My Dinner With Alptekin

In which I break bread with the Uighur democracy movement in Arlington, Virginia.
BY ISAAC STONE FISH

One day, the Communist Party chief of the vast Chinese region of Xinjiang visits a rural area on a publicity tour. 

A little girl comes up to him and says, "Mr. Secretary, there's this beautiful Uighur baby -- you should hug her." 

As soon as he does, the baby starts crying and spits on his face! 

"What's her name?" the party chief bellows. 

"Rebiya," the little girl says. 

And so he shouts and drops the baby!
I heard this joke from Nury Turkel, a lawyer and activist for the independence movement of China's beleaguered Uighur minority -- a Turkic-language-speaking, Islam-practicing people, numbering around 20 million -- at a dinner party in an Arlington, Virginia, apartment building on Nov. 11. 

Two weeks prior, a Uighur had crashed a car into the heart of Beijing, killing five and injuring dozens. 

An attack like that is extremely rare in China, and it reportedly led to scaled-up scrutiny of Uighurs throughout the country. 

On Nov. 16, Xinjiang authorities said assailants armed with knives and axes attacked a police station in a remote part of the region, leaving 11 dead, though details are murky. 

Ethnic tensions remain high, and more bloodshed will likely follow.
The joke, which Turkel told to me with good cheer and decent timing, surrounded by Uighur luminaries from around the world, may not have been funny, but the symbolism was clear. 

The Rebiya, of course, is Rebiya Kadeer, the president of the World Uyghur Congress (WUC) and the leader of the Uighur independence, or democracy, movement. 

Like with Tibetan activists abroad, China views members of the Uighur movement as "terrorists" trying to "illegally split" the country, and it has made clear it will brook no dissent in Xinjiang. 

All Kadeer and the Uighur movement can do, the joke implies, is spit in the face of the Chinese. 

And we all know what happens when you drop a baby.
The dinner party, in celebration of the 80th and 69th anniversaries of the founding of two short-lived East Turkestan republics, had that same spit-in-the-eye sense of fatalism. 

In 1950, one year after reunifying China, the Communist Party conquered the roughly 640,000 square mile swath of land that East Turkestan was part of, calling it Xinjiang, which means "New Frontier." 

China has ruled the territory since then; today, no country recognizes the Uighur homeland. 

Although China claims some Uighurs in Xinjiang work with the shadowy East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM), which it calls a terrorist organization, it is unknown whether there is an active freedom-fighting movement operating within Xinjiang, and the U.S. State Department does not include ETIM on its list of terrorist organizations. 

I'm no oddsmaker, but East Turkestan's independence seems only slightly more likely than Dennis Rodman being named ambassador to North Korea.
Turkel, a former president of the Washington, D.C.-based Uyghur American Association (UAA), an advocacy group, and Alim Seytoff, the current president, addressed, on some level, the quixotic nature of their goal. 

The UAA held an event commemorating the East Turkestan anniversaries on Capitol Hill on Nov. 12. 

They invited members of Congress, "but because of the shutdown none of them will come," Seytoff said, ignoring -- out of politeness, political savvy, obliviousness, or a combination of the three -- the fact that the government shutdown had already ended. 

The real reason is likely a combination of the near-total lack of interest Americans have in the Uighur cause and Beijing's well-documented policy of punishing politicians who meet with people -- like Uighur activists -- it considers enemies of the state.
Turkel fled China roughly a decade ago and began speaking out against official repression. 

"They wouldn't let my parents leave China and come to my wedding," he said. 

"That really pissed me off." 

Over the last few years, Xinjiang has been in a bad way. 

Ethnic riots in July 2009 in the region's capital, Urumqi, left nearly 200 dead, and July 2013 saw dozens others killed in attacks that Beijing blamed on "Islamic terrorists." 

Using these attacks in part as justification, local authorities have severely limited the right to speak out or assemble. 

Like with Tibet, Xinjiang is officially an "autonomous region," but it is firmly in Beijing's palm. 

Another famous joke, Turkel recounted that night, goes like this: "When the Chinese select the chairman of the region, they put all of the Uighurs into a box. Whoever has the softest head -- one you can really push your finger into -- they pick."
The dinner was held in a conference room on the first floor of an Arlington apartment building not far from the freeway, an apartment building that Yelp reviewers have described as "cheap" and "clean as f***." 

Apart from a conference table, the room had a little kitchen area and comfortable couches, where the women and children sat.
Besides myself, the other guests were all Uighurs, many of whom grew up in mainland China. 

One, who was last in Beijing in 1997, said, "It's a nice city; I just don't like the god-damn government." 

I asked a businessman whether he had been back to Xinjiang lately. 

"No." he responded. 

"I was back in East Turkestan. 'Xinjiang' is the word I hate more than any other. I was back in East Turkestan." 

Besides coming from Turkey and across the United States, many of the Uighurs had flown in from Germany, where the WUC was founded and where many of them live.
As we ate home-cooked Uighur lamb dumplings and flat noodles, Turkel introduced me to the roughly 15 men sitting around a table. 

"This guy runs the Uighur show in Japan," he said, pointing to a gruff man in a suit jacket. 

"And this older gentleman -- before Kadeer, this guy's father, Isa Yusuf Alptekin, was the face of the Uighur movement." 

Alptekin was a top official in East Turkestan in the 1930s and a celebrity among the Uighurs in Turkey, where many of them settled after 1949. 

"It's a Googleable name," Turkel told me. 

It was a casual gathering, though as the night progressed, several men stood up and gave speeches. Throughout the evening, the ground shook a few times, as a man lifting weights in an adjacent gym threw his barbells on the floor.
The son of the former face of the Uighur movement is Erkin Alptekin, a former WUC president and a Germany-based former journalist for the U.S. government-funded Radio Liberty. 

The WUC's website says Alptekin has attended "more than 6,000 international conference[s]" over the last 35 years. 

"Can you believe it? This guy is 74 and he was out drinking with me until 2 a.m. in Dupont Circle!" Turkel said.
"I'm a good Muslim, but I love beer and vodka," Alptekin responded good-naturedly.
Alptekin moved around the table, smiling and shaking hands. 

One of the men poured cups of whiskey under the table by his legs and surreptitiously -- but with a wink -- distributed them. 

The conversation was in Uighur, so when Alptekin stood up to speak I could not understand what provoked the belly laughs and good-natured ribbing. 

"I'm so tired of speeches," Alptekin said, plopping down next to me with an exaggerated sigh. 

Then he grew philosophical. 

"My own personal opinion: Things are going to get worse." 

The Chinese, he said, try to call this radical Islam or terrorism, but it's not: It's an independence movement that has lasted for several hundred years.
I only knew one of the men at the table -- a friend of a good friend from China -- and after listening to several speeches that I did not understand, and several gulps of whiskey, I went to go talk to him. 

But he doesn't speak much English, and I felt communicating with him in Mandarin would be in poor taste. So I smiled at him, and he smiled sadly at me, and pulled out his accordion. 

"We eat, we talk, we drink -- water or tea, not vodka, like me," Alptekin said with an exaggerated wink, as my friend stared into the distance beyond the gym wall and started playing a mournful song on the accordion. "And that's how we free East Turkestan."

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Uyghurs Commemorate East Turkestan Anniversary

By Gulchehre Keyum

Uyghurs attend an anniversary of the establishment of the East Turkestan Republics in Washington, Nov. 12, 2013. 

Ethnic Uyghurs from around the world gathered in Washington this week to commemorate the anniversary of two short-lived independent republics set up by their forefathers within what is today called the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in China.
Around 100 Uyghurs attended a ceremony on Tuesday at Capitol Hill in Washington to remember the establishment of East Turkestan republics on Nov. 12 in 1933 and 1944.
Ughyur activist and president of the Munich-based World Uyghur Congress Rebiya Kadeer praised the efforts of those who had founded the republics and called on the Uyghur people to remain strong in spirit despite what she called a policy of “repression” under the current Chinese government.
“The Uyghur people have been suffering under the oppressive government of China since the destruction of the Uyghur republics, however, the level of repression has since been extended to our beliefs and customs,” she said at the ceremony at the Rayburn House of Representatives Office Building.
Kadeer slammed the Chinese leadership for denying Uyghurs the right to “practice their religion openly and freely” and for an ongoing campaign of discrimination against the mostly Muslim ethnic group who call northwest China's Xinjiang their home.
She also condemned Beijing’s tightened security measures, which include house-to-house raids targeting Uyghur families and which have led to a string of violent incidents in Xinjiang in recent years.
“China should understand that by suppressing our people [the government] cannot silence the Uyghur call for dignity and freedom,” she said.
“I firmly believe there will come a day when we will establish an independent republic again.”

