This was just the most bloody of a series of violent incidents involving rioters and police in Xinjiang over recent years, each of which suggest a boiling over of violence rather than premeditated attacks. In June 2013, 35 people were killed in a violent confrontation between rioters and police in the town of Lukqun near Turfan. Reporters observed that this followed a particularly heavy-handed campaign by police against the wearing of ‘religious clothing’ that had been proceeding for months. This riot was also termed an act of terrorism.
Meanwhile, the government pursues ever more petty restrictions on Xinjiang’s traditional culture and religion in the name of preventing extremism. Long beards and traditional veiling have been outlawed, with house-to-house searches mounted to enforce the ban. Shops are forced to sell alcohol, and police monitor stocks to make sure that this provocative edict is obeyed. Students, public servants and party members are all banned from observing the Ramadan fast. No one under eighteen is allowed to pray in the mosque. All of these restrictions are policed under a policy that stipulates that every household in every village in Xinjiang is assigned an officer who is tasked with keeping tabs on them and is empowered to ‘visit’ at any time. Observers believe that many of the minor violent incidents that have been reported as terrorism in Xinjiang in recent years have been in response to such intrusions by police into people’s homes.
Throughout the province, people have been encouraged to report their neighbours if they suspect any illegal ‘religious or separatist’ activity, and are paid for tipoffs.
Small wonder that this relentless pressure, along with the steady movement of Han immigrants into Xinjiang, feeds a conviction among Uighurs that their culture is under threat, while they are offered little in exchange. The upper levels of provincial governance are controlled by Han Chinese, Uighurs are disadvantaged in competing for government jobs, teaching in the native Uighur language of Xinjiang is now severely restricted, and opportunities for tertiary study in Uighur have largely been closed off.
Hundreds of people have been sentenced for a wide range of offences, including spreading propaganda, manufacturing weapons and ‘inciting ethnic hatred’. Sentences, including death sentences, have been passed during mass trials conducted in sports stadia, a style of justice made popular during the Cultural Revolution.
The tragedy is that demonising cultural and religious expression and criminalising even the slightest dissent is creating the very problem that the government say they are trying to combat.
The promise of autonomy that was very real in the early days of the People’s Republic and even as late as the 1980s rings increasingly hollow. Authorities now talk openly about the need for sinification in Xinjiang and Tibet, and in both places large-scale settlement of Han Chinese is gradually changing the facts on the ground, so as to one day leave no room for dispute that these regions are anything but Chinese.
The cultures of China’s ethnic minorities are already treated as little more than colourful novelties. This reached its nadir during the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics. A group of children in exotic ethnic costumes carried a huge Chinese flag into the arena, while a (Han) Chinese girl lip-synched a powerful rendition of ‘Ode to the Motherland’.
Just days later it emerged that the children did not actually come from the country’s different ethnic groups at all. They were all Han Chinese children hailing from no further away than Beijing. When outed, Olympic officials were baffled by the fuss. They pointed out it was common practice to represent China’s minorities this way, while the leader of the Beijing troupe which had supplied the children later said it would have been too much trouble to find real ethnic children, and, anyway, how could you be sure they would behave?
The most influential Uighur public intellectual in China, Ilham Tohti, tried for some years to put forward concrete proposals to ease the situation in Xinjiang. Ilham was an associate professor in the economics department at Minzu University, a charismatic figure who had set up a website called Uighur Online to act as a forum for discussion of issues between Han Chinese and Uighurs. The website was blocked in China from the day after the trouble broke out in 2009, but he still offered to work as a ‘bridge’ between Uighurs and Han Chinese.
He wrote of the need for the government to deliver on the promise of autonomy for ethnic minorities that is enshrined in the Chinese constitution, and counselled against petty crackdowns on cultural expressions such as long beards and the wearing of headscarves. He talked of the atmosphere of fear that had been generated by years of ever-increasing repression and control. He made detailed suggestions for addressing the economic disadvantage and discrimination that was at the root of resentments in Xinjiang. In all of this he was at pains to state that he believed Xinjiang’s future was within China and that he opposed any separatist agenda. He also was a staunch opponent of violence.
In January 2011 he wrote an autobiographical essay, ‘My ideals and the path I have chosen’. He wrote:
Whether looking vertically at Chinese history or horizontally at the world today, it’s clear that the greater a country’s cultural diversity and tolerance, the greater its creativity. Any thinking that doggedly stresses a particular group’s cultural uniqueness and superiority, thus making it non-inclusive, is closed-minded and a thing of the past. It will inevitably kill the culture it means to enshrine and protect . . . I hope that China, having endured many misfortunes, will become a great nation of harmonious interethnic coexistence and develop a splendid civilisation.
On January 15 2014 Ilham was arrested at his home in Beijing and taken to a prison in Xinjiang. A month later he was charged with ‘separatism’, and in September 2014 was sentenced to life in prison.
