Can the center hold in China?

The country is facing its second big bout of unrest among an ethnic minority within two years.

More than 100 people were killed in rioting in Tibet in March 2008, after things spiraled out of control due to a heavy-handed Chinese crackdown on what were at first peaceful protests.

The unrest among the Uighur Muslims in Urumqi, the capital of China’s Xinjiang province in the country’s northwest, was similarly aggravated by the official response. Initially, there was an outpouring of Uighurs on the streets after the authorities mishandled a factory brawl between Han Chinese and the Uighurs. The harsh government reaction ensured that things turned violent quite fast.

“Some reports from Urumqi indicate that the demonstrations began peacefully, and much of the marauding occurred only after security troops appeared in large numbers,” writes Russell Leigh Moses in the New York Times.

Uighur Muslims attacked members of the Han Chinese community, and Han mobs sought out Uighurs for revenge. At least 150 persons have been killed in the mayhem.

Now, all this pent-up anger has deep roots, caused by systemic repression of the Uighurs by the Chinese regime. Cultural or religious expression on the part of the Uighurs is severely curtailed. A massive influx of Han Chinese is threatening to make the Uighur a minority in their homeland. And even the Uighur language is dying due to official neglect. Tibet and Xinjiang face very similar situations.

“Fundamentally, the relationship between Uighur and Han is one of colonized to colonizer,” says Nicholas Bequelin, a China expert at Human Rights Watch.

To make the parallel with Tibet even more telling, the Uighurs have their own version of the Dalai Lama. Her name is Rebiya Kadeer, and, just like Chinese government officials blamed the Dalai Lama for the Tibetan unrest last year, they’re pinpointing her as the source of all the trouble in Xinjiang.

It’s hard to figure out how much veracity the Chinese government’s charges have. But something to keep in mind is that the regime has also accused the Dalai Lama of sending suicide squads into Tibet to carry out violent attacks.

Kadeer started off as a reluctant activist. In fact, she was among the most successful businesswomen in China. Then, in 1997, she spoke out after rioting occurred in her home province. For her impunity, she was jailed for more than half a decade. After her release, she relocated to the United States and now runs an organization in Washington, D.C., dedicated—in a nonviolent way, she asserts—to fighting for the rights of her people. Two of her children are still in prison in retaliation against her activism.

“The guards would torture other Uighurs in front of me, to scare me and psychologically torture me,” Kadeer told In These Times in 2006 about her experience as a political prisoner. “The prison guards would taunt me, saying, ‘If you are so powerful and strong, why don’t you help these people now?’ ”

The Chinese have very skillfully used the September 11 attacks to play off fears of Islamic terrorism in the West to discredit the entire Uighur movement, including Kadeer. In this, they have been helped by a tiny separatist movement that has carried out some violent acts. The United States has aligned with China on this, declaring the East Turkestan Islamic Movement a terrorist organization in 2002, much to the delight of the Chinese.

Coincidentally, the violence in Xinjiang arrived at a time when the Obama Administration has been trying to find a country to settle a bunch of Uighurs detained in Guantanamo but now determined by the United States to not be a threat. (The Pacific island nation of Palau seems to be the preferred destination for now.) The association of Uighurs with Islamic radicalism accounts in large part for the painfully measured U.S. response to the Xinjiang violence, in which it says it is “deeply concerned,” is “trying to sort out . . . the facts” and calls “on all sides to exercise restraint."

Unrest among its ethnic minorities is just a tiny share of the worries of the Chinese government. It annually faces tens of thousands of protests, most often spontaneously organized around issues like land seizure. So, far, it has been able to maintain control, but for how much longer?

Eventually, the brush fires will become too numerous for the Chinese regime to stamp out.