Rebiya Kadeer

The movement behind the First East Turkestan Republic, which was established in Xinjiang’s Kashgar area, grew out of a desire to strengthen the state of education amongst Uyghurs and came to a head in response to official policies promoting the Sinicization of the local populace, according to reports.
It was put down only months later by the forces of local Chinese warlord Sheng Shicai backed by Soviet troops, as Moscow reportedly feared that the Uyghur movement for independence could spread to territory along the borders with China.
The second republic was established in northern Xinjiang on Nov. 12, 1944 with Ghulja as its capital after China’s nationalist Kuomintang (KMT) Party under the leadership of Chiang Kai-Shek removed Sheng from power and subsequently lost control of the area to local Uyghurs supported by Moscow.
After the KMT administration in Xinjiang surrendered to the Communist People’s Liberation Army (PLA) in mid-1949, the Second East Turkestan Republic was absorbed back into China by the end of October that year.

Wolf letter
During Tuesday’s ceremony president of the Washington-based Uyghur American Association Alim Seytoff read a letter of congratulations from U.S. Congressman Frank Wolf to Kadeer for her work in highlighting human rights abuses by the Chinese government against Uyghurs.
“Our own State Department in its annual human rights report acknowledges the severe official repression of the freedom of speech, religious association and the harsh restrictions on the movement of ethnic Uyghurs,” the letter read.
“I pray for the day when true freedom will come to all those living under the repressive rule of the Chinese government and I will continue to urge this administration and this State Department to be a voice for those whose voices have been silenced.”
Following the ceremony at Capitol Hill, a group of Uyghurs held a protest in front of the Chinese Embassy in Washington.

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Why the Carrot Isn't Working, Either

The Chinese government thinks it can thwart unrest among ethnic minorities by raising their incomes. But prosperity doesn't buy loyalty.
BY SCOTT RADNITZ, SEAN ROBERTS

Uighurs living in Turkey burn a Chinese flag to commemorate the July 5 incident.


On Oct. 28, a car crashed in Beijing's Tiananmen Square, killing two innocent bystanders and injuring about 40 others. 

The incident appears to have been an act of terrorism, albeit quite an unsophisticated one, perpetrated by ethnic Uighurs, a Turkic Muslim population mostly living in China's Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region (XUAR). 

This is the first time in recent history that Uighurs have engaged in political violence outside the XUAR. 

The incident seems to be a product of the substantially escalating tension between Uighurs and the Chinese state.
The Uighurs view the XUAR as their homeland, an assertion that has long fueled tensions between them and the Chinese state. 

This tension has been on the rise over the last twenty years as the People's Republic of China rolled out controversial policies that emphasize integrating Uighurs into the Chinese state.

The government has used heavy-handed measures to impose this integration (sticks), but it has placed its largest bets on the hope that rising prosperity will encourage loyalty among Uighurs (carrots). 

Unfortunately, China is guided by an outdated development strategy, and it's only generating more instability.
China's most controversial integration measures suppress the Uighur culture and violate the group's human rights. 

Since the mid-1990s, the Chinese state has pursued policies that limit the Uighurs' ability to freely practice Islam and prevent all forms of political organization and expression in the XUAR. 

This has led to hundreds of arrests on political charges of "illegal religious activity," "separatism," and "terrorism," scores of which have ended in executions. 

More recently, the Chinese government has adopted education policies that force all students to study in Mandarin Chinese while limiting access to education in the Uighur language and reducing the publication and broadcasting of materials in Uighur.
But these heavy-handed cultural transformation measures tell only part of the story. 

The Chinese government has also undertaken a gigantic economic development plan for the XUAR, and has targeted rural Uighurs to partake in education and industrial work projects at institutions and factories in China's interior. 

These "softer" efforts to integrate Uighurs have not only failed to ease tensions between Uighurs and the state, but indeed appear to have exacerbated them.
This has caused frustration among Chinese policymakers and citizens, who view these efforts as a benevolent program to provide Uighurs with new opportunities and better livelihoods. 

But the Uighurs' resistance should not be surprising. 

In fact, in the modern era, many states have attempted to pacify restive minority populations through economic development, only to bear similar results.
The idea of modernization as a way to unify nations goes back several centuries. 

The nation-states of Europe we know today -- Germany, England, France -- emerged as unified entities from their fragmented forbears through the advance of communication and transportation technology, along with concerted efforts by state leaders. 

Modern states not only began to collect taxes and raise armies, but also sponsored national systems of education that propagated state ideology and instructed pupils in a single national dialect. 

Economic development birthed loyalty to the state and fellow-feeling among citizens. 

As suggested by both Marxist and free market modernization theorists, economic stability and prosperity was thought to yield harmonious, unified states.
In the 20th century, would-be state builders sought to accomplish in a few decades what took centuries to take hold in Europe, using top-down planning and industrialization. 

This approach was effective in achieving rapid growth, but it was less successful in establishing a unified body politic. 

In Turkey, leaders attempted to use a strategy of economic development through education and infrastructure to integrate minority Kurds into the new state, even as they banned the Kurdish language and suppressed its culture. 

This strategy only generated a violent movement for secession. 

Today, the Turkish government has been pressed to accommodate the still-strong Kurdish identity through new reforms.
The Soviet Union also relied on development to integrate the many peoples of its far-flung empire. 

After the Russian Revolution, the Bolsheviks sought to eliminate national identity altogether -- and with it the threat of anti-Soviet nationalism -- by delivering material progress. 

Increased well-being would bind people to the Soviet regime, while macroeconomic growth would eliminate differences between nations, ultimately transforming Latvians and Uzbeks into exclusively Soviet subjects. 

As we now know, this did not work out as planned: 70 years of development led to remarkable improvements in living standards, but it did not stifle nationalism. 

It was the wealthiest inhabitants who were the most vehement in opposing the Soviet Union.
Why doesn't prosperity buy loyalty?
First, economic development, rather than causing political passivity, tends to result in greater political engagement. 

Scholars of modernization theory recognized decades ago that urbanization, literacy, and rising incomes gave people greater means to develop their own interests and to advocate for them. 

Rather than expressing gratitude to the state that made their political consciousness possible, newly empowered classes would demand more accountable governments and sometimes overthrow them. 

In simplified form, this is the story of democratization in Europe in the 19th century. 

It is also the story of anti-colonial liberation movements, whose leaders emerged from the middle classes that were educated under colonial systems of rule.
A second reason development fails to quell nationalism is that it occurs unevenly, especially when it is rapid and state-led. 

The benefits of centralized investment, even if nominally intended for the minority masses, often fail to reach their targets. 

Instead, state largesse tends to fall disproportionately into the hands of well-connected elites (who may be settlers in minority regions rather than minority representatives themselves) or to benefit certain (usually urban) areas over others, which can increase overall inequality between majority and minority ethnic groups and exacerbate resentments. 

Prosperity and development lead more citizens of the majority group to settle in minority regions, often marginalizing minority groups in areas where they were once the primary inhabitants. 

When people are marginalized both economically and culturally, their exclusion heightens their awareness of difference from the majority and provides a unifying cause around which they can rally.
A third reason for the failure of the modernization strategy is that human beings tend to value certain ideals in addition to, and often above, material well-being. 

Money is nice, but the desire for justice, fairness, self-determination, or dignity can be a stronger driver of human behavior. 

Although the protests of the Arab uprisings were partly about unemployment and frustration with elite corruption, the demonstrators' slogans appealed to more abstract virtues in pursuit of a better society. "Bread, freedom and dignity" became a rallying cry in Egypt's Tahrir Square. 

Expression of these values is usually even more pronounced in movements involving culturally marginalized groups, who react to official suppression by asserting their language, culture, and traditions.
This brings us back to the Uighurs. 

The Chinese government's intensive development plan has only inspired conflict in the XUAR as Uighurs become increasingly marginalized in their own homeland. 

Development has in many cases displaced traditional Uighur communities, the most well known example being the destruction of the culturally significant, medieval city of Kashgar. 

In other cases the government has forcibly relocated Uighurs to accommodate large development projects. Additionally, China's policies have encouraged an influx of Han Chinese migrants into the region in pursuit of economic opportunity, reducing the Uighur share of the population. 

Finally, Uighurs are increasingly discriminated against for employment in urban areas, as the economic benefits of the region's development flow mostly to Han Chinese.
China's development efforts in the XUAR utilize an outdated top-down model of development that betters the region's GDP, but not the lives of its average citizens. 

As a result, many Uighurs perceive China's development plan as an attack on their very existence.
The failure of state-led development to ease ethnic tensions in the XUAR should not be taken as evidence that development can never mitigate conflict and unrest. 

However, when the politics of identity are involved, development planning must include all ethnic groups and communities and promote a fair distribution of wealth. 