Dissident Chinese writer Wang Lixiong tweeted that in jailing Ilham the Chinese government had ‘created the Uighur Mandela’. Prominent Chinese activist and Sakharov Prize winner Hu Jia was brave enough to state the obvious: that the guilty verdict showed the Chinese authorities ‘don’t want the Uighurs to have any voice at all’.
If anyone was in any doubt of the government’s zero tolerance for Uighur dissent after Ilham’s sentence, that was dispelled by the subsequent jailing of seven of his students who were said to have been ‘bewitched and coerced’ into working for his website.
The cruelty of Ilham Tohti’s life sentence was underlined when the court also ordered his assets seized, leaving his wife and young children without financial support. His wife, who was in court to hear the verdict, remained unbowed: ‘No matter what happens, I will wait for him to come home,’ she said. ‘We will wait forever.’
By the time Ilham Tohti was sentenced in September 2014 it was already clear that China had entered a new era of repression, ushered in with the ascension to power in late 2012 of China’s new paramount leader, Xi Jinping.
Xi Jinping is a ‘princeling’, the son of Mao’s comrade-in-arms Xi Zhongxun. As a descendant of the first generation of China’s revolutionary leaders, he is part of a cohort who believe that they are heirs to the party’s primal legitimacy, and have a duty to safeguard it.
When the younger Xi first rose to power, many took heart from the fact that his late father had been a moderate, persecuted and imprisoned under Mao, and a prime supporter of Deng Xiaoping’s reforms. Xi’s father was particularly associated with the early success of southern China’s special economic zones and was later believed to have been a defender of Hu Yaobang and a critic of the crackdown in 1989. He was also known for his sympathy with China’s ethnic minorities.
As it turned out, it was not his father’s example that Xi Jinping looked to in forming his own approach to leadership. Soon after he took over as general secretary of the Communist Party in November 2012, Xi gave a speech musing on the lessons China should take from the fall of the Soviet Communist Party and the subsequent breakup of the Soviet Union. His verdict: the Soviet communists had allowed their ideals and beliefs to be shaken, and when the challenge came nobody was man enough to resist the fall of the pa
rty and the disintegration of the USSR.
Soon after he achieved the top job in late 2012 his strategy to save the Communist Party began to unfold. First there would be an unprecedented crackdown on corruption, one that would catch both high-placed ‘tigers’ and low-level ‘flies’ who had used their positions to make themselves and their families rich.
As I write, the anti-corruption campaign is still unfolding. Today the running tally on the website ChinaFile, which tracks those individuals whose prosecutions have been announced, stands at 1740, of whom 176 are ‘tigers’ and the rest are ‘flies’. Apart from these formal cases, observers estimate hundreds of thousands of party members have been caught up in some way in the investigation.
Some have questioned the motivations behind the campaign, noting that none of Xi’s allies—and indeed no princelings at all—have been implicated, while allies of former presidents and leaders of the Communist Party, Hu Jintao and Jiang Zemin, have not been so lucky. Most likely the campaign has a dual purpose, to win respect for the party for putting their house in order, while consolidating Xi’s position by eroding competing power bases.
The second prong to Xi’s strategy to entrench the party is a wide-ranging crackdown on alternative voices in society. The first to feel the chill on his ascension were the rights lawyers, but the campaign soon spread to other activists: NGOs, journalists, popular figures on Weibo (China’s version of Twitter), representatives of Christian churches, and even feminists.
Under Xi a string of lawyers and activists have been charged with a crime that would seem laughable if it didn’t lead to jail time: ‘picking quarrels and provoking troubles’, a catch-all concept covering such peaceful exercises of civil liberty as publicising a defendant’s case, organising strikes, opposing housing demolitions, or arranging a demonstration against sexual harassment on public transport. The crackdown on individuals has been accompanied by an intense effort to clean up the internet, where an army of party operatives toils to delete any opinion or information that doesn’t fit the official line.
The crackdown on alternative voices has led to a succession of travesties of justice. The treatment of Ilham Tohti may be the most egregious but he is not alone in being jailed for peacefully promoting solutions to acknowledged social problems. In January 2014 prominent rights lawyer and activist Xu Zhiyong was sentenced to four years in prison for ‘gathering crowds to disturb public order’ after he organised small-scale protests calling for equal educational opportunity for children of workers in China’s floating population, and for a public register of officials’ assets. Xu had co-founded a group called the New Citizens Movement, which aimed to promote constitutionalism in China.
In court Xu read out a defiant statement at the close of the trial:
What the New Citizens Movement advocates is for each and every Chinese national to act and behave as a citizen, to accept our roles as citizens and masters of our country—and not to act as feudal subjects, remain complacent, accept mob rule or a position as an underclass . . . You say we harboured political purposes. Well, we do, and our political purpose is very clear, and it is a China with democracy, rule of law, freedom, justice and love.
The continuing crackdown on alternative voices such as these is aimed at protecting the party’s monopoly over law and policy. Behind it runs the spectre of the old Soviet Union, and the fear that if the party was to give up even a little of its prerogative to set China’s course it would undermine the principle of one-party rule. Even where a citizen’s suggestion accords with announced policy, as with Xu Zhiyong’s proposed register of official assets (a key anti-corruption mechanism), it must still be rejected.
