
extremism and separatism and only this August has reaffirmed it. Let us
recognize that Islamic radicalism does exist in Xinjiang and the
government of China would be irresponsible if it were to ignore it. Two
radical Islamist groups in Xinjiang were recognized by the United
States and the United Nations as terrorist organizations. But Beijing's
uncompromising response is rendered counterproductive when it coincides
with such harsh measures against the mainstream population as those
outlined above.
These in turn are rationalized in terms of the campaign against
separatism. Yet the ``Strike Hard'' campaign has long since wiped out
whatever separatist currents may have existed in Xinjiang a decade ago.
Those few voices still calling for Xinjiang's independence arise from
abroad and are audible mainly on the Internet.
Today, the overwhelming majority of Xinjiang Uyghurs, Kazakhs,
Kyrgyz, and Tajiks would be quite content with a greater degree of
autonomy, as opposed to outright independence. Their plea is simply for
the current Chinese government to fulfill the expectations that Mao
Zedong himself generated when, after conquering the province, named it
the ``Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region'' (emphasis mine).
The U.S. government, other western countries, and the EU have
rightly been concerned with the state of democracy, human rights, and
religious freedoms in the Caucasus and Central Asia. With the collapse
of Soviet imperial rule eight new states were created in these regions.
At independence, all of them were weak and poor, with small populations
ranging from four to 24 million. They were inaccessible to trade and
those lacking oil and gas were poor in resources. None had any real
experience with democracy and the rights that citizenship should
confer. Our efforts in behalf of democracy, human rights, and religious
freedom have concentrated above all on these eight states.
However, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia constitute only a part of
the Caucasus. The rest of the region--Dagestan, Ingushetia, North
Ossetia, Chechnya, and Kabardino-Balkaria--remains under Russian rule.
Similarly, Kazakhstan, the Kyrgyz Republic, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan,
and Uzbekistan are only part of Central Asia, the rest being
Afghanistan and Xinjiang.
Merely to mention this raises an obvious point. It cannot be denied
that the independent countries I just listed are guilty of many and at
times serious lapses in the areas of democracy, human rights, and
religious freedom. So, of course, were the newly independent United
States of America. But even at their worst, their record in all three
areas of concern to your committee is far better than is the record of
Russia's rule in Chechnya, Dagestan, and Ingushetia, and of China's
rule in Tibet and in Xinjiang.
And yet how different is our response to the two situations! When
the small, weak, relatively poor, but independent states stumble in the
area of democracy, human rights, and religious freedom we editorialize
against them, pass censure motions, heap public abuse on their leaders,
threaten to suspend aid, and decertify them even for humanitarian
assistance. But when large, rich and powerful states impose their rule
over other parts of the same region with brutal and primitive force--in
the process assaulting the principles of democracy, human rights, and
religious freedom--we continue to receive their leaders as honored
guests and otherwise remain silent.
By the act of its founding the United States placed itself on the
side of national self-determination and those seeking freedom from
imperial rule. Recently, however, it appears that we have reversed this
age-old stance. We seem to acquiesce in serious abuses committed by
those who are the heirs of empires acquired by force, and instead focus
narrowly on the shortcomings of independent states that have no
understanding of how to apply the values we hold high.
The word ``engagement'' is a resonant term in this city's
discussion of foreign affairs. Applied to the Caucasus and Central
Asia, we seem more willing to engage with those in Moscow who rule the
North Caucasus and with those in Beijing who rule Xinjiang, than we are
with those in the eight newly independent states who are trying,
against formidable odds, to govern their countries under conditions of
great insecurity and to build their still fragile economies in a
globalized world with which they had little or no direct contact until
very recently.
Let me be clear: I am not arguing against engagement with the
Peoples Republic of China, nor am I proposing that we ``give a pass''
to governments in Central Asia and the Caucasus when they commit abuses
in the area of democratization, human rights, and religious freedom.
Instead, I am suggesting that it is time that we take our finger off
the scales, and start acting on our values in a consistent manner. At
the very least, we must stop allocating rewards and punishments,
engagement and rebuke, on the basis of whether a country is large or
small, secure or vulnerable, powerful or weak. Removing what appears to
many as a double standard will go far toward promoting the noble ends
we seek to promote.