In the absence of these considerations, China will continue to be confronted by the perverse consequences of its development policies. 

Attacks like the one in Tiananmen Square may become all too common.

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The Limits of China’s Surveillance State

By Gabe Collins

The recent attacks point to a future in which repression alone will no longer be enough to guarantee stability.
Violence in Xinjiang appears to be worsening significantly, despite Beijing’s large commitment of money and manpower to build a comprehensive surveillance apparatus intended to preempt social disorder. 

China now spends at least $111 billion per year nationwide on internal security – nearly as much as its reported 2013 military budget of approximately $114 billion.
Yet 2013 has been among the most violent years in the past decade in Xinjiang, with some data showing that at least 189 people – mostly Uyghurs – have been killed in violent confrontations with government forces since March, with many others left injured. 

More disturbingly, Xinjiang’s troubles seem to be metastasizing into other parts of China, a dynamic the authorities have worked hard to prevent.
On October 28, an SUV driven by a Uyghur man and containing two members of his family rammed into a crowd at Tiananmen Square, killing two tourists. 

The vehicle’s occupants then lit themselves on fire. 

The Tiananmen suicide attack and the rising tide of violence in Xinjiang itself suggest that in the face of determined adversaries, China’s well-manned and generously funded surveillance systems and repressive apparatus are not nearly as effective at preempting unrest as Beijing would like them to be.
Indeed, the fact that the Party stripped the senior military commander for Xinjiang, Gen. Peng Yong, of his position in the regional party’s Standing Committee less than a week after the Tiananmen attack suggests Beijing believes a senior official had to be sacrificed for significant security failures. 

Gen. Peng’s position was likely already weak due to the turmoil that has afflicted Xinjiang for much of this year.
Before delving into the strategic implications of surveillance limitations, let us take a quick look at what the parameters of the system look like today. 

China now may employ as many as two million Internet watchers to aid official censors. 

On the physical side, China has an ominously national program called “Skynet” (a name that will no doubt disconcert fans of the Terminator movies) that aims to increase the number and capabilities of surveillance cameras.
Beijing itself is leading the way. 

For those walking or driving in Beijing (and a growing number of other Chinese cities), the operative phrase increasingly is “smile, you’re on camera.” 

Beijing now reportedly has at least 800,000 CCTV cameras, according to Wu Hequan, Secretary General of the Chinese Academy of Engineering. 

As such, in each Tiananmen Square-sized block (roughly 270 meters by 380 meters), one can expect to find an average of 60 CCTV cameras.
In practice, strategic portions of the city – main streets, government sites, and landmarks like Tiananmen Square – will have much higher surveillance camera densities. 

So the Uyghurs who drove into the Square and self-immolated most likely passed hundreds of cameras, if not more, in the final kilometers of their journey. 

Yet despite running this gauntlet of cameras, web watchers, phone taps and police on the street, they were not discovered until they had entered one of the CPC’s most important sites, run down sightseers, and lit their SUV – a white Mercedes Benz – on fire.

If the car had been carrying explosives or struck a more crowded part of town, things could have been much worse.
Beijing clearly sees its growing surveillance systems as a tool for cracking down on separatist movements. 

In November 2012, The Telegraph reported that Chinese security forces intended to use a network of surveillance cameras to help end self-immolations by Tibetan protesters and that police could be on scene within two minutes after undesired activities were spotted by CCTV cameras. 

While public accounts of how video surveillance technologies are used with respect to Xinjiang are elusive, we can note that within the past month, Chinese authorities have detained at least 139 people in Xinjiang, accusing them of using the Internet to spread jihadist ideas.
At present, China may have as many as 30 million security cameras installed around the country. 

Its cities seem to be bent on adding more as quickly as possible, while enhancing their capabilities. 

For instance, Chinese cities such as Dongguan are now working to create “Smart Skynets” to improve surveillance capacity.

Strategic Implications
The Tiananmen attack will likely prompt the Chinese security agencies to take a “tactical” approach and push for installing more cameras and upgrading their technology and capabilities. 

These measures would likely include adding facial recognition software to more camera systems as well as integrating systems with one another.
However, there is a real risk that focusing heavily on technical security measures will fail to yield the security enhancements Beijing desires. 

Consider the fact that even in high-security prisons worldwide, where virtually every movement and activity is watched by guards and security cameras, drugs still get smuggled in, weapons still get made, and inmates still regularly get attacked and even killed. 

In short, where there is a will there is a way, and the limits of surveillance as a pre-emptive tool are rapidly exposed.
It increasingly appears Beijing’s longstanding “strike hard” policies in Xinjiang have not broken the will of the Uyghurs to resist, and in fact may have actually increased the ranks of those willing to openly challenge Han dominance in the region. 

The rising crescendo of violence in Xinjiang suggests that among certain segments of the Uyghur population, the wall of fear that Beijing has worked so assiduously to construct over the past 20 years may be cracking. If true, this is a serious problem because it may portend a cycle whereby violence triggers repression and tighter repression begets additional violence.
Uyghur insurgents will not be able to obtain guns domestically, but Xinjiang lies next door to several Central Asian states where borders are porous and weapons plentiful. 

However, another weapon in the insurgents' arsenal is likely plentiful in Xinjiang’s many farming areas: ammonium nitrate fertilizers that can be used to make simple, but deadly improvised explosive devices (IEDs), a technique pioneered by the Taliban in Afghanistan. 

State capacity in the region is also generally low, especially with regard to Afghanistan and Pakistan, who cannot even effectively manage their internal affairs, much less ensure border security in remote regions. 

The likely result: Beijing will be forced to invest further in securing the border from the Chinese side.
Xinjiang’s rich natural resource bounty is also at risk of insurgent attacks. 

Insurgents in other countries such as Colombia, Iraq and Yemen have made a habit of targeting energy infrastructure. 

Xinjiang’s rail network, growing number of oil & gas pipelines, and planned long-distance power lines intended to supply electricity to Central and Eastern China are all potentially at risk. 

Should insurgents decide to leverage the province’s remoteness and the difficulty of constantly watching hundreds of kilometers of vital infrastructure and begin attacking it, Beijing could have a real problem on its hands. 

Such attacks would be increasingly disruptive to the national economy as Xinjiang’s energy suppliers become more deeply entwined with consumers further east.
Beijing will not lose control of Xinjiang in the scenarios described above, but there is a rising risk that it will have to devote far more manpower and funds to maintaining security and control – a long term “surge” that turns into yet another tax on the country’s economy. 

As the country’s economy levels off onto a lower growth trajectory, China is likely to increasingly face not just “guns versus butter” tradeoffs but also “guns versus guns” as internal security concerns compete with the externally focused military services for budgetary resources.
The increased instability in Xinjiang has truly national security implications. 

China has other restive border areas such as Tibet, less violent than Xinjiang but which still command significant attention and resources from the security services. 

This situation is likely to worsen when the Dalai Lama passes from the scene with no heir apparent. 

Most importantly, the trouble Beijing is having containing the actions of what amounts to probably a few thousand true Uyghur separatists who are actually willing to take up arms suggests that serious economic disruptions in coming months and years could trigger social disorder that even the current muscular repression apparatus could not contain. 

A number of foreseeable events – a severe debt or real estate crisis, say – could rapidly trigger a time of economic reckoning in China. 

Moreover, a complex multi-trillion dollar economy such as China’s holds meaningful potential to produce various types of economic “black swan” events that could prove at least as disruptive as the foreseeable ones.
If tens of thousands of security cameras, two million internet monitors, and large internal paramilitary forces cannot resolve and contain the problems in Xinjiang, how would they cope with potentially millions of angry citizens roiled by economic problems? 

A gaping socioeconomic divide helps fuel violence in Xinjiang and such gaps exist elsewhere in China as well, raising the specter of additional attacks throughout the country as unhappy groups without a real political voice turn to violence as an outlet for their grievances. 

Indeed, on November 6, multiple bombs in the coal-mining center of Taiyuan killed one person and injured at least eight. 

China may be in for a new trend of metastasizing violence that originates in the ethnic minority borderlands, but comes to affect Han interests around the country. 

If Beijing is forced to more tightly control people movements, vehicle movements, and access to basic dual-use goods such as nitrate fertilizers, the resultant “terrorism tax” would have profound effects on trade and economic activity.
China’s leadership has proven smart and capable, but the current problems emanating from Xinjiang increasingly point to a future in which repression alone will not be enough. 

Beijing’s likely near-term solution will be to do everything it can to prop up growth, but the financial and policy measures required to do this simply raise the stakes down the road. 

Zhongnanhai faces an unenviable and complicated set of decisions as it grapples with rising domestic unrest.

