LATENT CONFLICT IN CENTRAL ASIA
Beijing faces up to Uighur nationalists

Uyghuristan(XUAR), the vast, partially uninhabited region on China’s western fringe once known as East Turkestan, has been the scene of unrest on the part of the Uighur minority for some years now. In response to a wave of bomb attacks, Beijing is using strong-arm tactics. A solution similar to that on the other side of the border, where the collapse of the Soviet Union was followed by the creation of independent Central Asian republics, seems out of the question despite the aspirations of the Uighurs, who have long been established in Kazakhstan and dream of a state of their own.

By Vincent Fourniau

The winter of 1996 and spring of 1997 saw a fresh spate of bomb attacks in China’s western region of Xinjiang. These attacks have been going on for a number of years. No one has claimed responsibility for the latest explosions, in which many people died, but they are nevertheless an unprecedented sign of agitation and protest (1). The Chinese authorities have responded with mass arrests, allegedly running into tens of thousands.

What do the events in Uyghuristan (XUAR) tell us? Are we witnessing the emergence of unrest throughout the area rather vaguely termed Central Asia? Or are we making too much of things, as we tend to do whenever the People’s Republic of China is involved?

Uyghuristan (XUAR), sometimes referred to as Chinese Turkestan, is both China and Central Asia, part of both entities. At the present time, however, it is perhaps best conceived as China within Central Asia.

China is in many respects the embodiment of durability and continuity. Central Asia, on the other hand, is an area of abrupt change and political instability. It has never existed as a state with definite boundaries and has often found itself at the confluence of forces acting beyond its confines.

Uyghuristan (XUAR) has been under Chinese control since its conquest by the Manchus in 1757-59, but until the establishment of the People’s Republic in 1949 its links with Beijing were very loose. The region often found itself virtually independent and its relations with the centre were marked by regular and very violent revolts.
Since 1949, however, Uyghuristan (XUAR) has been solidly anchored to China. Since the beginning of the 1960s the Beijing authorities have been encouraging Han Chinese to settle in the region. As a result, the Han population of Uyghuristan (XUAR) rose from 10 % in 1955 to an estimated 40-50 % in 1994, out of a total population of 16 million. The Chinese call this policy “adding sand”, the idea being to thicken the cement (2). The Chinese empire pushed westwards into the Tarim basin (3) on three separate occasions during its long history, but never before has the presence of the state in Uyghuristan (XUAR) been accompanied by such intensive Sinification. The recurrent Chinese political presence (in the second century B.C., in the eighth century A.D. under the Tang dynasty, and continuously since 1757) has left its mark on Uyghuristan (XUAR), but the last twenty-five years have brought about a major upheaval.

Uyghuristan (XUAR) occupies one sixth of the total area of the People’s Republic of China and is its largest official region. It is inhabited by one main nation, the Uighurs (numbering seven million in 1994), who are mainly spread around the Tarim basin. The other large group (apart from the Han) are the Kazakhs (one million), who live on the grassy mountainsides of Dzungaria, to the north of the capital, Urumqi.

There are a number of other ethnic groups in the region, including Kyrgyz, Tajiks, Hui and Xibe. These communities are among the 55 officially recognised national minorities (minzu) in the People’s Republic of China, for whom “autonomous” administrative structures of varying status have been set up, the highest being that of “autonomous region” (zizhiqu). Uyghuristan (XUAR) has had autonomous region status since 1995, carrying with it the right to some use of non-Han languages, primarily Uighur, in education, the press and publishing.

Despite its special status Uyghuristan (XUAR) has no political autonomy. Nevertheless, the People’s Republic established a link between cultural-ethnic identity and territory in the 1950s, at a time when the “socialist camp” seemed destined to last for ever. Although lacking any real content, this link corresponds to a stubborn aspiration on the part of nationalist movements throughout the world that has existed since the nineteenth century and remains a goal for many of them to the present day.

In the case of the Soviet federation, the existence of fifteen republics enabled the system to implode peacefully. Uyghuristan (XUAR) on the edge of the post-Soviet world, is bordered by the now genuinely independent republics of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, and to the north east by the former Soviet satellite of Mongolia. The problem is that the former Soviet Union cannot serve directly as a model for the Uighur national movement since China is not a federal state. It defines itself, on the contrary, as a united, multi-national socialist republic.


Uyghuristan (XUAR) exemplifies the general features of Chinese regions peopled by national minorities. Such regions comprise 86 % of strategic border zones, have abundant natural resources necessary to the country’s economy, but suffer from major economic disparities with the rest of China and have incomes below the national average. For China as a whole, the average national per capita income in rural areas was 1,220 yuan in 1994. For Uyghuristan (XUAR) it was 635 yuan and for Tibet 555 yuan. National minorities make up 44 % of China’s poor.

The Taklamakan Desert is used for underground nuclear tests, but it also has vast oil deposits, now being exploited, which could in the near future replace the main oilfields of Manchuria and Shandong. Along with Tibet, Uyghuristan (XUAR) is the region most distant from the new economic zones of the coastal provinces and is undergoing twofold acculturation - to the modern world and to Chinese culture.

