The China-Pakistan Axis: Asia's New Geopolitics

by Andrew Small

  As the Chashma deal demonstrated, recent years have also seen a renewed impetus to press ahead with sensitive projects that in the time of Jiang Zemin, or in the early years of Hu Jintao, might have prompted pause on Beijing’s part. Now, from dam building in Kashmir to assuming operational control of Gwadar port, China is willing to act despite the reaction it will elicit in India. And while Sino-Pakistani military cooperation naturally provides the focal point for India’s concerns, many of the supposedly economic projects are also seen through a strategic lens. In some cases, such as the claims about an influx of PLA troops to work on infrastructure-building in Gilgit-Baltistan, these anxieties are wildly overblown.112 In others, as the fifth chapter of this book explains, the strategic nature of the supposedly economic initiatives is not only beyond doubt, it is almost the only reason they are going ahead.

  In recent years, the slowdown in Indian economic growth and complications in US-India relations have undoubtedly eased Chinese concerns about India’s take-off as a credible rival. The epilogue of the book details some of the Xi Jinping government’s refreshed efforts to improve relations between the two sides, which have expanded even further since Narendra Modi’s election victory. But this cannot obviate the fact that for Beijing, whatever the ebbs and flows in its bilateral ties with New Delhi, Pakistan’s utility as a balancer, potential spoiler, and standing counterpoint to India’s ambitions has never gone away.

  If interactions between the United States, China, India and Pakistan were shaped entirely by geopolitical and economic considerations, the basic framework would be fairly clear: a group of countries pursuing hedged policies towards each other, using their rivals’ opponents to gain leverage, trying to maintain sufficient levels of cooperation to continue to extract economic benefits even as strategic competition persists. But an additional cross-cutting element complicates matters, ensuring that instead, leaders on all sides have to lower their sights from the world of high strategy to the world of IEDs, Kalashnikovs, and jihadi propaganda videos: the militant factor. In this respect, for all the years of Sino-Pakistani friendship, China shares many of the same concerns as the United States and India. Yet as the next chapter lays out, Beijing’s history with Pakistan and its militants is a complicated one: China was integrally involved in the thinking and practice of Pakistan’s sponsorship of extremist networks in the first place, and has derived some strategic advantages from it ever since.

  4

  THE CHINESE WAR ON TERROR

  China has a good understanding of almost everything in Pakistan, political, security or economic, that might affect the bilateral relationship, but there is one piece they just don’t get: Islam.

  Pakistani Sinologist, Islamabad 20111

  China is taking a risk by stoking up Uygur resentment while brushing aside Isa Alpetkin’s model of peaceful Uygur national development. An old Turkish proverb has it that ‘you can hit a Turk ten times, and he’ll do nothing. The eleventh time, he’ll kill you’.

  Hugh Pope, in Sons of the Conquerors: The Rise of the Turkic World2

  In April 2010, the International Department of the Chinese Communist Party (IDCPC) played host to an intriguing set of guests. A delegation from Pakistan’s Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam (JUI) was making a rare visit to the IDCPC’s gleaming modern headquarters off Fuxing Road in Beijing.3 The JUI is part of the Sunni fundamentalist Deobandi movement, and most of its international relationships are flavoured accordingly. It was in JUI madrassas that many of the Taliban leadership received their education,4 JUI intermediaries helped facilitate the Taliban’s military and financial relationships in the Gulf,5 and JUI-linked militant groups helped provide logistical support to Osama Bin Laden while he was in Pakistan.6 When its “in-depth consultations” with the CPC’s polished vice-minister Liu Jieyi were publicly announced, along with the news that “both sides had agreed to promote party-to-party cooperation”, it naturally raised a few eyebrows.7 Certainly the JUI-F, whose leader, Maulana Fazal-ur-Rehman, headed the delegation, was a political party, but this was also a movement that acted as a barely concealed front for jihadi groups.8 And their trip to Beijing was by no means a unique occurrence.