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China's Account of Tiananmen Square Crash Questioned

Beijing is exaggerating the ETIM terror threat in order to justify its harsh policies against ethnic minority Uighurs

by William Gallo

Analysts are questioning China's claim that last week's deadly car crash in Tiananmen Square was the work of an al-Qaida-linked separatist group fighting in northwest China.

Two tourists were killed and scores of bystanders wounded when a car carrying three people rammed past security and burst into flames in the symbolic Beijing square last Monday.
China has called the incident a terrorist attack. 

It blames the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, or ETIM, an Islamic group said to be fighting for independence in Xinjiang province.
Michael Clarke, a Xinjiang scholar at Australia's Griffith University, told VOA the alleged attackers' apparent lack of sophistication calls into question the government's narrative of ETIM involvement.
"The immediate question is whether such a fairly amateur-looking attack can be linked to a supposedly organized terrorist group, which is what China wants the international community to believe by pointing the finger at the East Turkestan Islamic Movement," said Clarke.
China has blamed ETIM for a series of attacks on government targets in Xinjiang in recent years. 

But many, including Clarke, question the extent to which it still exists in an organized form.
Many say Beijing is exaggerating the ETIM terror threat in order to justify its harsh policies against ethnic minority Uighurs, some of whom complain of government discrimination against their Islamic religion and culture.
Others say key details are missing from the government's account of the Beijing car crash. 

Henryk Szadziewski, with the Washington-based Uyghur Human Rights Project said, "We really need to have more concrete details from Beijing to call this a terrorist attack. I think we would need to have some overtly stated political motivation, and at the moment, those details are quite sketchy."
Szadziewski agrees that China has been known to exaggerate the role of ETIM in Xinjiang. 

And he says such terror accusations serve as politically beneficial distractions from Uighur grievances.
Johan Lagerkvist, an East Asia researcher at the Swedish Institute of International Affairs, said many Uighurs feel they have "no other means to make their voices heard."
"They feel their religion and religious practices and their cultural traditions are under challenge from Chinese-speaking people moving there and they feel they don't have the same rights and social mobility opportunities," he said.
China denies mistreating Uighurs. 

It said all of the country's ethnic minorities are guaranteed wide-ranging religious and cultural freedoms and benefit from urban development.
Since the Tiananmen incident, Beijing has lashed out at Western analysts for suggesting that repression of Uighurs is responsible for the violence, stating such accusations amount to supporting terrorists.
U.S. officials have been reluctant to support or deny Beijing's assertion that the car crash was an organized act of terrorism.
When pushed on the issue by Foreign Policy on Thursday, U.S. Ambassador to China Gary Locke said Washington has no independent information, but deplores "any and all acts of terrorism."
He also said the U.S. believes China should be "more respectful of the different cultures, religions, and languages within Xinjiang, and elsewhere in China."

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Tiananmen crash: Terrorism or cry of desperation?

• Chinese government has created a police state within Xinjiang
• Crude instruments used in attack suggest not work of well-organized group
• No evidence Uyghurs involved substantively in a global Muslim militant movement.
• Claims of a Uyghur terrorist threat maybe becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.

By Sean R. Roberts

Oppressive occupiers: Chinese anti-terrorism force holds exercises in Hami, in northwest China's Xinjiang region in July.

The events on Beijing's Tiananmen Square that resulted in the death of five people and the injury of dozens more were tragic, but are they representative of a serious terrorist threat to the Chinese state as is now being suggested by official sources?
According to Chinese security organs, this act of driving a jeep into a crowd of people and setting it on fire was a "carefully planned, organized, and premeditated" terrorist attack carried out by a group of Uyghur Islamic extremists from Xinjiang Province.
Unfortunately, given the lack of transparency historically in the Chinese state's conviction of Uyghurs on charges of political violence, we may never know whether this characterization of Monday's events is accurate.
What we do know is that Chinese security organs claim that the attackers in the truck, all of whom died, were a Uyghur man, his wife, and his mother. 

Additionally, Chinese state sources claim to have arrested an additional five suspects in connection with the alleged plot.
Were these alleged attackers members of a cell belonging to a large transnational Jihadist network like Al-Qaeda? 

Are they representatives of a well-organized militant movement like Al-Shabaab, which recently led an armed hostage-taking operation at a mall in Kenya?
Looking at the crude instruments allegedly used by these people -- gasoline, knives, iron rods, and an SUV, it is difficult to argue that this was the work of any highly organized and well-armed militant group or terrorist network.
There were no sophisticated explosives used in the attacks, and the alleged attackers did not even possess guns. 

Furthermore, although Uyghurs are Muslims, there is no evidence that they have ever been involved substantively in a global Muslim militant movement.
So, how do we understand this act of violence if it was indeed carried out by a family of Uyghurs?
The obvious answer is to look at what is happening in the Xinjiang itself where such violent acts have been occurring with increasing frequency ever since the ethnic violence between Uyghurs and Han Chinese that spread throughout the regional capitol of Urumqi during the summer of 2009.
Life for Uyghurs inside Xinjiang is not like that of most people in the People's Republic of China (PRC).
For the last decade, the Chinese government has created a virtual police state within Xinjiang, employing enhanced surveillance of Uyghur citizens, actively repressing Uyghurs' political voices, and greatly curtailing Uyghur religious practices.
It has also vastly reduced Uyghurs' access to education in their own language and has limited Uyghur language publications of original reading materials.
Officially, the Chinese state explains most of these measures as part of its anti-terrorism measures to protect national security.
These measures also regularly include arresting large numbers of Uyghurs on charges of engaging in "illegal religious activity" or of having ties to terrorist organizations.
In fact, during this month alone, security organs in Xinjiang were involved in the fatal shooting of suspected Uyghur militants on several separate occasions and arrested at least one hundred more they suspected of trying to flee the country.
Although the government characterizes its ongoing and expansive confrontation with Uyghurs in Xinjiang as anti-terrorism, it is equally related to the PRC's larger plans for Xinjiang.
The region is of critical strategic importance to the state as it is China's primary gateway to the west, both in accessing western markets for Chinese goods and in securing natural resources, such as oil, gas, and uranium from Central Asia and locations further west and south.
In this context, the PRC is presently funding enormous development projects in Xinjiang that are also bringing a large influx of Han Chinese migrants and are uprooting Uyghur communities and displacing them from traditional lands.
The state may not care to rid Xinjiang of Uyghurs, but it would like the Uyghurs living there to willingly yield their homeland to a Han-dominant state culture.

As a result, the future of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region appears destined to be neither Uyghur nor autonomous.
With these events unfolding in the region that Uyghurs view as their historical homeland, one feels compelled to question whether Monday's alleged attack was a well-prepared terrorist act or a hastily assembled cry of desperation from a people on the extreme margins of the Chinese state's monstrous development machine.
However, given that this is allegedly the first instance that Uyghurs have carried out such desperate acts outside Xinjiang, and in this case in the very symbolic seat of central power, we may also be witnessing a sharp escalation in the Chinese state's confrontation with the Uyghurs.
In the midst of this escalation, it is also possible that the PRC's long-maintained, but largely unsubstantiated, claims of a Uyghur terrorist threat are perhaps becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.

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In Xinjiang, Poverty, Exclusion Greater Threat Than Islam

by Reuters
Two ethnic Uighur men walk in a clothing market in downtown Urumqi, Xinjiang province, Nov. 1, 2013.

A Chinese policeman of the Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) team stands guard on a main street next to Tiananmen Square in Beijing, Oct. 31, 2013.

Smoke raises in front of a portrait of Mao Zedong at Tiananmen Square in Beijing, Oct. 28, 2013.

URUMQI, CHINA — In the dirty backstreets of the Uighur old quarter of Xinjiang's capital Urumqi in China's far west, Abuduwahapu frowns when asked what he thinks is the root cause of the region's festering problem with violence and unrest.
“The Han Chinese don't have faith, and the Uighurs do. So they don't really understand each other,” he said, referring to the Muslim religion the Turkic-speaking Uighur people follow, in contrast to the official atheism of the ruling Communist Party.
​​But for the teenage bread delivery boy, it's not Islam that's driving people to commit acts of violence, such as last week's deadly car crash in Beijing's Tiananmen Square -- blamed by the government on Uighur Islamist extremists who want independence.
“Some people there support independence and some do not. Mostly, those who support it are unsatisfied because they are poor,” said Abuduwahapu, who came to Urumqi two years ago from the heavily Uighur old Silk Road city of Kashgar in Xinjiang's southwest, near the Pakistani and Afghan border.
“The Han are afraid of Uighers. They are afraid if we had guns, we would kill them,” he said, standing next to piles of smoldering garbage on plots of land where buildings have been demolished.
China's claims that it is fighting an Islamist insurgency in energy-rich Xinjiang -- a vast area of deserts, mountains and forests geographically located in central Asia -- are not new.
A decade ago, China used the 9/11 attacks in the United States to justify getting tough with what it said were al-Qaida-backed extremists who wanted to bring similar carnage to Xinjiang.
For many Chinese, the rather benign view of Xinjiang which existed in China pre-Sept. 11, 2001 -- as an exotic frontier with colorful minorities who love dancing and singing -- has been replaced with suspicion.
​​China says al-Qaida and others work with the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, in Beijing's eyes the foremost terror group in Xinjiang, and spraypaints warnings on walls against Hizb ut-Tahrir, a supranational group that says its goal is to establish a pan-national Muslim state.
​The incident on Tiananmen Square has only added to China's unease.
“The Han seem to be afraid of us. I don't know why. They won't tell us,” said a 22-year-old Uighur man who runs a shoe and clothing shop a stone's throw from an armed police training ground in Urumqi.

