...
Playdough and Ice...
Murakai writes, "These people (the Uyghurs) aren't even Han Chinese, so I don't know what the big issue is."
And Visser writes, "Secular muslims have nothing to worry about, only the religious nuts."
Well. Both of you are off the mark. The main reason that the Chinese authorities are persecuting the Uyghur people of Xinjiang is because they are NOT Han Chinese. The persecution of the Uyghurs has less to do with the Muslim religion than it does with a simple difference of ethnicity and language.
To understand the mentality of the Chinese authorities try to think in terms of "social homogeneity" and "total uniformity of thinking, acting and appearance". The police have locked up Uyghurs because they are Turkmen, not because they are religious or fanatical.
The first and only time I visited Xinjiang, in 1999, I noticed that the main mosques in the bigger town of Kashgar were completely deserted at all hours. Back then the doors were still open, but nobody in Kashgar worshipped in public. Down the road, on the way to the Karakorum range, which I had to climb over by bicycle to enter Tibet, there was a smaller town, Kargilik. There was a mosque there, too, and the men weren't so afraid to go in for a prayer. But they didn't look very happy or secure about it. Kargilik was the only place in which I saw people openly practicing the Muslim religion in Xinjiang in 1999.
Ethnic, social and religious oppression has been an ongoing policy in Xinjiang for decades. Since July 2009, after major streets riots in Urumqi, the biggest city in Xinjiang, things got even tougher for the Uyghurs, culminating in the construction of the huge detention centrers we see today. The Uyghurs are not identical to the Chinese: they are Turkmen. So, "Do not pass go. Do not collect 200 dollars. Do not pickup a get out of jail free card."
You see the same type of repression in Tibet. Only those few Tibetans who grow up immersed in the official sinicization system of Mandarin-political education in Lhasa can prosper. Ordinary Tibetan peasants who can't speak Mandarin and don't want to get involved with the Chinese system basically keep out of the way and don't live in Lhasa.
Tibetans in Lhasa staged a major street protest in 2008, with many killed and hundreds jailed, much the same as in Xinjiang. The protest happened in Lhasa after 15 years of steady migration by Han Chinese into Tibet, and especially into Lhasa. These Chinese migrants came with extra pocket change and free government money, which enabled them to step over the heads of poor local Tibetans to establish businesses.
The example of Lhasa is similar to what happened in Sihanoukville recently, only the changes to Lhasa came much more gradually, with much less dust and certainly without the criminal gangs from Fujian and elsewhere.
But there is no doubt that it was the overt usurpation of prime property, social privileges and opportunities by the Chinese migrants that upset the local Tibetans in Lhasa. Few Tibetans were or are rich, and only a few owned significant businesses in Lhasa.
One of the local Tibetan businessmen, Mr. Dorje Tashe fell out with the authorities for alleged support of "exiled groups" and was sentenced to LIFE in prison in 2010. He was even a member of the Communist party. Others like him went to jail, too. See:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorje_Tashi
Hundreds of ordinary Tibetans and monks have been jailed for no crime worse than thinking and speaking for themselves.
BTW: after 2008, it became impossible for foreign travelers to move around independently in Tibet. I was fortunate to be able to cycle solo for thousands of kilometers across Tibet in 1997 and 1999, first coming in from Yunnan to Qamdo and back out to Chengdu over some of the Earth's most spectacularly scenic spots. (The mountains and gorges of eastern Tibet make the Rocky Mountains in Alberta seem itsy-bitsy.)
On my second bicycle trip, I rode from Kashgar in Xinjiang all the way south and east through the sparsely populated regions of far western Tibet, arriving in the extremely remote and ghostly gorgeous Guge kingdom in the Sutlej River valley.
It is a very long road from Kashgar to Mt. Kailash and Lhasa.
Several years after these odysseys, it was around 2007, my then social butterfly musician girlfriend took me to a party at one of her friend's. He turned out to be Wu'er Kaixi, who is four years younger than myself. Mr. Kaixi is #2 on Beijing's "dissidents wanted list" and had to flee China after the Tienanmen crackdown against the '89 Democracy Movement. He is also an Uyghur. He was genial, but also sad, and he seemed at a loss for words, I think, to express his sense of frustration. But he seemed humble and not really angry, more like resigned to his predicament, that is, of having had to run away from China and forced to depend on his new connections in Taiwan and America. Certainly, life cannot be easy for anyone who has been ridiculed and then totally erased from the public memory at home. During the '89 Democracy Movement, he famously stood up to face Premier Li Peng and criticized him for waiting so long to come and talk with the Tienanmen protestors.
