East Asia

Ethnic identity in China

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The fighting between minority Uighurs and the majority Han Chinese last week has revealed a crack in China’s self-perception as a unified country of one people. The World’s Mary Kay Magistad reports. Listen

Unrest in western China

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JEB SHARP: I’m Jeb Sharp, this is The World, a co-production of the BBC World Service, PRI and WGBH in Boston. Security forces in Urumqi killed two Uighurs and wounded another today. The three allegedly attacked and stabbed a fourth man before being shot by police. The incident underscores the tension that still exists after last week’s rioting. More than 180 people were killed, and at least 16 hundred injured in fighting between the minority Uighurs and the majority Han Chinese. The World’s Mary Kay Magistad says that violence is just an extreme sign of self-assertion among China’s minority peoples.

MARY MAGISTAD: It’s become chic in China, these days, to embrace things ethnic.  The Chinese middle class flocks to Tibetan and Uighur restaurants, and more and more Chinese are identifying themselves as belonging to one of China’s 55 ethnic minorities.

DRU GLADNEY: But I think it goes deeper than that.

MARY MAGISTAD: Dru Gladney is an expert on China’s Muslims, at Pomona College in California.

DRU GLADNEY: There is an interest in ethnic roots, regional heritage, and in the past, we’ve tended to downplay that and sort of focus on the official ethnic minorities.  But I think that there’s this unofficial ethnicity in China that does not get recognized, Hakka people, Sichuanese, Cantonese, Shanghainese, and that is really becoming a very important factor in cultural politics across China.

MARY MAGISTAD: Gladney sees the Uighur riots last week, and the Tibetan uprising last year, as part of a bigger picture, a trend of people in China, even those broadly classified as Han Chinese, identifying more with their smaller ethnic group than with a bigger, harmonious, multi-cultural family, united by the common purpose of seeing China rise and prosper in the world. But the big, harmonious family is what China’s leaders insist their citizens are.  So the government paints disruptions like last week’s riots in Xinjiang, or the Tibet uprising last year,  as the fault of outside agitators. Abdul’ahat Abdulrixit, is vice-Chairman of the highest civilian advisory body to China’s legislature.  He said this today, in an interview with state-run television network CCTV.

ABDUL’AHAT ABDULRIXIT: The terrorists, separatists, and extremists used distorted reports to create and instigate national hostility. The July 5th riot was very serious and distressing. Minorities cannot live without the Han. No ethnic groups can live without each other. We have the same homeland and the same goal, and share a common fate.

MARY MAGISTAD: There’s been no state-run media examination of grievances that may have sparked the violence in Xinjiang, but you can catch a glimpse of those grievances in Nianzigou, a tangle of mud brick shanties, on a hill overlooking Urumqi’s gleaming new hi-rises.  I climb a steep dirt path to the village, next to an open sewer, and chat with residents near the village mosque.  A small crowd of about 30 Uighurs gathers.  I ask how many of them have jobs.

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MARY MAGISTAD: None of them are working, and only two of them speak even a little Mandarin, the language here of economic advancement. The government does encourage Uighur children to attend school in Mandarin, and more and more do.  But then, their parents lament that the kids no longer want to speak Uighur at home, and that their Turkic cultural heritage is in danger of disappearing.  Many Uighurs resent being forced into a choice of preserving their culture or getting a decent job. It’s a choice many of China’s ethnic minorities have had to make.  But it’s different here, as in Tibet, says Jim Seymour, who teaches Chinese politics at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

JIM SEYMOUR: The Uighurs have a strong sense of identity.  It comes partly from their religion, partly from their sense of history, their knowledge that they had a great empire in Central Asia, and have survived through all these centuries being independent most of the time.

MARY MAGISTAD: Seymour says former Chinese leader Mao Zedong originally promised ethnic minorities they’d have the right to preserve their language, religion and culture, and to enjoy considerable autonomy. Those promises were flouted during China’s political storms, like the Cultural Revolution.  Now, he says, they’re being chipped away by attrition, and pressure to assimilate, but, with Uighurs still not getting the rights and respect that go to Han Chinese.

JIM SEYMOUR: If a Uighur is beaten up, he can’t even go to the police and say, so and so beat me up, you should do something about it. The police often just won’t pay any attention.

JIM SEYMOUR: In recent days, Uighurs have complained of exactly this, of being turned away at police stations.  In the slum I visited, a man lifted his shirt to show welts that all the villagers said came from Han Chinese coming here a few days ago to beat up Uighurs.  One Uighur I talked to near a mosque in the heart of Urumqi summed it up.

UIGHUR: [TRANSLATED TO ENGLISH] In the People’s Republic of China, Uighurs don’t have many rights. The People’s Republic of China is actually the Han People’s Republic of China.

JIM SEYMOUR: The challenge for the People’s Republic of China is to change that perception among China’s ethnic groups,  and make them feel like equal partners, before the fissures grow deeper and frustration erupts again.  For The World, I’m Mary Kay Magistad in Beijing.

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