Security Crackdown
Since 2001 -- a process that started arguably even before -- China has conducted a sweeping security crackdown in Xinjiang, further repressing Uighur culture, religious tradition and language, rights groups say, despite strong government denials of offering the Uighurs anything but wide-ranging freedoms.
Some Uighurs believe their only alternative may be to draw closer to Islam, and by doing so, further the distance between themselves and the Communist Party and the Han Chinese.
While many Uighur women in Urumqi dress in much the same casual fashions as their Han counterparts, others have begun to wear full veils, something more common in Pakistan or Afghanistan than Xinjiang.
“It's only since the state has been repressing religious practices in Xinjiang so hard, that ironically it has caused Uighur Muslims to re-traditionalize, to re-Islamize at a very rapid rate now,” said Joanne Smith Finley, a lecturer in Chinese studies at Britain's Newcastle University who studies Xinjiang.
“There is no tradition in Xinjiang of any kind of radical Islamism,” she added.
The government has recognized the economic roots of some of the problems, and has poured money into development in the form of schools, hospitals and roads. 

To be sure, incomes have risen, especially in the countryside where many Uighurs live.
Annual rural incomes averaged a little under 6,400 yuan ($1,000) a year in 2012, up some 15 percent on the previous year, though this is still 1,500 yuan less than the national average and more than 11,000 yuan less than Shanghai's rural residents, the country's richest.
Discrimination against Uighurs in the job market -- including employment advertisements saying “no Uighurs accepted” -- is another issue, despite government attempts to end this.
Ilham Tohti, an ethnic Uighur economist based in China and a longtime critic of Chinese policy toward Xinjiang, told Reuters he feared the Tiananmen incident would only lead to more repression and discrimination, further fanning the flames.
“Whatever happens, this will have a long-term and far-reaching impact on Uighurs, and will cause great harm. It will only worsen the obstacles Uighurs face in Han-dominated society,” he said.

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China’s Pivot West

China has begun “Marching Westwards” in Asia. The consequences could be huge.
By Ankit Panda

Here at The Diplomat, we’ve devoted extensive attention to covering China’s many sources of friction in the Asia-Pacific region, ranging from Japan, to the Philippines and, of course, to India. 

Fortunately, it may have been the case that booming trade and economic promise have been the glue keeping the Asia-Pacific largely peaceful for so long despite the rise of China: an often-assertive superpower.
Nonetheless, experts hardly manage to get through a conversation on China’s relationship with Japan, South Korea, ASEAN or India without referring to what these countries might be doing to “hedge” against a potential downturn in relations with China. 

On the contrary, China’s “hedge” in the region is less well understood and it is best captured in its “Marching Westwards” policy – its very own pivot to Eurasia.
Chinese President Xi Jinping is fond of the Silk Road; he was born in Shaanxi province, its easternmost node. 

In his October 3 speech before ASEAN leaders, Xi spoke of the “seaway that bridges China and foreign countries” as being as “prestigious as the Silk Road that connects East and West.” 

This speech came a month after he visited the actual old Silk Road during a four-country tour of Central Asia. 

He opened a crucial energy pipeline with Kazakh President Nursultan A. Nazarbayev that will feed Caspian gas into China’s coastal cities in the future, traversing Turkmenistan where it will feed into another jointly developed pipeline.
Unfortunately for China, geography has been unkind to it in a way that it never was to the United States with its vastly unconstrained oceanic access. 

China's strategic access to the east – into the Pacific Ocean – does not leave it among unwavering friends and allies. 

With the exception of North Korea, and perhaps Myanmar, China can count few states among its all-weather strategic friends along its vast southeastern rimland: from the north-easternmost point of Manchuria to Tibet and Aksai Chin, China’s rise has not been perceived as unthreatening or as an overwhelmingly positive development for regional stability and security.
One of China’s greatest strengths when it comes to foreign policy and business is its willingness to go everywhere and do almost anything. 

It has become a formidable “all-weather” partner to many countries. 

China does this best when messy topics like Asian history, nuclear weapons, and territorial disputes are left out of the equation. 

This is where the flip side of China’s vast geography is of interest. 

The regional outlook to China’s west might not offer the same level of economic sophistication as its east, but it does offer massive strategic prizes that will grow increasingly important in the 21st century.
China has given its Eurasian strategy the rather-assertive moniker “Marching Westwards” – a phrase that might keep American China hawks awake at night until they realize that this westward march halts at the Caspian Sea. 

None of this is a hushed secret, but it is underappreciated, particularly among Euro-American strategic analysts that may privilege naval power in the footsteps of men like Alfred Thayer Mahan and Nicholas John Spykman. 

It is prudent not to understate China’s attempt to modernize its navy, but this is more a response to its threat environment than anything else.
Wang Jisi, a Chinese international relations scholar at Peking University and a recent research scholar at Princeton University, articulated the policy in late 2012 but many failed to pick up on it thanks to the acute flare-ups around territorial disputes in East Asia. 

Yun Sun of Brookings clarifies the strategic logic of Wang’s proposal: 

"The logic of “March West” is rather simple and reflects the complex regional quagmire China is in. As Washington rebalances to Asia, the relation between the U.S. and China has become increasingly contentious and “zero-sum.” 

In Beijing’s view, deeply embedded in the rebalancing is Washington’s profound concern about China’s rise in the region and a determination to curtail its expanding influence. 

Under this overarching theme, Beijing sees a comprehensive policy of Washington to block China’s rise in the East through strengthened military alliances, “sabotaging” China’s ties with ASEAN and undercutting China’s effort to lead the region economic integration by pushing U.S.-centered and China-free Trans-Pacific Partnership. 

Since both Beijing and Washington are seeking to expand their influence in East Asia, as Wang argued, if China continues to push forward, more problems, even a head-on military confrontation with the U.S. (such as over Senkaku dispute), would be inevitable."
While Wang’s article was published in the Global Times in October 2012, the trend westwards in Chinese strategic thought began much earlier. 

Readers of The Diplomat will be familiar with the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) – founded in 2001 by China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan in an attempt to codify Eurasian multilateralism. 

The SCO has cooperated heavily on security matters, and has conducted vast war games and military exercises, much to the concern of the U.S. and China’s eastern neighbors. 

According to the European Council of Foreign Relations, "some [Chinese] analysts hope it will become a quasi-military alliance that could veto an UN-based intervention in the region and carry out its own security actions, including against future terrorist threats."
China’s westward march is not entirely frictionless, however. 

Its “Xinjiang problem” is particularly pronounced in this region. 

The cultural proximity between the Central Asian members of the SCO and Xinjiang’s oppressed Uighurs could raise suspicions of China. 

Nonetheless, China pitches itself as a “good neighbor” to the region and as a source of much-needed investment, and Central Asian governments have been more than happy to buy into this vision.
China’s strategic focus on Central Asia is bookended geographically by Russia to its north, and Pakistan in its south-west. 

Vladimir Putin’s continued leadership of Russia has demonstrated that Russia’s future will not be European or Transatlantic, but “Eurasian.” 

The wounds of the Sino-Soviet split have long-since healed, and Russia and China have strategically converged. 

While Putin laments that the collapse of the USSR was a tragedy, he would settle for a sort-of G2 primacy of the Asian heartland, beside China. 

Energy buttresses this relationship and if the current trend of interactions between Russian and China state-owned oil companies is any indication, China will have much to gain from maintaining Russia as an all-weather partner.
Underlying China’s “western pivot” is the geopolitics of energy. 

Given its less-than-rosy interactions with its neighbors to the east, and its reliance on maritime traffic that traverses sea lines of communication in the Indian Ocean, almost entirely out of its control, China has recognized the far more favorable risk involved with importing its energy over the land. 

Nevertheless, its relationship with Pakistan is a crucial node in balancing its move to the west. 

