“People here feel genuine terror, we definitely feel unsafe here,” said a 21-year-old man surnamed Huo from China’s southwestern Sichuan province.

“That scene was just too cruel. There were corpses, blood everywhere. No one dares to come out on the streets.”

About 200 enraged Chinese residents protested two nights ago, angered that “innocent lives were taken,” Huo said ….

The roads are now occupied by troops at security checkpoints and paramilitary officers are carrying batons and rifles as they walk the streets. Stores have kept their doors shut for days.

“In the past, we used to get along, but now I distrust them,” said a Kashgar Chinese shopkeeper, who declined to be identified, referring to the Uighurs and Han Chinese.

“The violent attacks targeted one whole race — the Han Chinese. How am I supposed to trust them now?”

Ethnic tension in the area is intense, following years of heavy-handed government policy aiming to lift Xinjiang’s economy while “binding it more closely” to Beijing. Dr Jason Abbott at Netherlands Aid explains:

Like Tibet much of the ethnic violence in recent years has been a result both of Beijing’s continuing hard-line approach towards ‘splitist’ tendencies and Uyghur opposition to the officially sanctioned, and indeed supported, migration of Han Chinese into the region. The latter is the result of the ‘Go West’, or ‘Chinese Western Development’ program that was launched by then-Premier Zhu Rhongji in 2000 in order to alleviate the growing economic division between the eastern maritime board and the rest of the country …. Massive infrastructure projects including highways and rail lines were largely designed according to Nicholas Bequelin of Human Rights to “bind Xinjiang more closely to the rest of the PRC.” While the Chinese government denies that its policies are designed to promote demographic change the proportion of Xinjiang’s population that is Han Chinese has risen from approximately 5 per cent in the 1940s to around 40 per cent today.

… For the Uyghurs the continued inflow of ethnic Han Chinese threatens their distinct ethnic, linguistic and cultural identity and threatens to make them eventually a minority in the region as a whole.

The Associated Press described a bleak scene in Kashgar on Tuesday:

Units of the People’s Armed Police, some in riot suppression gear, stood in clumps at points throughout Kashgar, a Silk Road city of 600,000 people, about 80 percent of whom are members of Xinjiang’s native Turkic Muslim Uighur ethnic group.

Armored cars were parked along streets and a nighttime curfew was in force downtown, with people only allowed to cross the security cordon to leave for the suburbs ….

Pools of dried blood were visible Tuesday on the floor of the destroyed restaurant, its windows were shattered and its walls charred by fire.

According to Twitter posts by NBC News’ Adrienne Mong, however, the security presence was less conspicuous by Thursday, and there were a number of Han tourists on the streets:

Old Kashgar stunning, reminds me of Old Kabul w/wood and brick architecture. Lots of small tour groups of Han Chinese, esp from Jiangsu. →

Found a Mao restaurant in Kashgar. One of few places open for lunch during Ramadan. yfrog.com/kfw2saaj →

Only heavy security presence in Kashgar so far is on People’s Square: riot police w/full-on riot gear. All staring at great big Mao statue. →

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Post tags: go west policy, Han Chinese, kashgar, Mao Zedong, Uyghurs, Xinjiang, Xinjiang violence, Zhu Rongji
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Nat Geo went on a search for the most typical human face. After crunching the numbers, they discovered their candidate: a 28-year-old Han Chinese male.

According to the magazine, there are nine million people in the world who fit that description.

Not surprisingly, China scores the top spot for both nationality (19% of people are Chinese) and language (13% of people speak Mandarin as their first language).

To discover more about the “most typical person”, see here.

© cdtstaff for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Han Chinese, population
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When communist China was formed in 1949, Mao Tse-tung decreed that everybody should follow a single time zone, no matter that the country is as wide as the continental United States.

But Uighurs, the dominant minority in China’s northwestern Xinjiang province, balked at running their lives on Beijing time, which would have them getting up in the pitch dark and going to sleep at sunset.

[...]

So the Uighurs follow their own unofficial time, which is two hours earlier — in effect following the dictates of the sun rather than of Beijing, about 2,000 miles away.

