China Demands Australian Film-maker to Withdraw Uighur Documentary

The Chinese Government, out of sheer stupidity, is stepping up pressure on Australia to subjugate to its whim.  This time, the target is an Australian film on Rebiya Kadeer, to be screened at the upcoming Melbourne Film Festival.  This is a report from ABC Radio Australia:

Organisers of an Australian film festival say they have been pressured by the Chinese government to remove a documentary about an exiled dissident.

The film by Australian director Jeff Daniels, called The 10 Conditions of Love, tells the rags-to-riches story of millionaire businesswoman Rebiya Kadeer, a member of the Uighur ethnic group.

Ms Kadeer was one of China’s richest women but is now in exile in the United States.

Richard Moore, director of the Melbourne International Film Festival, says an official from the Chinese consulate rang him last Friday asking him to withdraw the documentary.

“Then (they) went on to list at great length . . . the number of so-called crimes that Rebiya Kardeer had committed against China and against humanity,” Mr Moore said.

“I have to tell you after about five minutes I fazed out and then again reminded her that there was no way we were going to withdraw the film from the festival and politely put down the phone.”

Please follow this LINK to a more detailed report from this morning’s ABC AM program.

Let me sum up how an Australian will respond to this kind of farcical situation:

1. Amused.
2. There’s no way Richard Moore will back down.  If he does, he’ll be called a wuss.
3. That’s good publicity for Kardeer.  She’ll have more stories to tell when she is here for the film festival.  Good on her.
4. Now you finally got me interested.  Where can I buy a ticket?

Incidentally, the Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd today has  issued a stern warning to the Chinese Government about the way it handles Mr Stern Hu’s case.  Mr Rudd said and I quote:

Australia of course has significant economic interests with its relationship with China, but I also remind our Chinese friends that China too has significant economic interests at stake in its relationship with Australia and with its other commercial partners around the world,” Mr Rudd said. “A range of foreign governments and corporations will be watching this case with interest and will be watching it very closely, and they will be drawing their own conclusions as to how it is conducted.

 

Who are the Uighur?

I write this post about the history of the Uighur people as a response to our regular troll Anonymous (aka Ferin), who has a habit of using pseudo-science to justify his discrimination against the majority of non-Han Chinese in this world, in a manner analogous to the CCP-inspired Darwinian view towards other ethnic groups. It is not my intention to write a comprehensive Uighur history. I am only answering a few questions raised in Ferin’s comment.

(As a disclaimer, I hereby declare that I am of Han Chinese heritage. However, in the strictest sense as would have been approved by Ferin, I may not be qualified to such a claim. My DNA results seem to indicate that my genetic makeup has as much African and European components as East Asian ones. That made me wonder where my Chinese ancestors actually came from.)

First of all, let me quote Ferin’s comment:

Natives? Read up on your history. The Uighur did not separate from the Gaoche until around 700 AD, before then the Han Dynasty already established itself across Xinjiang up to within a few hundred KM of its modern Western border.

Not to mention, the Uighur of today are Uzbeks or “Sart-Taranchis”, there is interesting information out on this as well.

The real natives of the Xinjiang would most likely be the Chinese and Tibetans, and then 2,000 years later the Tocharians (who are not related to the Uighur, but share some genetic material).

Islam definitely is not native to Central Asia or anywhere but Saudi Arabia.

The following is my reply:

Dear Ferin,

1. You are the one who needs to read up on your history. Ethnicity is defined by history and culture; it is a matter of identity, not DNA. The way in which you misappropriate DNA information here shows that either you don’t understand the cultural history of the Uighur people or you intend to deny their identity, as Han chauvinists would often do.

2. You should also stop blindly regurgitating CCP racial propaganda. The CCP’s ways of using DNA make-up of population TODAY to define the HISTORY of different ethnic groups in China (and beyond) is not just problematic but also dishonest.

3. The word “Uighur” means “united”. It was a confederation of Turkic speaking ethnic tribes who came together to form an Empire in the 6th century. Their forefathers, however, were descendents of the Xiongnu. The name Xiongnu appeared in Chinese historical sources from as early as 3th century BC, even before the First Emperor established his unified empire of Qin. Xiongnu, according to Chinese historical records, formed a distinct cultural group and had for centuries occupied the interlocking desert, steppe, and forest regions from Heilongjiang and Jilin in the east to XIJIANG in the west before they came into contact with the Han Empire.