This insistence on total control has led to the situation where even to promote observance of China’s own constitution is deviant behaviour. ‘Constitutionalism’ is now routinely demonised in party media. Perhaps this is not surprising, since the Chinese constitution is full of inconvenient clauses about respect for human rights, freedom of speech, the right to criticise any state organ or functionary, and the rights of citizens in autonomous areas.
In late 2013 an internal Communist Party document was leaked that provides a telling glimpse of the party’s fears and insecurities. Known as ‘Document 9’, the circular listed seven ‘false ideological positions’ which are a threat to party-imposed stability. These perils included Western constitutional democracy, universal values, the primacy of individual rights, Western-style journalism, and ‘historical nihilism’—that is, critiquing the party’s version of history.
The document argues: ‘by rejecting Chinese Communist Party (CCP) history and the history of New China, historical nihilism seeks to fundamentally undermine the CCP’s historical purpose, which is tantamount to denying the legitimacy of the CCP’s long-term political dominance.’ Tellingly, one of the document’s examples of ‘nihilism’ is ‘rejecting the accepted conclusions on historical events’. This is as clear a statement as it is possible to find of the party’s determination to win the war for control of the national memory.
One of the key battlegrounds in that war is Tiananmen Square and the events of June 4 1989.
In early May 2014, a month after we had travelled to Guizhou together, I went to visit Guo Jian in his studio in Songzhuang, an artists’ village outside Beijing’s city limits. Having lost yet another studio to developers, he was camping above his new workspace, which was crammed with canvases, found objects, art books and half-completed projects. Among them was a miniature three-dimensional model of Tiananmen Square.
He had been working on this diorama since 2010, adding new elements to a fantasy scene of the square threatened by bulldozers on the ground and helicopter gunships in the air. It was intended as a studio piece only, as no gallery would consider a work full of such dark resonances, even though the gunships and bulldozers were meant as a commentary on the relentlessness of urban development.
As the 25th anniversary of June 4 loomed, he had decided the diorama would say something else. He had covered the whole scene in minced meat, and invited me out to see the work in progress.
As I walked through the open door I was assaulted with the odour of rotting meat. He had only been working for a day but the 50 kilograms of minced pork was already on the turn. The smell added to the shock of seeing the familiar buildings of Tiananmen Square—the Monument to the People’s Heroes, the Great Hall of the People, Mao’s Mausoleum—disappearing under red minced flesh.
We retreated outside to talk. Of course he wasn’t going to show the work, he told me, but he was going to get a friend to document it on video. I asked what he planned to say if anyone in authority came snooping. He would tell them the truth, he said, with an innocent grin: it was inspired by the meat sculptures he had seen at the Royal Easter Agricultural Show in Sydney.
We talked about how happy his father was that Guo Jian had finally ‘swept’ his grandfather’s grave. This act of filial piety had started a whole new conversation between them about the past, about his grandfather’s life and death and his father’s story, too. But as we chatted it was hard to escape the pall of the looming anniversary—the pre-June crackdown had started early that year and news had just broken of the arrest of the rights lawyer Pu Zhiqiang.
Pu had been arrested after attending a private gathering to commemorate June 4. His Weibo account, which had hundreds of thousands of followers, was silent, but elsewhere the web was humming with the news, with comments being deleted as fast as they appeared. For all that Pu was a thorn in the authorities’ side (most recently for his defence of the dissident artist Ai Weiwei), the respect he commanded had made him seem untouchable. He had even made the cover of the state-run China Newsweek the previous December, lauded as the most influential person promoting the rule of law in the country. That he should have been detained seemed a particularly bad omen.
I was back in Sydney when I got the message that Guo Jian had been arrested. It was early on Sunday, June 1 and the news was spreading fast among his fri
ends on the popular messaging app WeChat. We had all seen the interview he had given to the Financial Times that had appeared the day before. In it he had talked at length about the events of 1989, and reading it I had felt a sense of pride at his bravery, mixed with a sinking feeling that this year he wouldn’t get away with it. He had never avoided the subject and he had discussed it with journalists before, but this was the 25th anniversary, with a new and prickly leadership team in power. Around the world Guo Jian’s friends sat waiting for news.
When the police came to his studio, it was past midnight on the day the article appeared. The minced meat had long been cleared away and the Tiananmen diorama was clean and white once more.
He was expecting them. By that time dozens of intellectuals and activists had been detained, and the interview had put him under a spotlight. That day he had got a haircut and had had his nails done as well. His army training had taught him a bit about preparing for rough conditions.
Even though he was ready for it, the knock sounded terribly loud when it came. Some of the police were in uniform, others in plain clothes. One carried a video camera and worked his way around the room shooting anything that looked significant. The senior officer took Guo Jian aside and showed him his police badge. They soon focused on the diorama and called over the video officer. ‘Evidence!’ he said, zooming in on the tanks and soldiers. ‘Let’s go down to the station and have a talk,’ said the man in charge.
The Phoenix Years Page 28
