“watch the situation in China as Bejing may soon discover the Chanakiyan activities of India’s intelligence agencies, entrenched in Kabul, who according to scuttlebutt in Afghanistan, are deeply involved in subversive activities in Sinkiang.”
Recent communal disturbances in Sinkiang, China
Musings on the recent communal disturbances in Sinkiang, China, located near Indian-occupied Punjab, Khalistan with which the Sikh Homeland has had trade relations for centuries
Washington D.C. – The sudden outbreak of unprecedented communal street violence in Urumqi, (pronounced Urumchi) the capital of China’s far Western Muslim-majority Xinjiang UyghurAutonomous Region (postal map spelling Sinkiang) in which disturbance 184 were killed – mostly Han Chinese- and about 1, 680 were injured, has caught both the Chinese government in Beijing and outside observers by surprise. As Sinkiang is not far (as the crow or as a missile flies) from the Sikh Homeland of Indian-occupied Punjab, developments there are, and should be, of interest and concern to every Sikh.
It is widely known that Urumqi’s population is 75% non-Muslim Han Chinese and the rest 25% consists of various Turkic Muslim (Uyghur,Kazakh, Krygyz, Palmiris, Hui, Mongol, Dongxiang, Xibe) communities. How could a ‘volcano’of this scale erupt suddenly in Xinjiang’s tightly-policed capital city of Urumqi, which has a demographic break-up of 75.3% Han Chinese and only 12.8% Muslim – mostly Sunni – Uyghurs – is a question on the mind of every political observer? Some of them are saying that it is not believable that protesters belonging to a regimented and closely-monitored minority – like the Uyghur community – can organize into mobs and kill so many people of the dominant Han Chinese ethnic group with just ‘knives, bricks and stones’, as is being announced by the Chinese government news agencies. Of the 185 casualties, how many are actually victims of the ‘heavy handed’ actions of state agents (police/army et. al) they are asking? The Han Chinese, the readers ought to know, are an ethnic group native to China and, by most modern definitions, the largest single ethnic group in the world. Han Chinese constitute about 92 percent of the (one billion three hundred million) population of the People’s Republic of China, they also make up 98 percent of the 23 million strong population inTaiwan, 75 percent of the 5 million population of Singapore, and are about 24 % of the 25 million Malaysian population
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Sinkiang (Xinjiang) is an Oil/Gas/mineral rich province of China. It is a large, sparsely populated (mostly desert) area which makes up about one sixth of China. Sinkiang has an area of 640, 930 Sq. miles which is larger than Iran or double the size of Pakistan or eleven times the size of Nepal. It has a population of about 20 million with a density of 31 persons per sq. mile as compared to India’s population density of 1,000 persons per sq, mile, Pakistan’s 575 persons per sq. mile and Nepal’s density of 534 persons per Sq. mile. The Chinese province of Sinkiang borders the TibetAutonomous Region of China, touches Indian-occupied Ladakh (Kashmir) in the South-East. Mongolia is to the North east, Russia is to the north, and Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan in the West. Afghanistan and Pakistan are on it’s Southern border. “Xinjiang” in Manchu, literally means ‘New Frontier’ a name given during the Manchu Qing Dynasty which ruled China from 1644 to 1912 A.D. It is home to a number of different ethnic groups, many of them Turkic, the largest of which is the Uyghur people a Turkic peoples of Central Asia. Many English speakers pronounce it as “wEEger” but the pronunciation “ooygOOr” is closer to the native usage.
Older English-language reference works often refer to the area as Chinese Turkestan, Sinkiang, East Turkestan, or Uyghuristan. Pan-Turkism is a political movement aiming to unite the various Turkic peoples into a modern political state, a confederation, or an economic union closely resembling that of the European Union. The First Eastern Turkestan Republic (ETR), or Turkish Islamic Republic of East Turkestan (TIRET), or Republic of Uyghurstan, was a short-lived break-away entity founded in 1933. It was centered around the city of Kashgar in Sinkiang. This first Eastern Turkestan Republic (ETR) was effectively eliminated rather quickly. Its example, however, served to some extent as inspiration for the founding of a Second East Turkestan Republic. The Second East Turkestan Republic, usually known simply as the East Turkestan Republic (ETR) was a short-lived, Soviet Union-backed, separatist republic (multi-ethnic in character, including Kazakhs) which existed in the 1940s in three northern districts of Sinkiang (Xinjiang) province of the then Republic of China, what is now the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of the People’s Republic of China. ETR continues to influence modern Uyghur nationalist support for the creation of an independent East Turkestan Republic. East Turkestan Independence Movement is a broad term that refers to advocates of an independent, self-governing Xinjiang, also referred to as East Turkestan.
