One man’s imagined community is another man’s political prison. ARJUN APPADURAI, Modernity at Large
The leaders of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) have spent decades pursuing the dream articulated by Sun Yat-sen and Chiang Kai-shek during the Republican era, that of transforming the heterogeneous peoples and lands previously governed by the Qing empire into a unified nation-state. China’s leaders have often behaved as if the government had realized the dream long ago. They have regularly trumpeted the party-state’s success before both domestic and international audiences. Yet the work is by no means finished.1 Uyghurs in Xinjiang and abroad lie athwart the CCP’s plans. Earlier in the century, China watchers considered other groups on the periphery, principally the Mongols and Tibetans, to pose greater challenges to the unity of the state. Beijing’s worries about Tibetans have not entirely ceased, although the Dalai Lama’s advanced age and China’s increasing global power allowed the leadership to crush widespread Tibetan rioting in spring 2008 and to flatly reject any further talk of autonomy in November 2008, without fear of international consequences. Today the problem of broad Uyghur disaffection and its implications for China’s “territorial integrity” are of graver concern to the country’s leaders.
In the broadest terms, the argument of this book has been that despite decades of trying, China’s government, one of the strongest and most penetrative states in the world, has not been able to transform all its citizens into conscious and willing members of the “Chinese nation.” The evidence furthermore suggests that it will not succeed in doing so in the near term. Many Uyghurs have refused to identify with either the strong and homogenizing version of the “Chinese nation,” which tacitly equates it with the Han, or the more pluralist conception of a “multi-minzu minzu,” in which each constituent group has an important, but only a partial, role to play. Furthermore, many Uyghurs continue to be dissatisfied with the functioning or particulars of the system of minzu regional autonomy.
As should be clear by now, this book has not proposed to tell the story of the long-running contention between discontented Uyghurs and the Chinese party-state simply by looking beyond the propaganda and posturing. I stated in the introduction and sought to demonstrate in each chapter that the posturing and overblown rhetoric emanating from many sources are not just distractions from the true course of that political struggle. Neither are they merely distortions of the struggle, obscuring layers that must be peeled away to reveal the true story behind it. Instead, these various modes of representational politics are crucial components of the contention.
There is much to be learned from work that tries to establish the facts of politics behind the cant and spin, whether in describing Xinjiang and the Uyghur diaspora (Dillon 2004; McMillen 1979, 1984; Shichor 2005), or Guangxi (Kaup2000), or China’s peripheral areas generally (Dreyer 1976; Mackerras 1994). The authors of many of these works properly admit that the official texts on which they have had to rely cannot be regarded as veridical accounts. Published official reports, scholarly studies, and the testimony of officials in interviews are verbal representations constructed to persuade some audience and so must be read as such. Descriptions of events need to be treated with due skepticism (which may ultimately amount to saying, “possibly true, possibly not”). But in compensation for the potential unreliability of the ostensibly mimetic content, we can derive other crucial information from the representational strategies: the political messages encoded in the stories, the techniques for encoding those messages, and the justificatory apparatus defending them. We can fill out our understanding of politics in Xinjiang by consistently taking rhetoric seriously as a terrain of struggle, a terrain previously largely ignored in the literature.
Throughout the book I have tried to show that Chinese officials and many Uyghurs have used representations to do political work. They have attempted thereby to invoke a community, to unify it against challengers, and to rouse it to action. As we have seen, they also have targeted audiences beyond the community itself. In this conclusion I focus on representational politics aimed at the world outside: the aim of drumming up international sympathy and eventually garnering international support for that community.
Representational politics is and will continue to be important to antistate movements because the international political climate has changed over the last two decades. The international community was never very charitable toward secessionist movements, for the obvious reason that the so-called community was composed of states, many of which faced separatist movements of their own and all of whose leaders could imagine the threat of state disintegration. For decades, states and international organizations followed a standard procedure in dealing with separatist violence. First they publicly condemned it, even (in some cases) when they secretly funded and supported it. In the few cases in which challengers succeeded in wresting away a portion of the state, they feigned surprise and then begrudgingly recognized the new states if they appeared to be durable, all the while warning that others should not take inspiration from the example or interpret it as a new precedent. In other words, they quietly welcomed the very rare polities that succeeded in separating from existing states through armed struggle but then turned around and denied that armed secessionist struggles had any legitimacy.