Besides their common strategic distrust of India, China sees in Pakistan its entryway to the Arabian Sea–almost at the mouth of the ever-more strategic Strait of Hormuz.

Its investment in Pakistan’s port at Gwadar crystallizes this vision.
Does any of this mean that China is expecting to devote the majority of its strategic energy to its northern and western neighbors, or that it will privilege the development of its land power? 

In all likelihood, no. 

On a global scale, the struggle for Pacific primacy will play out between the United States and China, and for this, China continues to devote considerable attention to the modernization of its navy and to its relations with East Asia’s rimland states.
The PLA hasn’t suddenly been convinced by John Mearsheimer’s theory on the primacy of land power; the westward march is premised primarily on mitigating energy-access risk. 

As a corollary, a China-friendly Central Asia is a considerably favorable bulwark against greater domestic instability on China’s western front. 

Ultimately, China’s attention to its western frontier is a strategic response to external developments in East Asia, and to the U.S. pivot, and one that will continue to have important consequences in the story of China’s rise.

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Ethnic Uighurs are facing new police scrutiny in Beijing following Tiananmen attack

By Associated Press

Uighur jade vendors sell their wares at an outdoor curio market where Chinese police have been checking their IDs everyday since a vehicle attack in Beijing, China, Wednesday, Oct. 30, 2013. Members of China’s ethnic Uighur community in Beijing say they’re facing stepped-up scrutiny from police following Monday’s deadly vehicle attack at Tiananmen Square in Beijing that killed five people.

An SUV plowing into a crowd in Tiananmen Square, killing five

BEIJING — In a dusty outdoor curio market in China’s capital, traders from the minority Uighur community gathered Wednesday to swap stories about the omnipresent harassment they say they suffer at the hands of the police. 

That scrutiny has only intensified after this week’s deadly vehicle attack at Tiananmen Square in which Uighurs are the prime suspects.
Before the day ended, five suspects had been arrested on suspicion of involvement in Monday’s audacious attack, which a police statement described as carefully planned terrorism strike — Beijing’s first in recent history. 

Police also said knives, iron rods, gasoline and a flag with religious slogans were found in the vehicle used in the suicide attack.
Since the attack, police “come to search us every day. We don’t know why. Our IDs are checked every day, and we don’t know what is happening,” said Ali Rozi, 28, a Uighur (pronounced WEE-gur) trader at the sprawling Panijayuan market.
“We have trouble every day, but we haven’t done anything,” said Rozi, who is from Kashgar, the capital of Xinjiang province where most Uighurs live.
Militants from the Muslim Uighur community have been fighting a low-intensity insurgency against Chinese rule in Xinjiang for years. 

Recent clashes, including an attack on a police station, have left at least 56 people dead this year. 

The government typically calls the incidents terrorist attacks.
The police scrutiny of the Uighurs in Beijing highlights the years of discrimination that have fueled Uighur demands for independence for their northwestern homeland of Xinjiang. 

Many Uighurs say they face routine discrimination, irksome restrictions on their culture and Muslim religion, and economic disenfranchisement that has left them largely poor even as China’s economy booms.
In Monday’s incident, a sports utility vehicle barreled through crowds and burst into flames near the portrait of Mao Zedong on Tiananmen Gate. 

Three of the car’s occupants and two bystanders were killed, and dozens were injured in the strike at the capital’s political heart, where China’s Communist Party leaders live and work.
The incident is the first such attack outside Xinjiang in years, and among the most ambitious given the high-profile target.
An attack in one of the eastern population centers is “something that the Chinese authorities have been worried about for a long time,” said University of Michigan expert Philip Potter.
“Once this threshold has been crossed, it is a difficult thing to constrain,” Potter said, predicting tighter surveillance and scrutiny of Uighurs in eastern cities.
Rozi Ura Imu, a 48-year-old trader in jade and other precious stones from the ancient Silk Road city of Kashgar, condemned the attack, but said it didn’t justify the harsher treatment by authorities.
“I am also upset. They crashed a car, and we end up being harassed by police every day now, saying that we Xinjiang people are like that,” Rozi said, standing at the gate of the Panijayuan market, which has thousands of stalls featuring crafts from regions throughout China: rows of statues and furniture, bins of beads and trinkets, cases of books and scrolls.
Uighurs are a Turkic Central Asian people related to Uzbeks, Khazaks and other groups. 

With their slightly European features and heavy accents, most are immediately recognizable as distinct from China’s ethnic Han majority.
The 9 million Uighurs now make up about 43 percent of the population in Xinjiang, a region more than twice the size of Texas where they used to dominate.
Many complain of strict government controls not seen in other parts of China, including a ban on religious observance by minors and injunctions against traditional male cultural gatherings called meshreps. 

Recent moves to mainly use Chinese in Xinjiang schools have raised fears of the further erosion of Uighur language and culture, as well as job losses for Uighur teachers.
Uighurs also say they’ve seen little benefit from the exploitation of Xinjiang’s natural resources while good jobs tend to flow to ethnic Han migrants.
Uighurs frequently say they’re made to feel like second-class citizens, facing difficulties obtaining passports or even traveling outside Xinjiang. 

Hotels and airlines are reported to have unofficial bans on catering to Uighurs, and many employers refuse to hire them.
“Hotels won’t take us and you can’t rent if your ID shows a Xinjiang residence. People look at us with a lot of prejudice,” said Yusuf Mahmati, 33, a fur trader plying his wares on a busy sidewalk opposite the Panijayuan market, a gathering place for traders from several regional ethnic groups.

The Beijing police statement said the five detained suspects had helped plan and execute the attack, and were caught 10 hours after it was carried out. 

It said they had been on the run and were tracked down with the help of police in Xinjiang and elsewhere. 

It didn’t say where they were captured, but said police had found jihadi flags and long knives inside their temporary lodgings.
“The initial understanding of the police is that the Oct. 28 incident is a case of a violent terrorist attack that was carefully planned, organized and plotted,” the statement said.
The overseas advocacy group World Uyghur Congress on Tuesday urged caution and expressed concerns that Beijing could use the incident to demonize Uighurs as a group.
Beijing-based Uighur economist Ilham Tohti urged the government to make public its findings if it indeed has evidence that Uighurs were involved in a terrorist attack. 

He said repression against Uighurs would only get harsher.
“Most certainly, this incident will worsen the situation for Uighurs,” Tohti said.
Tohti has faced frequent police harassment for his activism. 

He was placed under house arrest numerous times in the wake of deadly ethnic rioting in Xinjiang’s capital, Urumqi, in 2009 that sparked a nationwide crackdown on Uighur activists.
The Urumqi violence, which left nearly 200 dead, most of them Han, had strong ethnic overtones, beginning with a protest over the killing of Uighur workers at a south China toy factory over false rumors of sexual assaults on Chinese women. 

China termed the bloodshed a terrorist attack planned by overseas-based Uighur rights advocates and heavily increased its security presence in Xinjiang.
Chinese authorities rarely provide direct evidence to back up terrorism claims, and critics say ordinary crimes or cases of civil unrest are often labeled as organized acts of terror.
However, Xinjiang borders Afghanistan and unstable Central Asian states with militant Islamic groups, and Uighurs are believed to be among militants sheltering in Pakistan’s lawless northwestern region.
Uighurs were also captured by U.S. forces following the fall of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, and 22 were held as enemy combatants at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. 

All but three have since been released and now reside in Albania, Bermuda and elsewhere.
China has largely been successful at limiting both the volume and effectiveness of domestic terrorist attacks, while containing them mainly to Xinjiang.
However, the Chinese government has warned that radicals were planning attacks outside of Xinjiang and launching strikes in China’s eastern population centers offers “easy access to soft, high-profile targets as well as an information and media environment that is increasingly ripe for terrorist exploitation,” Potter said.