4. Throughout history, the Uighur had all along been culturally and ethnically diverse. It has been conquered many times, dispersed and mixed with local population. The name “Sart-Taranchis” means “farmers and merchants”. It was first used by the Uighur after the dissolve of the Mongolian Empire in order to avoid persecution. The Buddhist groups among the Uighur were known to be allies of the Mongolians. For the same reason, some members of the Uighur would refer to themselves by the place they dwelt (such as Kashgarlik or Turfanlik), instead of by their ethnic identity.

5. The indigenous religion of the Uighurs was Manicheanism. However, Buddhism, Nestorian Christianity and Zoroastrianism were known to have been popular among the population. Later, Uighur groups that settled among the indigenous Iranian population in the Kashgar oasis region, southwest of the Tarim Basin, became absorbed into the Islamicized Kharakhanid domain from as early as the 10th to 13th centuries. Kashgar had became an important Islamic centre of learning influenced by Arabic and Persian civilizations ever since.

6. The claim that Han Chinese settlement in Xinjiang started from as early as 100AD is nothing short of wishful thinking. Traces of Chinese influence along the Silk Road only attested to the existing of trade relations. A bunch of Han people passing through Xinjiang doing business with local people did not amount to “settlement”.  Large scale Han settlement in Xinjiang is definitely a 20th century phenomenon.

7. As for the so-called “real native” or the Tocharians, where have they gone? Archaeology and historical records seem to suggest that these very ancient nomadic inhabitants of the Tarim Basin did not disappear on the face of the earth after they were defeated by the Xiongnu in the 2nd century BC. A small group of them had fled to the northern part of India. But the majority of them had remained in the Tarim Basin and lived among other ethnic groups. They later became a part of the Uighur Empire, adopted Uighur identity, and practised Buddhism and Manicheanism. This again supported my earlier assertion that the Uighur are a diversified ethnic group with a long history of cultural and religious adaptation. Their cultural identity is further reinforced by religion and the use of a common language.

8. I totally agree with JR that the Uighur are more than qualified to be called “the natives” of Xinjiang.

Blogger Arrested in Beijing for Writing About Urumqi Riot

www.bangkokpost.com

AFP reports that China has arrested a university professor in Beijing for writing about the Xinjiang riots on his website.  The AFP report quotes from Reporters Without Borders, which alerts that Professor Ilham Tohti, an economist at Minzu University of China and an ethnic Uighur, was arrested.  Professor Tohti has been repeatedly harassed by the Public Security Bureau in Beijing since March this year for posting articles on his blog exploring relations between ethnic Han Chinese and Uyghur in Xinjiang.  The PSB, however, refused to confirm Professor Tohti’s arrest for AFP reporters.

I am a regular reader of Professor Tohti’s website, which is now blocked from within China.  I find the website very helpful in understanding the lives of people in Xinjiang.  I find no evidence of the website inciting violence, as claimed by some Xinjiang authorities on CCTV.  I suspect Chinese authorities targeted the website because it provides an alternative perspective to ethnic issues, which from time to time, contradicts the Han-centric official line.

 

MORE UPDATES ON MEDIA COVERAGE OF URUMQI

 Media coverage of situation in Urumqi is a bit confusing today:

1. BBC describes it as “uneasy calm” in Urumqi;
2. Aljazeera highlights fear on Urumqi street.  Both Han and Uighur residents are not confident that the Government’s approach is helpful in sorting out a long term solution;
3. Bloomberg points out that China’s show of force brings uneasy truce to Urumqi after riots.

The best eyewitness report goes to ABC’s Tom Iggulden, who is reporting directly from Urumqi.  The report captures on video footages of Uighur people and foreign press being assaulted by Han Chinese.

