The ETIM and ETLO are minor organizations capable of carrying out pin-prick attacks. The Chinese security forces have efficiently curbed their activities, and Chinese diplomacy has successfully turned them into fugitives even outside of Xinjiang.I thought that ETIM and ETLO do have contacts inside Central Asian Republics and maybe Pakistan.
Point to widespread support for Islamism, not ethnic separatism. You should also feel free to address the fact that Chinese policies have encouraged radicalization by closing off other avenues of identity and criticism.
How about prohibiting cultural expression; demolishing primarily minority neighborhoods to make way for the Olympic Games and providing no recompense; inequitable enforcement of the law; and failure to assist minorities in receiving education (which is not free)?Sure, some of them are. One that you mentioned - disallowing religious clerics into government - seems to be a reasonable restriction looking at the record of cleric-governed places. And that's discounting the bad blood history between Uighurs and Chinese entirely, like the massacre of Chinese during ETA rule.
From Nicolas Becquelin's "Staged Development in Xinjiang" (The China Quarterly, 2004):Is it's economic situation so bad? Any statistics corroborating this claim?
t remains unclear whether Xinjiang's overall development strategy will be ecologically sustainable in the long term. Future demographic pressure coming from an expected upsurge of the minority population (half of it today is below the age of 14) [although the Han population grows more than twice as fast, and is larger] combined with intensified urbanization, oil exploitation and further land reclamations might cause irreversible damage, threatening the very possibility of human settlement in some areas.
Only 4.3% of Xinjiang's land can support human settlement. There is increasing desertification as well as a reduction in water resources.
Writes Becquelin of the economy:
Rural under-employment is acute, accompanied by a diminution of the cultivatable area per capita. Earlier surveys have showed that about one-third of the Uighur population is underemployed, and in certain districts, up to 45 per cent of the population registered have actually left to find work elsewhere. [... T]he problems Uighurs face in finding jobs in the cities are incomparably higher [than Han Chinese migrants], generating a growing urban underclass in the cities' suburbs.
Meanwhile, the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, while nearly three-million strong, must be heavily subsidized by the state.
Assimilation into Han Chinese might be beneficial in the long run, for both China and the lesser ethnic groups.
Riiiiight. Because, supposedly, Uighurs are maladapted to modernity. Too bad about that Islam, and all.
You've made no effective argument on this count.
You are saying most of them are reasonably content with the situation, and the violence is minority and insignificant next to China's authority in the region. So I repeat, what kind of suffering would assimilation cause? Non-assimilation and keeping the Uighurs as a "second class citizens", as you said, as some sort of apartheid, would actually cause far more suffering than directly assimilating them into Han Chinese.
No. I am saying that most of them are extremely critical of China's minority policies and governance, in general, but do not support violent separatism. Their interests would be satisfied either by Soviet-style dissolution of the Chinese state (that is, peaceful transition to independence), or political reform, which would necessarily be accompanied by an upswing in terrorist violence, but would efficiently address "root causes" over the mid- and long-term.
Wrong. There's comparative analysis of cultures' performance and not much else. More religious-heavy culture, and more fundamentalist, tend to be more luddite. More secular culture tends to be more progressive and more inclined towards industrialism and modernization.
The only barrier for the Uighurs is discrimination and poverty. Islam has not kept them from economic success. It's certainly true that a Han-dominated polity introduced new infrastructure and bound them into a larger economy. But Xinjiang is a colonial periphery, and even the extractive industries are dominated by Han.
The warlordist ETA - which is the "Uighur state" that existed under Soviet influence (and also massacred Chinese, just to recall some of the stuff causing bad blood again) is considered an example of "contemporary government"? And so? Palestine can grasp the concepts of contemporary government. Does it make a credible case in favour of their culture? If not, why? They surely do, and their government is arguably more modern that that of the Soviet-backed ETA enclave.
Both population groups have perpetrated massacres of the other.
I have pointed out that Uighurs are not organizationally inept. On the basis of your arguments about culture, the really deplorable thing about South Africa was inequality, not minority rule, and we should have countenanced the whites, so long as the blacks got something out of it.
Both the Palestinians and the Uighurs are oppressed peoples. Of course they're not going to enjoy good times.
Which US official expressed "prompt regret"? Which events? 1992, 1997 or 2006-2008 events?
Ask yourself: why is the ETIM the only organization up there on that list? The U.S. has begun to recognize that what China is doing stokes terrorism.