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Uighur group scorns China Tiananmen 'terrorist' claim

Uighur leader Rebiya Kadeer (L) and Alim Seytoff, pictured on December 10, 2010 being greeted by Nancy Pelosi in Oslo
Beijing (AFP) — A Uighur group dismissed Beijing's account of a "terrorist attack" in Tiananmen Square as a dubious pretext to repress the ethnic minority Thursday, even as state-run media hinted at potential repercussions.
Beijing police said on Wednesday that Usmen Hasan -- in an SUV carrying his mother and wife, jihadist banners and machetes -- sped onto the pavement, crashed in Tiananmen Square and set the car alight.
The crash in the symbolic heart of the Chinese state killed all three people in the car and two tourists, with 40 others injured.
Five other suspects with Uighur-sounding names were captured within 10 hours, although police only announced their detention two days later.
The mostly Muslim Uighur minority are concentrated in China's far western region of Xinjiang, where ethnic tensions and discontent with the government periodically burst out into violence.
Beijing regularly calls such incidents "terrorism", but Uighur organisations dismiss that as an excuse to justify religious and security restrictions, and information in the area is tightly controlled.
Alim Seytoff, a US-based spokesman for the overseas World Uyghur Congress (WUC), said the official narrative of the Tiananmen event was full of holes and discriminatory.
"The Chinese claim is in a way very unbelievable, to some extent outrageous," he told AFP.
"The only reason this is labelled as a terrorist incident is because the passengers happened to be Uighurs."
Seytoff questioned why an attacker would kill his own family, and how religious material could survive in a car engulfed in flames.
"If he were a terrorist, why would he bring his mother and his wife?" Seytoff said.
"The car was burned almost to the ground, the three people were burned to death, and the flag wasn't burned -- in the car?"
The account fit what Seytoff called a pattern of authorities labelling Uighurs as terrorists based on "thin evidence".
"We do not believe there is any kind of organised resistance against Chinese rule," he said.
"Some of the violence by Uighurs -- they are more sporadic, individualistic, out of desperation."
According to Chinese state-run media a "terrorist attack" in Xinjiang left 35 people dead in June, and 139 people have been arrested in recent months for spreading jihadist ideology.
Ethnic tensions have risen in Xinjiang since millions of members of China's Han majority have moved to the resource-rich region, where they largely control the economy. 

Rioting in the capital Urumqi involving both ethnic groups in 2009 left 200 people dead.
Seytoff warned Uighurs could face tighter repression after Monday's incident, particularly in the capital, where the WUC said 93 people have been rounded up.
Security has been bolstered across Xinjiang, where officers already maintain checkpoints, break up small gatherings and raid homes, he added.
State-run media warned Thursday that Uighurs would be the "biggest victims" of the Tiananmen Square attack.
Police had refrained from stating the attackers' ethnicity but the Global Times, which is close to the ruling Communist party, said that all those involved were Uighurs.
The paper, which often strikes a nationalist tone, called for a "united front against terrorism".
"People from Xinjiang, especially the Uighurs, will be the biggest victims," it said. 

"The ordinary work and study of Xinjiang people in inland regions may be affected."
It urged people in Xinjiang to "understand the negative effects and overcome them by cooperating with their inland counterparts".
At the same time it called on Han Chinese to reach out to the minority group and "make the Uighurs feel our sincerity".
An editorial in the state-run China Daily also suggested Uighurs might feel repercussions after Monday's incident.
"What they have done is against the interests and will of the majority of Uighurs, who have benefited from the unity of the country, from the reform and opening-up, and from the country's preferential policies for non-Han ethnic groups," it said.

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Tiananmen Square attack sows terror in spiritual heart of China

By Barbara Demick

Chinese microblogging site Weibo showed photos such as this of a closed Tiananmen Square after the crash.

Police cars block off the roads leading into Tiananmen Square as smoke rises into the air after a vehicle crashed in front of Tiananmen Gate in Beijing on October 28, 2013

BEIJING -- It could hardly have been a more audacious attack or one that was aimed more directly at the bull's-eye that is the spiritual heart of China.
At 12:05 p.m. Monday, a white sport utility vehicle entered a sidewalk and drove nearly 500 yards, plowing through tourists and police, until it stopped near the iconic portrait of Mao Tse-tung that hangs over the main gate in front of Tiananmen Square.
The Chinese state news reported that five people were killed and 38 injured.
The dead included the three occupants of the car and two tourists, one a Filipina woman and the other a Chinese man.
There were some suggestions that police were looking at suspects from the Uighur community, Muslims from the northwest of China.
A purported police notice put out Monday, apparently after the incident, advised Beijing hotel owners to look out for a 25-year-old and a 42-year-old man from the towns of Pichan and Lukchun, who have been involved in deadly tit-for-tat violence since the summer.
The notice, which was published on the Baidu.com Internet site, referred to an unspecified incident in Beijing, and said that the men had at least one light-colored SUV and several license plates.
Few other details were forthcoming from the official Chinese news organs and photographs were scrubbed clean from the Internet.
Nelson Bunyi, a Filipino tourist who survived the attack with a fractured leg, said he had been on the sidewalk with his wife and two daughters when they spotted the vehicle heading toward them.
"A lot of people were running and jumping, but it was too late for me," said Bunyi, who was flat on his back in the hospital, oxygen tubes in his nose.
"It was a white car and it was coming very, very fast. I fell to the ground. I remember there was smoke, not much else."
The interview was interrupted when police, who were stationed in the hallway outside the hospital room, said the patient could not be questioned without written permission.
The Xinhua news service said only that the causes of the incident were "under investigation."
The circumstances, however, suggested that it was a deliberate attack at one of the most closely guarded locations in China.
At all times, Tiananmen Square is blanketed with paramilitary and police, uniformed and plain-clothed, mingling in the crowds.
Cameras record every motion.
Separating the street from the sidewalk are 5-foot-high white steel barricades—designed to prevent the type of attack that took place Monday.
However, the white sport utility vehicle appears to have entered at one of the few openings in the barricades, some 500 yards to the east of the square at the intersection of Nanchizi, a street running perpendicular to the main Chang’an Street.
The driver then headed along the sidewalk toward the enormous Mao portrait, which hangs over the vermillion-walled "Gate of Heavenly Peace" (or Tiananmen Gate) that leads into the Forbidden City, erstwhile home of China’s emperors.
The vehicle appears to have crashed into a column, bursting in flames.
Photographs taken immediately after showed plumes of white and brown smoke rising from the scene.
It is unclear whether the car carried explosives or whether it caught fire after being stopped by police.
"The police were unprepared," wrote one micro blogger, who gave his name as Ma Min, and who claimed to have information from eyewitnesses.
Another, writing under the name Chen Renda, complained, "We have yet to hear the story behind the story. What was the real identity of the people inside the jeep?... Were there weapons found? Were there any pamphlets?"
Best known as the site of the 1989 crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators, Tiananmen Square is a frequent magnet for protesters and self-immolators.
But most plots are foiled far from the square—such as a 2009 incident in which three people set themselves on fire in a car at the Wangfujing pedestrian mall, reportedly over personal grievances with the government.
Most of the injured appeared to have been tourists or police.
A nurse at Beijing’s Tongren Hospital said that besides the Filipino family, there was a Japanese tourist and a 5-year-old Chinese boy.
The Chinese government appeared embarrassed by the apparent lapse in security at the heart of the city. There was no mention of the incident on the main 7 p.m. evening news, which led with a report on the 11th meeting of the All China Women’s Federation.
A report on the incident ran on the late news.
Beijing police closed off subway stations near the square after the incident and blocked vehicles and journalists.
Using high-pressure water hoses, workers scrubbed the sidewalk clean and there was no trace of fire or explosion.
But people knew what happened from the sketchy reports and word of mouth and appeared to be surprised, and a little shaken.
"I can’t believe this is happening in the center of Beijing," an elderly man in a beret murmured to his wife.
Senior members of the Chinese Communist Party are due to convene next month inside the Great Hall of the People, which is on the west side of the square, for a plenum to chart the nation’s economic future.
Mao’s mausoleum lies to the south and Zhongnanhai, the compound of the top leadership, just behind the vermillion walls to the west.

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China Acknowledges Human Rights Shortcomings

by Zlatica Hoke

For years, Western governments, human rights groups and Chinese dissidents have been accusing Beijing of grave violations of human rights and freedoms.

The 1989 crackdown on protesters in Beijing's Tiananmen Square remains the most egregious blot on China's human rights record, but since then the communist government has been dogged by numerous allegations of arbitrary jailing, torture and harassment of dissenters and their families.
In Geneva on Tuesday, the Chinese government faced a United Nations report listing grave abuses and violations of international human rights norms. 

While China’s response showed some softening of its rhetoric, some observers are not reassured.
Rights activist Ni Yulan was released from prison earlier this month, after serving 2.5 years in a women's prison on charges of fraud and stirring unrest. 

Ni has been at odds with the Chinese authorities since 2001, when she began protesting the destruction of homes, including her own, to make room for the construction of the Olympic village in Beijing.
"In the last 12 years I have been treated as a criminal, both when I was at home or sitting in prison. At home we were under police surveillance; they surrounded my house and turned it into a prison. We were not allowed to freely come and go, [and] my family was harassed," said Yulan.
Renowned Chinese artist Ai Weiwei was not spared either. 

After criticizing the government, the designer of Beijing's "Bird's Nest" Olympic stadium was arrested in 2011 and held in jail for almost three months without official charges. 