The best blog post for today is published by Xiao Qiang at China Digital Times.  CDT has translated an astonishing entry from the mitbbs.com, an American-based Chinese language online forum frequented by Chinese students studying abroad.  The entry contains an usually sober and objective assessment of the situation made by an ethnic Chinese with strong family ties in Urumqi.  I particularly appreciate the fact that this young person who posts under the name “ulmqman” is showing great concerns for the predicament of a forgotten group of people in Urumqi, the Kazakhs.  He wrote and I quote:

哈萨克人很郁闷，两头不挨，害怕被维族人杀，也怕被汉族人伤害。(Kazakhs are in a very difficult situation. They don’t belong to either side. They are afraid of being killed by Uighurs, and afraid of being killed by Hans.)

I agree with some commenters at mitbbs.com that the conflicts between ethnic groups in Xinjiang cannot be resolved by force or by blaming a few so-called Uighur terrorists.  A coordinated plan from the Government is desperately needed to encourage dialogue among ethnic groups.  Unfortunately and regrettably, we cannot see signs of that happening any time soon.

A Day of Selective Media Censorship in Xinjiang

It was the next day after the outbreak of ethnic conflicts in Xinjiang when foreign journalists received a surprise invitation from the State Council Information Office to go on an official trip to Urumqi, the venue where the mass incidents took place, so that they could “know better about the riots”.

Journalists such as Michael Wine from New York Times were quick to point out how this unusual step might have indicated a new and more sophisticated approach to information control:

It is a far cry from Beijing’s reaction 11 years ago to ethnic violence elsewhere in Xinjiang, when officials sealed off an entire city and refused to say what happened or how many people had died. And it reflects lessons learned from the military crackdown in Tibet 17 months ago. While foreign reporters were banned from Tibet, then and now, Chinese authorities rallied domestic support by blaming outside agitators, but were widely condemned overseas.

As the Internet and other media raise new challenges to China’s version of the truth, China is deploying new methods not just to suppress bad news at the source, but to spin whatever unflattering tidbits escape its control.

At Urumqi, the journalists had free access to a media centre with unrestricted internet connection, and affordable accommodation, and police protection and first-hand encounters with rioters in action. Meanwhile, the Information Office has made no apologies in offering their versions of the story, in the forms of compact discs filled with images and video clips prepared by state news agencies.

Their new initiatives have been greeted with cautious approval by some and outright rejection by others. Gady Epstein of Forbes described it as a clever publicity effort on the part of Chinese authorities “to define the story before the story defined them”. Robert Mackey of New York Times found these attempts at media management by the Chinese government contemptible. For Mackey, the tour went badly awry today when hundreds of Uighur protesters made an unscheduled appearance. The situation further deteriorated later in the afternoon when a Han Chinese mob took to the streets in Urumqi in hunt for Uighur Muslims.

That publicity stunt did serve the Chinese Propaganda Department’s purposes of temporarily diverting media attention away from mass arrests and strict Internet control that have been fermenting public outcries behind the scenes. But it also masks a potential danger of a government relying too much on propaganda and censorship as a way to harness public opinion. This report from The Australian has put it all in a nutshell:

THE fatal riots in China’s wild west underscore the difficulties that Beijing faces in maintaining order when its tight grip on media boosts the credibility of dangerous rumours.

And the lack of alternative outlets to disagree or to hold authorities accountable – where there are no independent courts or political representatives – drives people on to the streets, sometimes with pent-up anger about myriad grievances.

Incidentally, both Sunday’s riot and today’s mob revenge were believed to have been triggered by rumours.

For a summary of today’s events, I recommend THIS GUARDIAN REPORT by Tania Branigan from Urumqi. She puts a human face to an otherwise confusing situation. There is also a LINK to an accompanying video.

Mass Incident in Urumqi Claims Many Lives

A mass incident of seismic proportion broke out in the evening of 5 July 2009 at Urumqi, the capital city of Xinjiang.   ABC China correspondent Stephen McDonell filed this report from Beijing for the PM program.

ABC – PM | Mon, 06 Jul 2009 18:36:00 +1000

The latest official death toll has risen to 156.  In the meantime, Internet traffic and telephone connections to Urumqi are said to be cut off.  Social networking sites such as Twitter, Youtube and Flickr are blocked in most Chinese cities. 

Just for now.  And I’ll follow up with a bit more detailed discussions tomorrow.