  The previous year, a group of visitors from Pakistan’s Jamaat-e-Islami (JI), led by Amir Qazi Hussain Ahmad, had made the same journey to west Beijing, and went a step further: signing a formal memorandum of understanding with the CPC.9 The JI’s friends are a shade less colourful than those of its sometime-rival, sometime-ally the JUI, but the agreement to cooperate on “security issues” with the Chinese Communist Party was eye-catching nonetheless. On returning to Pakistan, Hussain publicly defended the MOU on the grounds that it was a means “to invite atheists towards Islam”.10 From China’s perspective, though, he was largely on-message. Officials noted with quiet satisfaction his statement that the JI “backed its stance on Taiwan, Tibet and Xinjiang” and his disavowal of “separatist Muslim movements”.11 Those with long memories knew that this was not the first time that Beijing had turned its attention to Pakistani religious parties. In the late 1990s, the likes of JI had been approached as part of a Chinese campaign to ensure that Uighur militant groups operating in Pakistan and Afghanistan were starved of support.12 The new spate of invitations to China could only mean one thing: Beijing had a problem, and didn’t believe its existing channels in Pakistan were doing enough to solve it.

  A few weeks later, the nature of that problem was vividly illustrated. On 29 June 2010, Dubai’s State Security Court found two ethnic Uighurs guilty of a terrorist plot. 35-year-old Mayma Ytiming Shalmo and 31-year-old Wimiyar Ging Kimili were each sentenced to ten years in prison after being caught in the early stages of a plan to attack the Dragon Mart, an enormous shopping mall on the outskirts of Dubai known as the largest Chinese trading hub outside mainland China.13 It was the first recorded occasion that the group known as the “Turkistan Islamic Party” or “East Turkistan Islamic Movement” had attempted an operation outside its usual turf in China and Central Asia. The trial provided a rare insight into the workings of an organization whose continued existence people had doubted until a series of jihadi propaganda videos announced its return in the lead-up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

  According to the court documents, Shalmo, the main plotter, had been recruited by the East Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM) during a pilgrimage to Mecca in 2006.14 There he met a fellow pilgrim from China who spoke to him about “jihad against their country’s government”.15 He travelled with the recruiter from Saudi Arabia to Pakistan, where he spent a year in an ETIM camp in Waziristan receiving weapons and explosives training, as well as instructions on making detonators from the group’s electronics expert.16 After being assigned to attack the Dragon Mart by ETIM’s deputy commander, Shalmo flew from Islamabad to Dubai where he conducted scouting missions at the mall. He also secured the support of his English-speaking co-conspirator, Kimili, who accompanied him on shopping expeditions to purchase the bomb-making materials. They were paid for with $10,000 worth of funds, which had been sent from Turkey through a hawala network. Local authorities in Dubai appear to have been alerted by a suspicious wire transfer that the men made between the UAE, China, and Saudi Arabia, and by the Chinese embassy, which had been monitoring the two men as a result of their Uighur ethnicity.17 When they were captured, police who raided Shalmo’s home in Al Ain found a large collection of chemicals acquired from chemists and paint supply stores, including potassium permanganate, concentrated sulphuric acid, nitrol, acetone, and nitric acid. Chemical experts at the trial said that the device, if detonated, would have had an 80-metre blast radius. Their goal was to “draw the world’s attention towards the Turkestani Muslims’ cause in China”.18 But they claimed they had not planned to kill anyone.19 The target was instead a symbolic one: a huge statue, standing outside the mall, of a Chinese dragon coiled around the globe.