...while studying for my B.A. in Canada in the early 90's, I befriended a privileged Beijing student, Ms. Jane. She told me that one late night during June 1989 she was woken up and "taken to" a public hospital in Beijing. She was brought there apparently to witness first-hand the suffering of the many injured civilians who had been shot up on various roads leading into the city as soldiers used deadly force to clear people off the streets late at night. Jane was studying computer science at the U of Alberta, and a very serious young lady. She had no reason to fabricate such a story. Her father was a senior Communist, an army general involved with Chinese arms sales overseas. "Those terrible things," as Jane called them. My point is, I met a real live Beijing girl and she told me all about the 1989 crackdown in 1992... "There was blood everywhere in the hospital," she said. Maybe she had some protestor friends? She was of their generation, and lucky to get out of China to study in Canada.
Back on topic, with the establishment of mass detention centers in Xinjiang, we see obvious evidence, on a grotesquely massive scale, of the aversion that the PRC government has to people with minds of their own. So this collective overreaction is fueled by paranoia and a cruel zeal: mass reprogramming is the social-political goal. And not because the Uyghurs are radical or a threat, but because they cannot be easily, or at all, subjected to sinicization. The Chinese government just cannot let well enough alone.
In the Western world, we complain about how going to school is just a socialization machine that produces copycat "conformists"; and yet, at the same time, all of us believe it is smart to become pricey professionals whose main aim in life is to end up comfortably complacent and free to do exactly as we please.
...But as a citizen of China, you are "bad" and only fail "uniformity" if you are not supremely patriotic and arrogantly proud of the country; at the same time, you are permitted to be cynical about society's contradictions and corruption, but you cannot openly condemn the party-state system, or criticize the current emperor of China; he is closer to God than the Pope. Understand that. Also try to appreciate that Western socialized conformity is only a less sincere shadow of Chinese programmed social uniformity... We Western minds are like the malleable "playdough" of subjective belief in whatever we think is right or true versus the rigid and brittle brain grammar of the Chinese mind, which is made of cold hard ice. The Western mind you can kneed and blend easily like putty; but the Chinese, you must melt or smash...
...[i]Playdough and Ice[/i]...
Murakai writes, "These people (the Uyghurs) aren't even Han Chinese, so I don't know what the big issue is."
And Visser writes, "Secular muslims have nothing to worry about, only the religious nuts."
Well. Both of you are off the mark. The main reason that the Chinese authorities are persecuting the Uyghur people of Xinjiang is because they are NOT Han Chinese. The persecution of the Uyghurs has less to do with the Muslim religion than it does with a simple difference of ethnicity and language.
To understand the mentality of the Chinese authorities try to think in terms of "social homogeneity" and "total uniformity of thinking, acting and appearance". The police have locked up Uyghurs because they are Turkmen, not because they are religious or fanatical.
The first and only time I visited Xinjiang, in 1999, I noticed that the main mosques in the bigger town of Kashgar were completely deserted at all hours. Back then the doors were still open, but nobody in Kashgar worshipped in public. Down the road, on the way to the Karakorum range, which I had to climb over by bicycle to enter Tibet, there was a smaller town, Kargilik. There was a mosque there, too, and the men weren't so afraid to go in for a prayer. But they didn't look very happy or secure about it. Kargilik was the only place in which I saw people openly practicing the Muslim religion in Xinjiang in 1999.
Ethnic, social and religious oppression has been an ongoing policy in Xinjiang for decades. Since July 2009, after major streets riots in Urumqi, the biggest city in Xinjiang, things got even tougher for the Uyghurs, culminating in the construction of the huge detention centrers we see today. The Uyghurs are not identical to the Chinese: they are Turkmen. So, "Do not pass go. Do not collect 200 dollars. Do not pickup a get out of jail free card."
You see the same type of repression in Tibet. Only those few Tibetans who grow up immersed in the official sinicization system of Mandarin-political education in Lhasa can prosper. Ordinary Tibetan peasants who can't speak Mandarin and don't want to get involved with the Chinese system basically keep out of the way and don't live in Lhasa.
Tibetans in Lhasa staged a major street protest in 2008, with many killed and hundreds jailed, much the same as in Xinjiang. The protest happened in Lhasa after 15 years of steady migration by Han Chinese into Tibet, and especially into Lhasa. These Chinese migrants came with extra pocket change and free government money, which enabled them to step over the heads of poor local Tibetans to establish businesses.