The separate time zones are in fact a metaphor for the chasm between the Uighurs and Han Chinese living in uneasy proximity in Xinjiang. Since 1949, the ethnic Chinese have grown from 9% to more than 40% of the province’s population, and Uighurs accuse the Chinese government of suppressing their culture and faith. The Uighurs are a Muslim people who look more European than Chinese and use a Turkic language sprinkled with Arabic.

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Post tags: Han Chinese, kashgar, time zones, Xinjiang
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In Tibet and in neighboring provinces, like Qinghai, Gansu and Sichuan, where Tibetans and other ethnic minorities live in large numbers, Tibetans and Han live in closer proximity than ever before, but they occupy separate worlds. Relations between the two groups are typically marked by stark disdain or distrust, by stereotyping and prejudice and, among Tibetans, by deep feelings of subjugation, repression and fear.

To be sure, there is no legalized ethnic discrimination, but privilege and power are overwhelmingly the preserve of the Han, while Tibetans live largely confined to segregated urban ghettos and poor villages in their own ancestral lands.

© Jenny Chu for China Digital Times (CDT), 2008. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: ethnic discrimination, ethnic tensions, greater Tibet, Han Chinese, Qinghai Tibet plateau, Tibetans
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Non-Han minorities may comprise only 9 percent of China’s population, but as the violence in Tibet and simmering resentment in Xinjiang indicate, the problem is one that Beijing is unable to resolve.This is a blow to President Hu Jintao, who is supposed to be an expert on Tibet, where he was once party secretary. He ordered troops as well as police forces into Tibet and Xinjiang last year to guard against pre-Olympic disturbances, but to no avail.

There are three reasons for the Communist leadership’s inability to address the issue other than by repression. First, given that Beijing’s first priority is government centralization, the official designation of any “autonomous region” in China is a façade.

Second, there is the innate belief in the superiority of the Han race, a notion historically reflected in China’s attitudes to all its neighbors as well as toward the non-Han minorities within its borders.

Third, the three regions with significant minority populations that are actual or potential trouble spots are all frontier areas that Beijing regards as strategically important. The minorities in southwest China are no problem because they are small, isolated and near frontiers from which China has never been invaded. The homelands of former invaders – the Mongols and Manchus – still exist, but they are now overwhelmingly Han. But Tibet – with its long history of isolation, immense cultural, linguistic and religious differences and on-and-off independence – is a different matter.

Dexter Roberts, in Business Week, argues that the failed development of western China by Beijing has fanned “ethnic resentment aimed at the millions of Han Chinese who have migrated into the region and have taken skilled, higher-paying jobs building the new roads, airports, and power stations.”

For China’s laggard west and its large ethnic minority populations, things looked a lot more optimistic back in 2000. That was when the government launched its grandly named “Develop the West” program. The aim was to use Beijing’s policy and financial support to reverse decades of economic stagnation, boost local provincial economies in part by tapping their rich resources, and ultimately narrow the yawning income gap between the flourishing coastal region of China and its poor western hinterlands. And as an added bonus, the new wealth would help ease ethnic tensions that have for centuries inflamed the loosely controlled western reaches of China (BusinessWeek.com, 12/20/06).

There is no denying that Beijing has tried. Over the past five years alone, the central government has spent more than $40 billion on infrastructure and social programs in the 12 western provinces. Last year fixed-asset investment into western China grew to $397 billion, up 28%, faster than China’s national average of 25%. “Continued progress was made in the large-scale development of the western region,” said Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao on Mar. 5 in his annual address to the National People’s Congress.

However, many of the economic statistics just don’t support that optimistic appraisal. Take overall gross domestic product growth for China’s west. While it grew an impressive 14.5% last year, several percentage points higher than the national average, the region’s total economy still only amounted to $667 billion. That’s less than one-fifth of China’s total GDP. Tibet’s GDP, up 17.5%, was a paltry $4.56 billion, dead last as the smallest economy of any region across China. All together, nine of the western provinces are among China’s 10 smallest provincial economies. “The western development plan is a strategy without effective policies,” says Zhang Baotong, director of the regional development consultancy center at the Shaanxi Academy of Social Sciences in the western city of Xian.

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Post tags: Han Chinese, minorities, Tibet, Xinjiang
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