The New Dominion

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According to sparse reports from the international press, a police station was assaulted last week in Sangong Hui Village by a group of Uyghurs. The Uyghurs are said to have used rocks and gasoline bombs in their attack. Several dozen people may have been arrested in connection with the attack. The attackers may have been protesting crackdowns on civil liberties in the run-up to the Olympic Games to be held in Beijing in August. No more details are known at this time. Although the incident has not been reported upon in the Chinese press, the Epoch Times, which I cannot for the life of me access from China, appears to have picked up the story. Michael Manning’s The Opposite End of China has some commentary.

Sangong Hui Village (三公回族乡) is a small village, encompassing nearby Upper and Lower Sangong Villages in Huocheng (霍城) County, 53 kilometers from Ghulja (Yining) and near the border with Kazakhstan. It is situated between the 218 and 312 highways, the latter of which leads west to Qorghos and Kazakhstan.

Thus far, the only source of this information has been Dilxat Raxit, spokesman for the World Uyghur Congress. If the story receives further press, we will comment on it here.

The idea that Uyghurs lashed out in protest over an increasingly harsh pre-Olympic crackdown makes some sense. Indeed, the restrictions imposed on life in Xinjiang, especially since the Khotan (Xotän) protests in March, have been sudden and without a satisfactory explanation: curfews of 11/9:00 PM have been imposed in many towns, especially in the South. It is now illegal to remove a knife from Khotan (and only Khotan) by post, bus, or plane, a law in effect since March but only under active enforcement in the last few weeks. Identification checkpoints and roadblocks are ubiquitous. For the last three weeks, the passports of non-Han citizens in Xinjiang (with, of course, certain exceptions for well-placed individuals) have been collected by government officials, to be returned after the Olympics are over. Supposedly, these are being held so that their possessors “will not lose them”. In some areas of Urumchi, including very “safe” neighborhoods, I have myself witnessed groups of “community volunteer police” (社区义务治安联防): ten to thirteen middle-aged, mostly Han, men walking in a bored single file, waving nightsticks. Besides their volunteer arm bands, they wear a uniform of a red Olympic hat and a t-shirt emblazoned with the Beijing Olympics logo on the front and the words “Welcome the Olympics, protect safety” (迎奥运，保平安) on the back. Given that Xinjiang hasn’t seen an ethnic riot on the scale of those seen in most of the rest of the world for many years – except, perhaps, for the skirmish between Han and Uyghur police academy students some time back – the sudden switch to a bunker mentality has left many law-abiding private citizens more than a little upset, and the explanation “It’s because of the Olympics” does not seem satisfactory. The implication, it seems, is that this is just what you do when there’s a hint of political jitters on the air: make things feel a little tenser in Xinjiang.

If I may editorialize further, it seems to me that, first of all, there is no large and active threat to public security and safety in Xinjiang. Ethnic and religious tensions are rampant and tangible in the everyday, but they are not, for the majority of people, violent, organized hatreds equipped with hair triggers. To lump, to take a hypothetical example, a law-abiding, China-loving ethnic Kazakh businessperson planning a business trip to Almaty in with a suspected sympathizer of the Islamic Party of Turkestan and revoke both their passports (how did the latter individual get a passport to begin with?) is to undo some of the work that economic development in Xinjiang has done to create a class of wealthy non-Han loyal to China. In the case of my Kazakh example, the better life to be had on the Chinese side of the border is what keeps such a person from asking for – and certainly receiving – a Kazakhstani passport. The sullen men with their big, black sticks just put the people around them on edge. The net result of all of this is an increasingly cynical attitude, as I see it, towards the Olympics out in Xinjiang, largely among non-Han who previously either did not care about the event or who held some hope that its light might shine out West. Suddenly, “One World, One Dream” sounds less inspiring when accompanied by jeeploads of angry young men in forest camouflage, a peculiar and jarring sight in the quieter corners of a grey city. It seems that China is having a dinner party, and non-Han are to be made to sit in their rooms upstairs and listen, the unwanted and twisted children. It is unwise to nurture resentment. Does the Chinese government want to make its own people angry?