  Xinjiang is China’s only Muslim-majority province and by some way its largest, encompassing more than a sixth of Chinese territory. Its land
boundaries span Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Russia, Mongolia, Afghanistan, India, and the entirety of China’s 520km border with Pakistan. The region holds China’s most substantial deposits of oil, coal and natural gas, as well as sensitive military installations such as the Lop Nur nuclear weapons testing facility. Since the 1990s, it has also been the source of the principal terrorist threat facing China, though the real scale and nature of that threat continue to be a matter of controversy. Xinjiang has long been wracked with tension between the Chinese state, the swelling ranks of Han Chinese migrants, and the native Uighur population. Aspirations towards greater autonomy or outright independence have never been far from the surface of political life in the province, and the consolidation of stable Chinese government authority has been a project under continuous challenge. One estimate suggests that central Chinese state control in Xinjiang has been effective for only 425 years over the course of two millennia,20 and the province experienced stretches of independent rule as recently as the 1930s and 1940s.21 In contrast to Tibet, the government in Beijing did not need to mount a full-scale military conquest when they incorporated it into the newly forged Chinese state between 1949 and 1950.22 As in Tibet, though, grievances over economic opportunities, population control policies, and land rights have readily escalated, taking on a more potent ethnic, nationalist and religious character. This has been reinforced by periods of outright repression of linguistic, religious and cultural rights, and the routine designation of large numbers of young Uighur men as “separatists” or “terrorists”, fair game for arrest, detention, or worse. Although these phases—such as the Cultural Revolution or the Strike Hard campaigns of the 1990s—have alternated with stretches of comparative liberality, the Uighurs’ sense of themselves as an oppressed minority whose way of life is under attack by the Chinese state is pervasive, and political resistance has been the result.23 For decades, this resistance was largely secular and pan-Turkic in inspiration,24 but by the 1990s, the impact of the religious revival across the region25 and the proliferation of transnational Islamist groups had started to give it a more explicitly Islamic character.26

  Pakistan was at the heart of this shift. While the closest ethnic and cultural links and the simplest land-borders to cross for the Uighurs were in Central Asia, the Soviet presence there acted as a barrier to trade, travel, and—through its stymying of religious activity—Islamic influence, leaving China’s south-western neighbour to become the main conduit instead. Until the 1980s, cross-border movement between China and Pakistan was limited by logistical constraints and political restrictions, but in the course of Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms the Uighurs were given newfound freedom to expand trade with neighbouring countries.27 Pakistan was the obvious place to turn. The Karakoram Highway had been completed in 1979 and was gradually opened up in the years that followed. A network of relationships between Pakistani and Uighur traders existed even before the new trade route was completed: many of the Uighurs who fled to Pakistan in the 1930s and late 1940s, fearing persecution from the Chinese Communist Party, had set themselves up in Gilgit, the Pakistani city midway between Kashgar and Islamabad. A modest two-way flow of products saw Uighur traders buy wool and leather goods, clothing, and cutlery and sell tea, hides, electrical equipment, and silk to the Pakistanis.28 Even more important than the small-scale trade links, Deng’s reform and opening process extended to religion. During the 1980s, China allowed Uighurs to travel through Pakistan to perform the Hajj or to receive religious education. Many of those who were studying in Pakistani universities and madrassas stayed on, and the transit points that were put in place for Uighurs on the way to Mecca, particularly in Rawalpindi, where they stopped while their Saudi visas were secured, became established centres of the Uighur community.29 The total number of Uighurs in Pakistan was never large by comparison with Central Asia, but their presence and activities would become increasingly sensitive as Chinese concerns over extremist influence there grew.

  The 1980s were a relatively peaceful time for Xinjiang, when Beijing saw economic and religious opportunities for the Uighurs as the best means to stabilize the province, but in the 1990s, that changed. Unrest in Xinjiang was already brewing by 1988, when small-scale protests in Urumqi erupted over the publication of a book that many Uighurs believed contained racial slurs.30 Tensions over growing Han migration and economic inequality had started to increase, and, following the fall of the Soviet Union, China had reason to view the disturbances in the province as a serious strategic threat: as the Tajiks, Turkmens, Kazakhs and Uzbeks all established their own independent Central Asian homelands, Beijing feared that separatist sentiment in Xinjiang would strengthen.31 The expansion of new transit and trade routes across the former Soviet republics made it far easier to move across the long-closed borders, giving easier access to overseas Uighur communities and other new pockets of support and influence.32 One of the most problematic cases was Tajikistan. The country was convulsed by civil war almost immediately after achieving its independence in 1991, drawing in Central Asian militants who would later give vital backing to their Xinjiang counterparts. The near-collapse of state authority made it a major corridor for weapons, drugs, and militants, running all the way through from Afghanistan to China’s western borders.33

