Armed policemen and paramilitary policemen patrol a street near the Kunming Railway Station, where more than 10 assailants slashed scores of people with knives Saturday evening, in Kunming, in southwestern China’s Yunnan province, Monday, March 3, 2014. Twenty-nine slash victims and four attackers were killed and 143 people wounded in the attack which officials said was a terrorist assault by ethnic separatists from the far west.Alexander F. Yuan/The Associated Press
To get a sense of the vast physical distance between Beijing and Urumqi, the capital of China's far western Xinjiang province, all you have to do is get on a train – as I did a few years ago.
From platform to platform, the journey took 45 hours. It wound through farmer's fields and coal-covered industrial cities and eventually the Gobi desert before depositing me on the other side of the country, in another world entirely – a world of minarets and muezzin calls, of lamb kebabs and nomadic pastoralists. In my case, I didn't stop there. I got straight on a bus and rode for another 24 hours along the northern lip of the searing Taklamakan Desert, deeper and deeper into the heartland of the Turkic Uyghur people that have lived in this incredibly harsh climate for centuries.
I disembarked at the fabled Silk Road city of Kasghar – which is closer to Kabul than Beijing – and found myself in a land of simmering discontent. The government was destroying Kashgar's beautiful old quarter. Chinese soldiers manned checkpoints outside the city, pulling people down from buses to check papers. I watched a Han Chinese migrant get drunk on rice wine and smash the white plastic table of a Uyghur food vendor, who tried in vain to get the man to pay for it. A taxi driver punched the air in anger as he vented about Palestine, hardly a topic that impassions Han Chinese further east. The mosques and imams are under watch. There is rampant employment discrimination. Riots in 2009 led to the deaths of nearly 200 people. There have been bold attacks on security forces.
This is necessary background to the recent knife attack in Kunming that killed 29, injured 143 others and was allegedly committed by Uyghur terrorists. It was a truly horrifying act of violence that has shocked China. But was it surprising? Not really. It is one more sad, entirely unnecessary tragedy that has come about after decades of failed policies from Beijing, which have disenfranchised and provoked the broader Uyghur population – on everything from housing and schools to language and religion – while simultaneously encouraging the small, extremist elements that use violence in pursuit of a separate "East Turkestan" Uyghur homeland.
Beijing is trying to label this the "Chinese 9/11." But it has tried to lump Uyghurs into the war on terror since Sept. 11, 2001, when it started using the West's wars as an excuse to crack down on Uyghurs. Have no doubt: This horrendous episode in Kunming will lead to a crackdown, and the cycle will continue. Far from being overly surprising, what happened in Kunming was simply a more sinister, civilian-directed evolution of violence that has characterized the Han-Uyghur relationship for ages, yet another notch on a depressingly long timeline.
How long? Some commenters have traced Uyghur anger back to forced Han migration beginning in the 1980s, a situation similar to Tibet, Xinjiang's neighbour to the south. But China's current predicament – in which it is battling a separatist movement with a long history and, it is feared, increasingly global ties within the terrorist networks of Pakistan and Afghanistan – goes back much longer. Xinjiang, the country's largest province, is essentially a colonial acquisition of the Qing dynasty in the 18th century, and it has always been a precarious hold. Xinjiang has been a violent breakaway state from China twice in the past hundred years, in the chaos of the 1930s and 1940s.
This is partly because the Uyghurs do not feel like part of China, and justifiably so. Ancient mummies found in Xinjiang's Tarim basin – preserved by the arid weather – had blond hair and European features. Uyghurs living elsewhere in China are viewed, even by otherwise reasonable Han Chinese, as potential thieves. Following Islam sets them apart in a secular nation, like their Turkic language. The Uyghurs' leader-in-exile Rebiya Kadeer is also harshly criticized by Beijing as a "splittist" intent on stirring up trouble and breaking apart China, though proof is not offered.
And since territorial sovereignty is one of Chinese Communist Party's fundamental claims to legitimacy, ethnic nationalism in Tibet and Xinjiang – like Taiwanese independence – is viewed with deadly seriousness. None of this, of course, justifies the murder of civilians or security officials; and violent separatists, whose separate state is a fantasy, are just making things worse for ordinary Uyghurs.
But Beijing seems incapable of dealing with the entirely legitimate threat of extremist violence without launching misguided policies that discriminate against innocent Uyghurs. Religious rights are circumscribed. Security forces are often brutally heavy-handed. Disappearances are common. Rights groups allege torture. And anyone who speaks up for Uyghurs' human rights is viewed as a separatist or a terrorist – or a sympathizer. Let's also not forget Huseyin Celil, the Canadian Uyghur who worked as an imam in Burlington, Ont., after fleeing China, but disappeared into the Chinese prison system after being detained in Uzbekistan and shipped back to China, where he was put on trial in Xinjiang.
It is in everyone's interest that Beijing avoids the tragic missteps of the broader war on terror, and deals with these problems precisely and with proportionate force, in a way that enhances security rather than seeding terror.