Xinjiang and China's Rise in Central Asia - a History by Michael E. Clarke

Author:Michael E. Clarke [Clarke, Michael E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: International Relations, Ethnic Studies, Social Science, Political Science, World, Asia, History, Sociology, Asian, China, General, Regional Studies
ISBN: 9781136827068
Google: jRhHphtBg-QC
Goodreads: 16490901
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2011-03-08T00:00:00+00:00

Xinjiang circa 1991: reasserting control and ‘opening’ to Central Asia

The events at Baren in April 1990, as detailed in the previous chapter, had combined with reports of external connections between the insurgents and elements in Afghanistan or Central Asia to heighten Chinese perceptions that the causes of unrest in Xinjiang were external in origin. Significantly, a connection was made between the state's relatively moderate approach to manifestations of ethnic minority religious and cultural identity and the relaxation of major methods of integration throughout the 1980s and this external threat. Important in this regard was the impact of the state's economic development strategy that focused on state-investment in China's eastern coastal provinces. Over the course of the 6th and 7th Five-Year Plans (1981–90) this strategy generated a ‘disintegrative effect’ on the national economy, with growing economic disparities between the coastal, central and western provinces (Zhao 2001: 200–1). As a result, regional/provincial authorities in the central and western regions gradually formulated their own economic development strategy to make up for the lack of central government attention and/or investment. In the case of Xinjiang, by the mid-1980s the authorities had begun to re-orient Xinjiang's economy toward Central Asia. This was ultimately contrary to the integrationist aims of Chinese policy in Xinjiang.

Therefore, 1991 saw a reassertion of state control over ethnic minority religious and cultural practices. Over the course of December 1990 to January 1991 the authorities implemented regulations on the ‘management of religious activities and regulations on management of clergymen’ (Ürümqi Xinjiang Ribao 1990a: 57). Notably the regions where these regulations were assiduously emphasised were those that had been the centres of unrest in April 1990, such as the Kizilsu Kyrgyz Autonomous Prefecture, Kashgar and Khotan. The role of these ‘two regulations’ was to provide guidelines for the management of religious affairs and to strengthen the ‘means to exercise administrative control over religion’. Specifically, these regulations aimed to prevent religious interference in administrative and judicial matters, such as marriage, education and family planning, which according to an official of the Religious Affairs Bureau had been ‘out of control’ in some parts of the region. These ‘acute problems’, however, were resolved by the authorities through the prevention of the ‘indiscriminate’ building of mosques and the implementation of a ban on ‘unauthorised’ private schools, classes and sites of religious education (Ürümqi Xinjiang Ribao 1990a: 57).

This was also coupled with the penetration of Party cadres more fully into rural and pastoral areas of the region to combat the twin evils of ‘national splittism’ and ‘illegal religious activities’. At the ‘XUAR Mobilization Meeting for 1991 Rural Work’ Song Hanliang announced that the provincial Party and government had decided to organise 18,000 cadres into ‘rural working groups’ to ‘stabilise’ the situation, develop ‘grass roots Party organisation’, promote ‘socialist education’ and ‘deepen’ rural reform (Ürümqi Xinjiang Ribao 1990c: 78–9). Revealingly, Song stressed that cadres must uphold the Party's ‘ideological and cultural’ position in the countryside that had been recently ‘recaptured and fortified’ after the events of April 1990. In

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