  Beijing’s concerns went beyond the practical support that might be extended to separatist groups—they were also worried about an Islamic revival in Xinjiang. Islam had become a rallying point for Uighur protests, which officials increasingly pinned on the influence of “illegal religious activities”.34 The result was a cycle of unrest, violence and repression. Thousands are estimated to have fled from the often brutal campaigns of arrests, raids, executions and extra-judicial killings that took place.35 The “Strike Hard, Maximum Pressure” campaign is described by one Xinjiang expert as having “condemned hundreds of men and women to death by shooting, used torture to obtain confessions, jailed thousands, and stripped many others of the right to work or to practice Islam—all in the name of quelling ‘splittism’, religious extremism, and terrorism”.36 Many found shelter in neighbouring Kazakhstan or Kyrgyzstan, or went further afield. Some were caught up in the war in Tajikistan.37 Others made their way to a Pakistan that was now awash with the men, money, machine-guns and sense of mission left over after the mujahideen’s battles against the Soviets. Inside and outside Xinjiang, the cocktail of political tension and violence threatened to have a convulsive impact. A leaked Chinese government document in 1998 listed Uighur independence movements as the main threat to the stability of the Chinese state.38

  Many of the Uighurs who became embroiled in the world of militancy across this period appear to have had little intention of doing so. In some cases, extremist groups controlled the crucial transit routes they used through Central Asia. In other instances, young men heading to Pakistani madrassas to seek religious education, or simply a new life away from the Chinese government’s crackdowns, arrived at what were essentially way-stations for jihadi recruitment. The stories of two Uighurs from Kashgar who were captured together in Afghanistan in 1999 and sent to a POW camp in the Panjshir valley are representative. Nur Ahmed went to Pakistan to study in a madrassa in Rawalpindi, which provided him with free board and lodging.39 After six months of Quranic memorization—Ahmed spoke no Urdu or Arabic and so could understand neither the text nor his teachers—his principal encouraged him to go to fight in Afghanistan. A Taliban representative in Peshawar paid for his travel by car to Kabul where Ahmed received twenty days of light weapons training before being sent to the front. He was soon captured. With him was Abdul Jalil, who made his way to Pakistan via Karachi and ended up in Kashgarabad, a large building and guesthouse in Rawalpindi that was run and financed by fellow Uighurs. He was told that a madrassa in Kabul would give him free tuition, board and lodging and duly headed there with three other Uighurs. After two months he was instructed to go and fight with the Taliban. He received only five days of weapons training before being sent to the front, whe
re he too was quickly captured. Both Jalil and Ahmed were told that they would be fighting against Americans and Russians in Afghanistan. They were instead being sent into the middle of a civil war.40 Similar stories of naive-sounding young men stumbling into trouble crop up again and again in the Guantánamo Bay case files. Of all the nationals who were detained in the first US military campaign in Afghanistan in 2001–2, Chinese Uighurs were seen to pose the least threat of resuming their involvement in militant activities, and US courts ordered every single one of them—twenty-two in all—released.41

  China’s credibility problem when it comes to Uighur “terrorists” goes well beyond the fact that so few of them seemed to be a credible threat. Beijing’s tendency to attribute almost any act of violence in Xinjiang to “separatists”, to claim malevolent intent behind even the most peaceful of protests, and to criminalize political groups such as the World Uighur Congress and the East Turkistan Information Centre leaves the line between the terrorist, the activist and the aggrieved citizen permanently blurred.42 However, this well-founded scepticism about Beijing’s approach should not obscure the fact that there is, and has long been, organized militant opposition to Chinese rule in Xinjiang.