Consequently, secessions and secessionist violence have been rare. Most politicized ethnonational groups have concentrated on “symbolic and organizational politics” (Gurr 2000:27). But in the 1990s, several events seemed to present not just counterexamples to the principle that states frowned on secession but also the emergence of a new international order and a new principle: the international interventions in Bosnia, East Timor, and Kosovo. Each intervention facilitated the separation of territory from an existing state.2
Uyghur activists have believed for some time that if they only could make their case forcefully enough, they would gain such international support. During the 1990s it seemed reasonable for many Uyghurs inside Xinjiang and in the diaspora to hope for international intervention on their behalf, and by the same token, Beijing appeared to have reason to fear such a possibility (Lawrence 2000; Ma Dazheng 2003:106–24, 206–11; Pan Zhiping 1999; Zhang Zhirong 2005). Chinese officials angrily opposed the NATO operation in Kosovo, arguing that only a UN sanction could have made it legal. They betrayed a clear concern that the NATO action might set a precedent for intervention in China’s territory. Zhu Bangzao, a spokesman for the Foreign Ministry, revealed this worry at a press conference: “Recently,” he said, “I heard some people say that in the future, force should also be used against China to solve the Tibet question, among others” (Agence France-Presse 1999a). Officials also clearly had Xinjiang in mind. As Ma Dazheng wrote with alarm in April 1999, “We believe: the things that happen today in Kosovo might very possibly occur in Xinjiang.” Ma pointed a finger at the United States for trying to play the world’s policeman (Ma Dazheng 2003:145).3
Uyghurs have broadcast the message that they were suffering unacceptably under Chinese rule and that as members of a nation they were entitled to independence. Such entities as the Eastern Turkestan Information Center, the Taklamakan Human Rights Association, and the Uyghur Human Rights Project, as well as the various nationally defined Uyghur political organizations, have devoted the bulk of their energies to making this case. At the same time, Beijing has published a large and growing number of documents, complemented by diplomatic speeches, seeking to persuade the international community that Uyghurs suffer no human rights abuses, do not claim or seek to exercise a collective right of self-determination, and, not being a nation, are not endowed with that right even if they were to claim it.4 The problem for both Uyghurs and Chinese officials lies in the antinomies of the principle of self-determination itself.
The principle of the self-determination of nations or peoples, formally recognized by the UN,5 is widely acknowledged and is as widely flouted. One problem is the impossibility of arriving at unambiguous, and equally important, universally agreed-upon definitions of key terms. In theory, nations, which enjoy a right of self-determination, meaning independence, are different from national minorities, which merit only autonomy or special protection within the state.6 What distinguishes them beyond the opinion of the state concerned? How is national decolonization considered an acceptable prospect to be distinguished from secession, which is not? The so-called saltwater test, stipulating that only a territory separated from its colonizer by a large body of water qualifies for self-determination, is patently unconvincing, as one scholar observed caustically:
International law is … asked to perceive a distinction between the historical subjugation of an alien population living in a different part of the globe and the historical subjugation of an alien population living on a piece of land abutting that of its oppressors. The former can apparently never be legitimated by the mere passage of time, whereas the latter is eventually transformed into a protected status quo. (Buchheit 1978:18)
Buchheit is concerned specifically with the legal validity of claims of self-determination. The three decades since he wrote this have demonstrated that neither the ethical force nor the legal status of such claims carries much weight in deciding which are gratified and which not.
Rupert Emerson pointed out long ago that the rights of sovereignty and self-determination are in tension because they stem from different sources: “The state has an indisputable prerogative and duty to defend its own existence, and the nation comes likewise to be endowed with a right to overthrow the state” (Emerson 1962:299). The unrestricted universal exercise of the right of national self-determination would have unacceptable implications for the international system. As a British foreign secretary once put it, “‘If it were to be accepted that people have a right to self-determination whenever they ask for it, it would make nonsense of organized international society” (Emerson 1962:451, n.21). Moreover, advocates of the right were prone to predictable hypocrisy. Any state could be expected to support self-determination when it threatened enemies but be opposed when it threatened allies or its own territory. Thus, “Lenin and Stalin made clear that self-determination was good where it involved a breach in the imperialist structure, intolerable where it involved a separation from the communist fatherland” (Emerson 1962:306). India, similarly, vigorously supported the right in international forums, but its leaders bristled at the suggestion that groups within India might wish to exercise it.
Furthermore, the possibility of foreign intervention wreaks havoc with the notion of the “self-expression” of a collective wish to employ the right. As we have seen, states are heavily favored in disputes with defiant or secessionist small groups in their population. Therefore, for any hope of success, such groups often must depend on the influence and intervention of other states. In a world of largely settled borders and scarce resources, many states have an incentive to intervene “on behalf of” small peoples, but actually for their own gain. Threatened states thus conjure the specter of foreign intervention to condemn all pushes for self-determination as “foreign plots.” And indeed, actual cases of intervention, such as India in Bangladesh, the United States in Tibet, and Pakistan and India in Kashmir, demonstrate that such accusations have not been idle.