The orderly disposition of large national minorities around the edges of Chinese territory, from the north-east to the south-west, looks almost intentional, but in fact each of them has its own particular historical relationship with China. Of the large national minorities, the Uighurs are one of the most “different” from the Chinese. Unlike the Mongols or Manchu, they never gave China a dynasty. Nor do their language, religion, architecture or diet (in which dairy products play a large part) have anything in common with Chinese culture.

Above all, the main features of contemporary Uighur identity owe nothing to the Chinese empire, which was politically absent from this part of Central Asia from the eighth to the eighteenth century.

Contemporary Uighur identity was forged by Islam and the fact of speaking a Turkic language. It is structured around religion and Turkish ethnicity. Islam came from the west, via Transoxiana (4), which was incorporated into the first Arab caliphate early in the eighth century. The successive waves of Turkic migration came from the north, from Siberia and Mongolia.


Of the main Turco-Islamic peoples of Central Asia, the Uighurs provide the most extreme and original example of the construction of an identity. Apart from the fact that Uyghuristan (XUAR) is a multi-ethnic region and that the other ethnic groups are also indigenous, Uighur identity is subject to various types of internal tension.

The term Uighur as the designation of an ethnic group was reintroduced in the 1920s after falling out of use for several centuries. The oases of Uyghuristan (XUAR) are customarily described as an area of Turkish expansion. In point of fact they were “Turkified” (5) under two medieval empires with different religions, one Muslim, the other Manichean and Buddhist. And it was the Manichean and Buddhist state that bore the name Uighur. It was eradicated by the advance of Islam.

Turco-Islamic identity expanded throughout Uyghuristan (XUAR) until the final disappearance, in the fifteenth century, of Buddhism and a political/cultural Uighur identity, which survived only as the heritage of a vanished Buddhist empire.

The term Uighur was not replaced by any other unifying concept. It simply disappeared, not to re-emerge until the early twentieth century.

At a congress of political activists from Muslim Turkic-speaking regions, held in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, in 1921, it was proposed to use the term Uighur once again to denote the settled Turco-Islamic peoples of the Tarim basin. The aim was to clarify their specific identity, which had revolved since the middle ages around micro-regional characteristics or very broad references to Islam or Turkish ethnicity.

The term caught on fairly quickly in Uyghuristan (XUAR), especially after it was adopted by Sheng Shicai, the pro-Soviet governor of the region, in the 1930s. It was then that it began to be used officially in population estimates of the various nationalities. Its adoption by the People’s Republic of China in 1949 was facilitated by the fact that the authorities needed such concepts in order to establish their policy on national minorities.

In these circumstances, is the Uighur identity solidly based? And is it strengthened by the reference to Islam? In more general terms, what aspects of the history of Uyghuristan - territorial, ethnic, cultural, religious, and so on - are the independence activists (6), whose numbers are difficult to estimate, seeking to put forward? These questions are the more crucial as, at the time of the Manchu conquest in the eighteenth century, the region did not constitute a state.


The Uighurs are clearly in need of a unifying concept that distinguishes them from the Turco-Islamic peoples who are their neighbours in the former Soviet republics which became independent states in 1991. The break up of the Soviet Union revealed the differences between all these republics and the intention of each of them to pursue policies of its own. The solidarity and identity of interests supposed to follow from having a common religion and closely related languages are far from automatic. It is Turkey that invokes them most vociferously in its efforts to penetrate Central Asian markets, but even Turkey is just as prone to other long-term considerations, as can be seen from the fact that Russia undisputedly remains its main commercial and political interlocutor in the region.

The Islamic factor

As almost everywhere else in the Muslim world, the question is the extent to which Islam is a political factor. Uyghuristan (XUAR) is certainly witnessing a political/religious revival, with the increasing visibility of “Wahhabite” groups, the growing activity of preachers from other Muslim countries such as Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, and renewed vitality on the part of the Sufi brotherhoods.

Nevertheless, the Uighurs are a people apart among China’s Muslims, and they are not the largest Islamic group. The Muslims in China number about 20 million in all and are spread among several nationalities. The Hui, who are ethnic Chinese, are to be found throughout the country, with some concentration in the centre. They are the largest Muslim nationality, more numerous than the Uighurs and, except in Uyghuristan (XUAR), where they constitute only 0.8 % of a population of 1.3 million (1990 figures), they are the main vector of Islam in Chinese society.

In conclusion, Uighur identity appears to provide the unifying concept which the nationalists require of it, irrespective of the inevitable distortions involved in any claim based on a heritage. Their declared aim is self-determination. In a recent statement Erkin Alptekin, a Uighur nationalist living in Turkey, expanded on this aim: “The Uighurs wish to be able to choose their destiny. We had our own sovereign state before the Manchu conquest and we wish to see it re-established. This could be done in the framework of a federation, and I do not believe the Uighurs would totally reject such an approach. For the moment, their main concern its not to lose their identity. To preserve the chances of a peaceful settlement, the Chinese government must urgently enter into discussions on the future of the Uighur people (7). ”

The Uighurs play a very small part in Chinese history, while the Han presence in Uyghuristan (XUAR) is very marked. This imbalance must necessarily give the Uighurs a strong feeling of national resentment. Will the Chinese policy of “adding sand” eventually smother the Uighurs and absorb them? Or will an Uighur national movement manage to halt the process? This is the long-term issue underlying the recent unrest in Uyghuristan.

From:http://mondediplo.com/1997/09/uighur