吾爾開希的流亡筆記

As an ethnic Uyghur, I am horrified by the riots, deaths, injuries and arrests – the worst military-civilian clashes in modern times – in Urumqi, the city my parents call home. I have lost contact with them, and so – like everybody else now – I rely on reports filtering out of Xinjiang for news of what is happening there. I have to accept the government figures of 156 people dead, more than 1,000 injured and more than 1,400 arrests.

Of course, I am skeptical about such figures. As a student leader in the 1989 student protests, I am still waiting for reliable government figures as to how many people died on June 4. It makes me wonder why it is today – when so little has changed politically in my homeland and I, like many others, remain in exile –the numbers are so high … and so exact?

The only conclusion I can come to – even if the real numbers are even higher – is that the Chinese government wants to send a zero-tolerance, brutal message to the Uyghur people of Xinjiang, the greater Chinese population and to the outside world that Uyghur dissent will be met with force. Beijing also no doubt expects that, when it releases statistics on the civilians it has shot in the streets, it will also have the broad support of China’s predominantly Han population. When Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang gave a press conference denouncing the Uyghur protests as “organised violent crime … instigated and directed from abroad, and carried out by outlaws in the country”, he showed a video as proof with what I can only describe as a smirk on his face, giving the impression that we are now dealing with a China that no longer cares about global opinion.

The broad consensus in China is that the Han Chinese occupation of formerly Uyghur and Tibetan territories has brought prosperity and liberty from feudal regimes to the subjects of “liberation”. In this sense, all opposition to Chinese cultural dominance and rule is viewed as a kind of betrayal. In fact, a nationalist netizen made precisely this point in a riposte to my blog on the recent events in Urumqi. The Han people, he pointed out, are the dominant force and can bring a better life to the Uyghur.

I replied that I was skeptical of arguments of this kind. If it was a logical position, we might argue that we would have been better off supporting the Japanese invasion of China in the 1930s. The Japanese too promised us a better life – and, who knows, perhaps, they might have been able to provide it.

The dominant Han culture of China is quick to react to any perceived attack on national pride – which is often conflated with ethnic notions of what it means to be “Chinese”   – and the Japanese invasion is currently more emblematic of national humiliation even than the Opium Wars,  which, incidentally, is another unsettled grudge for the nationalists of China. Despite this, the average Chinese has a patronising attitude to the “minorities” it brings enlightenment and prosperity to. There is very little – let’s be honest, none – sensitivity about ethnic sensitivities for minority ethnic groups that feel politically oppressed and squeezed out of opportunities by the mounting numbers of Han “immigrants” who, in cities like Urumqi and Lhasa, have come to outnumber the indigenous populations.

I live in exile because I stood up for political reform in 1989. I regret my exile. I am in pain because I am not able to be with my parents in this difficult time. But I still believe I believe democracy is an eventual means to freedom from political oppression. I also believe that democracy means the broad representation of all interest groups. I believe democracy should not serve the interests of nationalism.

I do not argue that independence for Xinjiang or Tibet is the answer to our problems. But I will argue that ethnic self-determination is. By this, I mean  a fundamental  right: that the ethnically distinct Uyghurs, like the ethnically distinct Tibetans – and I would argue the same for the culturally and politically dissenting people of Taiwan, the country I call home – have the right to decide whether they want to be part of China.

My people in Xinjiang have never been offered this choice. Those that live in Urumqi now live in a city that is 70 per cent Han Chinese. They were in hiding Tuesday as thousands of armed Chinese roamed the streets singing the Chinese national anthem and crying “exterminate the Uyghurs”. The government response to the Uyghur explosion of frustration that sparked this crisis – for having become politically oppressed and treated as a minority in their homeland – was to label them “separatists” and “terrorists” and to shoot them in the streets.

I am of China. I was born in modern China. I once struggled publically to make it a better place. But I cannot be a nationalist in country where nationalism trumps democracy – a place where nationalism is an excuse for brutal suppression of protest and dissent.

The Uyghur people are a politically oppressed minority – and, of that political oppression, cultural and economic oppression follows. I cannot help but think that the prompt government release of casualty numbers in Urumqi reflects an official attitude that the indigenous people of Xinjiang are not entitled to even the rights of regular Chinese citizens – or, to put it more simply, the domestic outrage they deserve.

I can only hope that, as the foreign reporters that the Chinese government took the highly unusual move of allowing to witness an “internal conflict” file their reports, the world understands that China has effectively declared war on an oppressed minority group within its own borders.

This article is published July 8th, 2009, The Guardian