The international community has kept Tibet under watch for decades, and Beijing has clearly been influenced by a concern about that international surveillance. By contrast, Beijing has never borne the brunt of heavy international pressure over the governance of Xinjiang (Carlson 2005:25, n. 12), although the Chinese government did take notice when human rights organizations began to publish materials focused on the region, and even more when the U.S. State Department mentioned Xinjiang for the first time in its annual Human Rights Report on China in 1998. Since that time, party leaders have devoted considerable thought and effort to avoiding the “internationalization” of the so-called Xinjiang problem (Ma Dazheng2003:205–11). It is important to remember, though, that the earlier internationalization of the Tibet problem actually drove party leaders to retrench reforms in Tibet and to cool talks with the Tibetan government in exile (Carlson 2005:105).
Chinese scholars have mounted a multifaceted effort to ward off the threat of self-determination in China’s peripheral regions. Academicians at the Center for Research on Chinese Frontier History and Geography (Zhongguo bianjiang shidi yanjiu zhongxin) in Beijing have devoted more than a decade to producing scholarly justifications for China’s claims to every square inch of the national territory and, indeed, several large regions no longer under Beijing’s rule. In addition to providing ammunition for border negotiations with neighbors, this work has clearly been intended to thwart the claims of Tibetans, Uyghurs, Mongolians, and even Koreans to national territories of their own (Bovingdon 2005; Carlson 2005:55; Millward 1996:118–21). Other scholars have focused on the principle of self-determination itself. Pan Zhiping, a leading social scientist in Xinjiang, wrote in 1999 that old Europe honored self-determination in order to arrive at mononational states but that such a program was “clearly already inappropriate for the highly complex contemporary world” (Pan Zhiping 1999:45).
The Sovietologist S. Frederick Starr suggests that Washington and Beijing outwardly appear to agree on this point. Noting that Washington has done nothing about Beijing’s abridgments of “democracy, human rights, and religious freedom” in Xinjiang, Starr concludes acerbically that “the United States, by its very founding, placed itself on the side of national self-determination and those seeking freedom from imperial rule. Now we seem to be supporting the imperial powers” (Congressional-Executive Commission on China 2005b).
Starr is perhaps overcritical of the United States on this score, in that it has not chosen a path different from that of most members of the international community. The fact remains, however, that hardly any states have given rhetorical support, let alone political or military assistance, to state-seeking groups’ quests for self-determination. One of the few states that did offer such open support was China during the Mao era, strongly endorsing independence for East Timor, Angola, and Palestine in the Xinjiang Daily newspaper (“Renmin ribao” pinglunyuan 1975; “Tuanjie qilai hanwei duli—Zhuhe Angela renmin jieshu putaoya zhimin tongzhide shengli” 1975; Xinhua 1975).
Beijing would, of course, object to this analogy, arguing that all those struggles were anticolonial, whereas the people of China ended colonialism once and for all in 1949. During an interview in 2006, China’s ambassador to the United Nations justified Japan’s exclusion from the Security Council and China’s right to a seat by saying, “We didn’t occupy other people’s territory” (Traub 2006). As we saw in chapter 1, the CCP leadership has arrogated to itself the right to define what territory was “other people’s” and what belonged to China.
Although few states have stepped forward to protect the right of self-determination of peoples, international bodies have demonstrated a growing commitment to the protection of human rights. On its face, the carefully circumscribed principle of protecting human rights appears less threatening than that of underwriting self-determination, which, by virtue of being a collective right, at least implies the possibility of secession. Despite seeming to be beyond reproach in moral terms, even intervention to safeguard human rights has quietly been opposed in practice by many states. Many governments have been leery of criticizing others for violations of human rights, fearing the derogation of their own sovereignty as a consequence(Krasner 1993:164). China has been no exception. For years after it gained entrance into the UN in 1971, the delegation from the People’s Republic of China compiled a near-perfect record of opposing humanitarian interventions. In defending its position, the delegation stipulated that the principles of human rights “do not apply everywhere in the same manner and that the implementation of these standards should be left to the states concerned” (Kamminga 1992:109–11). The government has signed pacts with other regimes aggressively reaffirming the principle that sovereignty trumps human rights. Thus in 2000, Jiang Zemin and Turkmenistan’s president Sapurmurat Niyazov promulgated an official statement that “under no circumstances, even reasons based on a thesis of ‘priority of human rights over sovereignty,’ does any state have the right to interfere in internal affairs of other sovereign states.”7
While it has not quite evaded criticism for repressing Uyghurs’ political action at home and engineering its suppression abroad, Beijing has banished the specter of a humanitarian intervention in Xinjiang that would lead to the territory’s secession. It appears increasingly unlikely that other states or international organizations might commit, and Beijing submit, to a lesser intervention. At the moment, it is difficult to be optimistic about a resolution of the long-brewing contention between the Uyghurs and the Chinese state.