Indian media reports are, at this point in time, spreading dezinformatsiya about Sinkiang and therefore, should be taken with a ‘pinch of salt.’ However, one report written by one, Sreeram Chaulia, an associate professor of world politics at the Jindal Global Law School in Sonipat, India, seems to be a reasonable ‘look-see’ and as such is readable. It claims that, “specific matchstick to the current conflagration in Urumqi comes from an ethnically motivated ‘transfer policy’ the Chinese government initiated in 2006, wherein state recruiters aggressively hired young Uyghur women to work as factory laborers at the other end of the country in provinces like Guangdong. Parts of Xinjiang, where the ten million strong Uyghurs make up the majority of the population, are especially targeted for these controversial transfers, which are carried out via threats and intimidation. Once the jobless Uyghur women are physically removed and sent to do low-paying and hazardous work far from home, the state fills the emptied spaces in Xinjiang with subsidized Han Chinese economic migrants. It is notable that the apparent trigger for the latest burst of violence in Urumqi was an attack in late June by an incensed Han gang on ‘transferred’ Uyghur workers in a toy factory in the southeast of the country. This incident in Guangdong left two Uyghur workers dead and some 81 of them injured. Local security agencies in the city of Shaoguan have been accused by rights groups of standing by inactively as the Uyghurs were singled out for harm. Once news of this injustice reached Urumqi, protesters came out to express their disgust at the government’s forced depopulation of Uyghurs and their ensuing ill-treatment in China’s manufacturing heartlands.” If true these two Uyghur deaths in Guangdong (near Hongkong) could have been the ‘spark’, the cause for the current trouble in Urumqi.
The fact of the matter is that the unrest in China’s far-west region of Sinkiang (Xinjiang) notably in the capital city of Urumqi, could have foreign roots as well as countries like India, in cahoots with mercenary elements in Afghanistan, has an interest in creating mistrust between China and Pakistan in whose lawless Tribal Areas some Muslim Uyghurs have found asylum. The riots come after 15 years of development and transformation of the Sinkiang area into a geo-economic Chinese springboard for projecting influence into Central Asia and the Caspian region in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union. The vast region of Sinkiang, more than three times the size of California (and once possibly best known as home to China’s nuclear test site at Lop Nor) is becoming increasingly important for China as a transit route for fuel pipelines from neighboring countries and further afield in addition to its role as an important supplier of its own energy and mineral resources to the industrial east of China. The central government of China may have encouraged heavy ethnic Han emigration to the area, to develop these resources while economic incentives (extra quotas in Universities, exemption from the draconian one child policy etc.) re offered to the disadvantaged native Uyghurs to leave for elsewhere in China. New highways throughout the region’s western hinterland are helping to promote international trade flows while strengthening the writ of the central government’s. The Chinese National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) says that Xinjiang holds 17.4 trillion cubic feet of proven gas reserves. Nevertheless, according to Chinese sources, Xinjiang represents one-seventh of the country’s current oil production and nearly one-quarter of its petroleum reserves. It also holds over two-fifths of its coal reserves. The landmark West-East Gas Pipeline (WEGP), using resources in Xinjiang’s Tarim Basin and running 4,000 kilometers to terminate in Shanghai, was opened in 2005. With India having bowed out of a proposed Iran-Pakistan-India natural gas pipeline, China has indicated an interest in expanding the now-signed bilateral Iran-Pakistan project into a trans-Pakistan route that would then transit Xinjiang.
The above mentioned West-East Gas Pipeline (WEGP) was opened with a volume of 12 bcm a year, a figure projected to increase to 17 bcm/y. Construction of a second pipeline to run 9,000 kilometers (including its projected eight sub-lines) from northwest Xinjiang began in early 2008. It will run parallel to the first WEGP and be interconnected with it up to Gansu before diverging to Guangzhou. The volume of the second WEGP is projected at 30 bcm/y and will be supplied largely by the Turkmenistan-China pipeline now under construction across Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. There are further plans to build a third and a fourth WEGP and possibly even a fifth. All these developments are in line with the “Go West” program announced by Beijing a decade ago. Under this plan, China seeks to build up not only Xinjiang but also Tibet, whose plateau holds astounding mineral resources and to which a rail line – an engineering marvel – was opened last year, and provinces further east but away from the better-developed coast. This could make them the driving forces of the country’s economic development over the next few decades. The “Go West” campaign was originally introduced in tandem with the re-invigoration of the “Hit Hard” campaign, a year-long security clampdown introduced for the 10th anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen incident. Some Western observers are of the opinion, that this week’s protests by Uyghurs in Urumqi, is not a new phenomenon, nor is their suppression.
Other observers are of the opinion that the recent sudden rioting between Han and Uyghurs, in Urumqi, could further alarm the authorities in Beijing about the possible threat of unrest in the homeland of Han-populated China further east, and feed the leadership’s disquiet (fear) over popular discontent, into ordering a nationwide ‘get tough’ policy. These tough policies would then be exploited by internet savvy countries unfriendly to China and could bring more unhappiness upon China’s minorities (Uyghurs and Tibetans for example) who, unlike the Han Chinese, have no restrictions on having more than one child per couple, a big concession by Beijing to it’s minorities.
Sikh Readers are advised to watch the situation in China as Bejing may soon discover the Chanakiyan activities of India’s intelligence agencies, entrenched in Kabul, who according to scuttlebutt in Afghanistan, are deeply involved in subversive activities in Sinkiang a la their British/Indian predecessors in the 1930’s. An angry China could retaliate by withholding or diverting the waters of the Sutlej river which rises in Tibet or focusing it’s ‘attention’ on the Tibetan training camps near the Pong, Pandoe and Bhakra dams located near the Sikh Homeland of Indian-occupied Punjab.
ThereAreNoSunglasses 