By Ruth Ingram
Imagine a world where two separate peoples live side-by-side, but in parallel universes. One sets its clock to Beijing time and the other to Central Asian, two hours behind. The majority population is largely oblivious of and disinterested in the hopes, dreams, and aspirations of the other. The cultural and social backgrounds of the two groups are governed by principles so diverse that it has become impossible to live together in peace and thus the government has decided that the only way to achieve its objectives is to clamp down and imprison anyone it deems a threat to the status quo.
This is Xinjiang, a Muslim, so-called autonomous region in the far west of China. The Turkic, largely Islamic people of Xinjiang – most notably the Uyghur minority group — have more in common with their Islamic neighbors in the five Central Asian countries to the west than with atheistic and quasi-Confucian Beijing, which has stepped up an across-the-board sinicization drive under President Xi Jinping. A vocal and sometimes militant Uyghur independence movement has also complicated relations with Beijing and estranged the majority Han, who see Xinjiang as an inalienable part of China.
After a proliferation of Uyghur-executed violent incidents, which have escalated over the past four years, Chen Quanguo — fresh from the success quelling the native people of Tibet with draconian policies — was brought in as Communist Party secretary of Xinjiang to stem the tide. His arrival in August 2016 has been heralded as a dramatic “success” by the government. Since his inauguration, “peace and stability” has been restored to the troubled province — by extrajudicially incarcerating more than 1 million Uyghurs within the past year and terrorizing those who remain. This has set Chen on a collision course with human rights activists and world opinion, but not enough to make a dent in his efforts to “eradicate the tumors and exterminate the viruses” of Islamic fundamentalism and “splittism,” which the government claims have plagued the province.
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