Chinese authorities said Ai Wewei was investigated for alleged economic crimes.
The long list of China's alleged rights abuses includes repression of minorities, especially in Xinjiang and Tibet, and excessive control of the media and the Internet.
The United States has repeatedly warned China to stop the abuses, but human rights groups say this is not enough.
"I think the reality is that for the United States, human rights issues in China remain an issue to be managed, not a problem to be solved. And, not as one as absolutely foundational, fundamental to securing progress on other issues in the bilateral relationship," said Sophie Richardson, China Director for Human Rights Watch.

On Tuesday, China acknowledged shortcomings but insisted that a lot of progress has been made. 

Foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying expressed the familiar Chinese line that human rights issues are China’s internal affairs and other nations should not meddle.

In Hong Kong, City University professor Joseph Cheng said Beijing wants to influence the international human rights agenda.
"China intends to soften external criticism, to defend its basic position and to lobby hard for support among other third world countries, especially those in Africa and Asia. Not only to defend China, but also to support China's membership of the [UN Human Rights] Council in the election to be held in November,” said Cheng.
Cheng also said China now wants to play a more active role in the U.N.'s human rights forum and in shaping the human rights policy of the United Nations.

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Uighurs in China Say Bias Is Growing

By ANDREW JACOBS

KASHGAR, China — Job seekers looking for opportunities in this ancient oasis town in China’s far western Xinjiang region would seem to have ample options, based on a quick glance at a local help-wanted Web site. 

The Kashgar Cultural Center has an opening for an experienced dance choreographer, the prefectural Communist Party office is hiring a driver and nearby Shule County needs an archivist.

But these and dozens of other job openings share one caveat: ethnic Uighurs, the Muslim, Turkic-speaking people who make up nearly 90 percent of Kashgar’s population, need not apply. 

Roughly half of the 161 positions advertised on the Civil Servant Examination Information Web site indicate that only ethnic Han Chinese or native Mandarin speakers will be considered.
Such discrimination, common across the region, is one of the many indignities China’s 10 million Uighurs face in a society that increasingly casts them as untrustworthy and prone to religious extremism. 

Uighurs are largely frozen out of the region’s booming gas and oil industry, airport jobs are mostly reserved for Han applicants, and truck drivers whose national identity cards list their ethnicity as Uighur cannot obtain the licenses required to haul fuel, an unwritten rule based on the fear that oil and gas tankers could easily be turned into weapons, according to several trucking companies.
Despite its name — the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region — this strategically pivotal expanse of desert and snow-draped mountains that borders several Central Asian nations is tightly controlled by Beijing. 

Top government positions as well as critical spots in the sprawling security apparatus are dominated by Han Chinese, many of them recruited from the eastern half of the country.

Ethnic Uighurs at a livestock market in Kashgar, China. They are the largest group in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, but Beijing maintains tight control.

At a tailor’s shop in the old city section of Kashgar, mannequins’ eyes are covered by paper, in deference to Islamic strictures on representing women.

Uighur women at a Sunday bazaar in Kashgar, China. Amid rapid development, Muslims have held on to their traditions.
“The bottom line is that the Chinese don’t trust us, and that is having a corrosive impact on life in Xinjiang,” said Ilham Tohti, a prominent Uighur economist in Beijing. 

“And the way things are going, it’s going to get worse.”
After a summer of violence that claimed at least 100 lives, analysts, human rights advocates and even a handful of Chinese academics are raising alarms over what they call repressive policies that are fueling increased alienation and radicalization among Uighurs, many of whom subscribe to a moderate brand of Sunni Islam. 

These policies have been tightened since ethnic rioting four years ago left at least 200 people dead in Urumqi, the regional capital.
The Chinese government blames outside agitators, among them members of a separatist movement it contends has links to global jihadists, for much of the unrest. 

While there have been a number of unprovoked attacks on Chinese police officers or soldiers in recent years, most experts say the threat from Islamic militants is far less potent and organized than that portrayed by Beijing.
In August, paramilitary police officers not far from Kashgar shot at least 32 men, killing a dozen, during a raid on what was described as a secret “munitions center”; a few days later at least a dozen other Uighurs were killed as they prayed at a farmhouse in Yilkiqi township, according to Radio Free Asia. 

The authorities said the men were taking part in “illegal religious activities” and training for a terrorist attack, but did not provide further details.
Other episodes include a shooting outside a police station in Aksu Prefecture that wounded 50 and left three dead, and a violent skirmish in Hotan, another Silk Road outpost, during which dozens of men were reportedly shot while protesting the detention of a local imam. 

The Chinese state news media described these and other episodes as “terror attacks”; exile groups say they were peaceful demonstrations crushed with brute force.
Local residents say these and other clashes have been fueled by the dispiriting realities of daily life here: the institutionalized job discrimination, the restrictions that prohibit those under 18 from entering mosques and the difficulty that many Uighurs face in obtaining passports. 

Those Uighurs lucky enough to travel abroad say they are often interrogated upon their return by security officials who demand to know whether they have engaged in separatist activities.
“The government should realize that reckless and inappropriate decisions by local authorities are only causing more instability,” said Yang Shu, a professor of Central Asian studies at Lanzhou University, referring to rules that discourage women from wearing head scarves and young men from growing beards.
Many Uighurs are also convinced that Beijing is seeking to wipe out their language and culture through assimilation and education policies that favor Mandarin over Uighur in schools and government jobs. 

Since 2004, a so-called bilingual education initiative has required teachers in much of the region to use Mandarin for nearly every subject. 

The authorities insist that the policy is aimed at helping Uighurs compete in a country where Mandarin is the lingua franca, but many parents, teachers and Uighur intellectuals are unconvinced.
“My 17-year-old daughter speaks decent Chinese, but she cannot get through a piece of Uighur literature,” said a government employee in Urumqi, who asked to remain anonymous because such criticism can have serious consequences. 

“A generation from now, I fear our people will be functionally illiterate in Uighur.”
Fear and mistrust between the two ethnicities has hardened in recent years as a growing number of Han Chinese migrants settle into heavily guarded enclaves, especially in the southern crescent of Xinjiang that remains predominantly Uighur. 

Even in Urumqi, where ethnic Han Chinese make up 75 percent of the population, knots of heavily armed police officers in fatigues are positioned throughout Uighur neighborhoods; after dark, Uighur men are barred from the front seats of taxis, according to a local ordinance cast as an anticrime measure.
Huang Xiaolin, a Han engineer who was recently lured to Hotan from coastal Shandong Province with a generous salary and subsidized housing, said colleagues frequently warned him against entering the city’s Uighur quarter. 

“The local people here are uncivilized and prone to violence,” he said, standing near a propaganda banner that read, “The Han and the Uighur cannot live without one another.”
Beijing has coupled its “strike hard” security approach with turbocharged economic development, but even that has stoked resentment among Uighurs, who say the best jobs go to newly arrived Han. 

“The Chinese government is focused on a very outdated understanding of macroeconomic development, thinking that it will bring everyone up to the same level, but it’s clearly not working,” said Sean R. Roberts, a professor at George Washington University who studies development in the region.
Part of the backlash, experts and local residents say, has been prompted by increasingly intrusive restrictions on religion. 

Civil servants can be fired for joining Friday afternoon prayer services, and Uighur college students say they are often required to eat lunch in school cafeterias during the holy month of Ramadan, when observant Muslims fast. 

In cities across the region, signs warn people against public prayer, and video cameras are pointed at the doorways of local mosques. 

Residents also say the government maintains an extensive web of paid informers and monitors Internet traffic and cellphone conversations.
Such policies are born out of concern that the radical Islam that has destabilized neighboring Afghanistan and Pakistan will take root in Xinjiang, a fear not entirely unfounded given the region’s proximity to lawless countries that have provided a haven for a kaleidoscope of jihadists from across the Muslim world, including some Uighurs.
But experts say the raids on unsanctioned religious schools and other restrictions have prompted even greater religiosity. 

“Five years ago, you would have been shocked to see a veiled woman in Urumqi, but not anymore,” said a Han academic at Xinjiang University who is critical of Beijing’s policies in the region. 

“For a lot of Uighurs, growing a beard and asking your wife to cover her head in public has become an act of defiance.”
Despite the growing death toll, analysts say China’s new leadership is unlikely to reconsider its hard-line policies any time soon. 

During a state visit to four Central Asia nations last month that sought to bolster Xinjiang’s role as the linchpin of a revitalized Silk Road, President Xi Jinping vowed to continue the battle against what he described as the “three forces” of separatism, terrorism and religious extremism, according to the official Xinhua news agency.
By failing to consider the root causes of Uighur discontent, Beijing could unwittingly radicalize a generation of young people, said Nicholas Bequelin, a researcher for Human Rights Watch who is based in Hong Kong. “The entire Uighur ethnicity feels asphyxiated, having become suspect as sympathetic to extremism,” he said. “Xinjiang is trapped in a vicious circle of increased repression that only leads to more violence.”

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