______
Prepared Statement of Daniel Southerland
NOVEMBER 16, 2005
``The [RFA] programs speak to my heart. . . .The world must hear
what is going on here.''--RFA Uyghur service listener.
The Chinese government has for many years tightly controlled
information reaching the Uyghur people in Xinjiang. But the
government's controls over the media and freedom of expression in
Xinjiang appear to have grown even stricter since the 9/11 attacks in
the United States in 2001.
The Chinese government currently controls the media in Xinjiang
even more tightly than in other parts of China, except perhaps for
Tibet. As a result, broadcasting to the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous
Region (XUAR) has constituted one of the most challenging tasks
undertaken by Radio Free Asia (RFA).
RFA broadcasts in 12 languages and dialects to listeners in Asia
who primarily have access only to state-run media. RFA's purpose is to
deliver accurate news, information, and commentary, and to provide a
forum for a variety of voices from within Asian countries that do not
tolerate free media. RFA, by broadcasting objective news, seeks to
promote freedom of opinion and expression, including the freedom to
seek, receive, and impart information and ideas through any medium
regardless of frontiers. This principle is enshrined in Article 19 of
the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
When it comes to Uyghur language broadcasting, RFA is the only
broadcaster that attempts to provide accurate and objective news. Saudi
Arabia does some broadcasting in the Uyghur language, but only on
religious matters. Taiwan stopped broadcasting in Uyghur several years
ago. Central Asian broadcasts in Uyghur are edited so as to avoid
offending the Chinese government.
The Chinese government itself broadcasts in Uyghur but censors the
information that is of the greatest relevance to the Uyghur people.
Foreign correspondents rarely travel to Xinjiang. When they do go, it
is mostly on guided tours. RFA covers stories no one else covers. And
the Chinese government is doing things in Xinjiang that it no longer
does in many other parts of China. Executions of political prisoners
are common. Officials don't just ban books in Xinjiang. They burn them.
They force Uyghurs to work on roads and construction projects without
pay. School-age children are forced to pick cotton. They restrict
religious education, even in the home. They rewrite textbooks so that
Ugyhurs cannot recognize their own history. Perhaps most significant,
the government is now imposing the latest of many educational
``reforms'' that will largely replace the use of the Uyghur language
with the Chinese language. This started at the university level is now
being implemented at lower levels of the educational system.
RFA has reported extensively on the forced labor and language
issues in recent months. Over the last year, RFA has also covered such
taboo subjects as environmental pollution in Uyghur villages, land
disputes involving the forced displacement of Uyghur villagers, and
restrictions on religious sermons, religious attire, and mosque-
building.
In such a repressive environment, Uyghur writers are particularly
vulnerable. They can easily be accused of engaging in ``separatist
thought.'' A writer promoting non-violent dissent can be accused of
advocating terrorism. For instance, in mid-2005, RFA reported that the
Chinese authorities had arrested Nurmuhemmet Yasin, the author of a
fictional first-person narrative of a young pigeon--the son of a pigeon
king who is trapped and caged by humans when he ventures far from home.
In the end, the pigeon commits suicide by swallowing a poisonous
strawberry rather than sacrifice his freedom.
The authorities apparently read the story, titled ``Wild Pigeon,''
as an indictment of China's heavy-handed rule in Xinjiang. They gave
Yasin a 10-year jail term for inciting Uyghur separatism. RFA later
learned that the chief editor of the Kashgar Literature Journal, which
published the fable, was given a three-year prison sentence. The fate
of these two men might have gone unreported had RFA not learned about
the prison sentences from sources inside Xinjiang.
No wonder, then, that the Chinese government heavily jams RFA
broadcasts to Xinjiang. Jamming consists of heavy noise, loud music and
co-channeled Chinese programs. China typically jams any new frequency
that RFA selects within 30 to 40 minutes of the first broadcast. Every
month, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) files a complaint
against Chinese jamming of U.S.-supported broadcasts with the
International Telecommunications Union. China consistently denies that
it is jamming.
Three years ago, the Chinese government-run Xinjiang Radio and
Television station revealed that the government had invested 300
million yuan (nearly $40 million) in a new project designed to more
heavily jam international broadcasts. The targets were obviously RFA
Uyghur and RFA and Voice of America Mandarin broadcasts. At the same
time, the government began building up its own Uyghur broadcasting
capability.
