Beijing needs to rethink its failed ethnic policies

The violence was as alarming as it was ironic. One World, One Dream, the Olympics' high-sounding slogan, turned out to be elusive even for one country. It was a rude awakening to a regime which has taken pains to achieve ethnic harmony among the country's 56 races including nine million Uighurs in Xinjiang and two million abroad. Since the July 5th riots in Urumqi, capital of Xinjiang, Beijing has been pointing an accusing finger at an elderly woman named Rebiya Kadeer, an exiled Uighur dissident residing in the United States, as the mastermind of the riots. But Ms. Kadeer, president of the Washington-based World Uighur Congress, has vigorously denied the allegations. “I did not tell them to come out on that day or that particular time to protest,” Ms. Kadeer told the Wall Street Journal in an interview last Friday. “It was the six decade-long repression that has driven them to protest.” Whatever Ms. Kadeer's role in the worst anti-Chinese protest in Xinjiang in recent memory, it has become clear that Beijing's policies toward Xinjiang and other autonomous regions, including Tibet, have failed miserably and needed an overhaul. The policies have pleased neither the indigenous Uighurs nor the Han immigrants. On the contrary, the policies have yielded the opposite effects and have contributed to racial tensions.

To begin with, Beijing has not mistreated Xinjiang's Uighurs, China's historical neighbors known in ancient times known as Tujue (突厥) that live in China's vast northwest along the old Silk Route to Europe. Since the founding of the People's Republic in 1949, Mao Zedong had tried to appease Uighurs by making Xinjiang province an autonomous region and providing them preferential treatments and benefits unavailable to Han immigrants who flocked to the region in droves under Mao's “Go West” political call. The newcomers complained that they were in fact discriminated against, reversely, by such policies favoring Uighurs who showed no gratitude for such special favors as tax benefits, leniency in criminal offenses, relaxed quotas in government jobs and the one-child planned parenthood. But Ms. Kadeer and many of her same-minded compatriots viewed these as “fake autonomy” and complained loudly about “six decades of repression.” What's wrong? Are the Uighurs so ungrateful as to bite the hand feeding them, or they do have a legitimate grievance? While there are no simple answers to the complex question, one thing is certain. Beijing's ethnic policies did not work the way they were intended to.The problem with Beijing's current policies arises from the fact they are neither based on multiculturalism nor uniculturalism. They were aimed to have both, but failed to have either.

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