The example of Lhasa is similar to what happened in Sihanoukville recently, only the changes to Lhasa came much more gradually, with much less dust and certainly without the criminal gangs from Fujian and elsewhere.
But there is no doubt that it was the overt usurpation of prime property, social privileges and opportunities by the Chinese migrants that upset the local Tibetans in Lhasa. Few Tibetans were or are rich, and only a few owned significant businesses in Lhasa.
One of the local Tibetan businessmen, Mr. Dorje Tashe fell out with the authorities for alleged support of "exiled groups" and was sentenced to LIFE in prison in 2010. He was even a member of the Communist party. Others like him went to jail, too. See:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorje_Tashi
Hundreds of ordinary Tibetans and monks have been jailed for no crime worse than thinking and speaking for themselves.
BTW: after 2008, it became impossible for foreign travelers to move around independently in Tibet. I was fortunate to be able to cycle solo for thousands of kilometers across Tibet in 1997 and 1999, first coming in from Yunnan to Qamdo and back out to Chengdu over some of the Earth's most spectacularly scenic spots. (The mountains and gorges of eastern Tibet make the Rocky Mountains in Alberta seem itsy-bitsy.)
On my second bicycle trip, I rode from Kashgar in Xinjiang all the way south and east through the sparsely populated regions of far western Tibet, arriving in the extremely remote and ghostly gorgeous Guge kingdom in the Sutlej River valley.
It is a very long road from Kashgar to Mt. Kailash and Lhasa.
Several years after these odysseys, it was around 2007, my then social butterfly musician girlfriend took me to a party at one of her friend's. He turned out to be Wu'er Kaixi, who is four years younger than myself. Mr. Kaixi is #2 on Beijing's "dissidents wanted list" and had to flee China after the Tienanmen crackdown against the '89 Democracy Movement. He is also an Uyghur. He was genial, but also sad, and he seemed at a loss for words, I think, to express his sense of frustration. But he seemed humble and not really angry, more like resigned to his predicament, that is, of having had to run away from China and forced to depend on his new connections in Taiwan and America. Certainly, life cannot be easy for anyone who has been ridiculed and then totally erased from the public memory at home. During the '89 Democracy Movement, he famously stood up to face Premier Li Peng and criticized him for waiting so long to come and talk with the Tienanmen protestors.
...while studying for my B.A. in Canada in the early 90's, I befriended a privileged Beijing student, Ms. Jane. She told me that one late night during June 1989 she was woken up and "taken to" a public hospital in Beijing. She was brought there apparently to witness first-hand the suffering of the many injured civilians who had been shot up on various roads leading into the city as soldiers used deadly force to clear people off the streets late at night. Jane was studying computer science at the U of Alberta, and a very serious young lady. She had no reason to fabricate such a story. Her father was a senior Communist, an army general involved with Chinese arms sales overseas. "Those terrible things," as Jane called them. My point is, I met a real live Beijing girl and she told me all about the 1989 crackdown in 1992... "There was blood everywhere in the hospital," she said. Maybe she had some protestor friends? She was of their generation, and lucky to get out of China to study in Canada.
Back on topic, with the establishment of mass detention centers in Xinjiang, we see obvious evidence, on a grotesquely massive scale, of the aversion that the PRC government has to people with minds of their own. So this collective overreaction is fueled by paranoia and a cruel zeal: mass reprogramming is the social-political goal. And not because the Uyghurs are radical or a threat, but because they cannot be easily, or at all, subjected to sinicization. The Chinese government just cannot let well enough alone.
In the Western world, we complain about how going to school is just a socialization machine that produces copycat "conformists"; and yet, at the same time, all of us believe it is smart to become pricey professionals whose main aim in life is to end up comfortably complacent and free to do exactly as we please.
...But as a citizen of China, you are "bad" and only fail "uniformity" if you are not supremely patriotic and arrogantly proud of the country; at the same time, you are permitted to be cynical about society's contradictions and corruption, but you cannot openly condemn the party-state system, or criticize the current emperor of China; he is closer to God than the Pope. Understand that. Also try to appreciate that Western socialized conformity is only a less sincere shadow of Chinese programmed social uniformity... We Western minds are like the malleable "playdough" of subjective belief in whatever we think is right or true versus the rigid and brittle brain grammar of the Chinese mind, which is made of cold hard ice. The Western mind you can kneed and blend easily like putty; but the Chinese, you must melt or smash...
[url=https://postimages.org/][img]https://i.postimg.cc/GhQXRZwJ/0-IMG-20191124-144923-330.jpg[/img][/url]