URUMQI: Teaching Mandarin to students in the remote Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region was helping the fight against terrorism, chairman of the autonomous region Nur Bekri said.
"Terrorists from neighboring countries mainly target Uygurs that are relatively isolated from mainstream society as they cannot speak Mandarin. They are then tricked into terrorist activities," Bekri said. The China Daily story is here.
The Uyghur autonomous region has a population of 20 million, 60% Uyghur or Kazhak. It is the old assimilate or separate problem. We know how it worked out in the USSR - mixed results, shall we say.
This measure can be contrasted to that of April 10. At a stadium filled with 4,000 local officials in Xinjiang, authorities announced the Supreme Court had upheld the judgments and that executions were imminent for two men who carried out a 2008 attack that killed 17 border guards. A few days later another vehicle bomb was exploded in the province. The China Daily reports are here and here.
That the will and means could be mustered to kill 17 paramilitary border police highlights the depth of the problem - one likely to be mitigated only slightly by assimilationist measures like Mandarin language study.
China is not an ideological union like the USSR. It is a proud ethnic giant unlikely to relinquish sovereignty in minority regions such as Xinjiang and Tibet. But the development and persistence of such centripetal forces tells us that the status quo is not a viable option. The assimilation-autonomy conundrum is far from resolution.
image: China Daily, August 4, 2008
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