In late July 2004, the Chinese government began trying to disrupt
RFA's Mandarin, Tibetan, and Uyghur call-in shows. Chinese operators
told callers that the regular access number to RFA was dead. Meanwhile,
persons apparently working for the government bombarded RFA day after
day with hundreds of automated phone calls in an apparent attempt to
block out legitimate regular callers. Callers complained about busy
signals eight out of 10 times when seeking 800-number access.
Fortunately, dedicated RFA callers were able to overcome these
problems. And callers continue to give RFA tips that once checked out
lead to important stories.
One such tip came late last year from a farmer in Xinjiang who had
been trying together with other farmers to get a state-run TV and radio
station to run a story on a disease that was killing livestock in the
Ili prefecture.
``We went to the local media to ask them to inform our herdsmen
about the disease, but all of them said that without approval from a
supervisor, they couldn't report it. Finally we sent someone to Ili
City, to the Uyghur radio station, and their answer was the same--but
they told us to inform Radio Free Asia's Uyghur service. So we called
you.''
RFA could obviously not use this story based on a phone call from
an anonymous farmer, but eventually we got confirmation from an
official in the regional animal husbandry bureau. The disease turned
out to be hoof-and-mouth disease, a highly contagious virus affecting
cows and sheep.
The Chinese government heavily blocks RFA Web sites directed at
China in Mandarin, Cantonese, Tibetan, and Uyghur. But we know that our
news does get through via proxy servers and ``human proxies'' who e-
mail our reports or post them on different Web sites.
The Uyghur Web site has now become the only Web site that is
updated continuously in all three scripts used by the Uyghurs: Arabic,
Cyrillic, and Latin. All three are immediately available at the click
of a button. An innovative feature, launched on August 5, 2005, allows
the reader to switch instantly from one script to another. In addition
to providing accurate and timely news reports, the site also functions
as a collective memory for the Uyghurs' besieged culture. It carries
regular features on Uyghur history and cultural and artistic life, and
on the works of Uyghur scholars and scientists. RFA recently added a
message board. The Uyghur community around the world uses it to post
poems, short stories, personal thoughts, and announcements of events.
The RFA Uyghur Web site received an Edward R. Murrow award last
year for its innovation, functionality, interactivity, and design.
An RFA story earlier this year showed that news sent via the
Internet can reach Xinjiang in creative ways. On March 17, Uyghur
businesswoman Rebiya Kadeer arrived in Washington following her release
from prison in China. Kadeer had spent more than five years in prison
after protesting China's mistreatment of the Uyghurs. After Kadeer
reached Reagan National Airport, her husband, Sidik Rouzi, held her in
a tight embrace. An RFA story and a photo of this embrace went out via
the Internet to Xinjiang, where the Internet police blocked both story
and photo. But before the police could do their work, someone managed
to cut and paste, remove the banned RFA address, and move the story and
photo along. When Kadeer called her children in China, they were able
to tell her that they had seen the photo of their father and mother
embracing each other after five years apart.
But the challenge of getting such images and information into
Xinjiang remains a daunting one. Based on studies done for RFA's
research department, the atmosphere in the XUAR is clearly the most
repressive of that of any of the regions in China. One study concludes
that the PRC authorities have ``used the `global war on terror' to
justify harsh measures in the XUAR designed to stamp out political and
social dissent, with little distinction between acts of violence and
acts of passive
resistance.''
In contrast with other parts of China, where people now feel free
in private to discuss personal matters or even political issues when
they do not directly challenge the Chinese Communist Party, many
Uyghurs dare not discuss sensitive issues, even with friends or family
members.
Although Internet usage is spreading gradually in the XUAR,
particularly the use of Internet chat rooms, accessing the Web sites of
international broadcasters remains an activity too risky for most
Uyghurs to try.
But for many Uyghurs, RFA broadcasts remain a ``lifeline'' in a
hostile PRC media environment. International broadcasts are the only
means for many Uyghurs to get reliable news of the outside world as
well as news about developments inside the XUAR.
``RFA broadcasts, like an educator, have brightened our hearts,''
one listener commented recently. ``They have opened our eyes. China
always wants to keep the Uyghurs ignorant of the world. But now we
understand democracy, human rights, and freedom. RFA broadcasting means
more than food, drink, and air to us, because it gives us hope and
inspiration. We hope RFA increases broadcasting time in the Uyghur
language.''