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Jul. 7 – China locked down Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, and several other cities in the far western region of China today as a third day of protests over real and perceived injustices continued throughout the region. Mobile phone coverage and internet services were cut as armed police entered ethnic Uighur neighborhoods following deadly clashes Sunday that left at least 156 people dead and thousands injured.
The unrest in Xinjiang follows similar protests in Tibet last year where monks and ethnic Tibetans rioted against Han Chinese policies. The violence in Urumqi on Sunday was the deadliest ethnic confrontation in China in over 20 years and highlights the racial tension that still remains quite strong in parts of West China.
Oil-rich Xinjiang is both politically and geographically strategic due to its proximity to the former Soviet states of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikstan as well as the borders it shares with Russia, Pakistan and Afghanistan.
With major cities in Xinjiang now is a state of lockdown – curfews are in effect and many services have been curtailed or cut – it could be come time before normalcy returns to this region. Though “normalcy” has been by no means welcome or wanted in many places. As Beijing struggles to find a clear path of action in western China, it has constantly struggled with the religious and ethnic nature of the problem. And by treating the region as one to be colonized and “integrated,” it has alienated many of the very people that it has tried to help.
The simmering anger that boiled over on Sunday is endemic of the problems facing many governments in Central Asia. In Uzbekistan, soldiers and tanks patrolled sections of the restive Ferghana Valley in May following shootouts with suspected Islamic extremists and a suicide bombing in the valley’s main city of Andijan. Government forces in Tajikistan meanwhile, have been scouring the remote Rasht Valley in an attempt to hunt down notorious militant commander Abdullo Rakimov. In Pakistan, troops are clearing out the last pockets of Taliban resistance after two months of fighting.
The fall of the Soviet Union gave rise to an unstable Afghanistan and a form of religious extremism that has since threatened the weak and ineffective governments that replaced to Soviets. The instability in Afghanistan not only gave rise to the Taliban but the civil war that continues unabated until today has allowed guns, drugs, terrorism and sectarian violence to proliferate. “Peace in Afghanistan,” the Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid wrote in his excellent book Taliban, “would pay enormous dividends across the entire region.”
“Pakistan’s isolation in the region would end and it could reintegrate itself into the Central Asian network of communication links,” said Rashid. “Iran would return to its position in the word community and its role as a great trading state at the center of South Asia, Central Asia and the Middle East. Turkey would have links and commercial ties to Turkic peoples in Afghanistan with whom it has a historical connection. China would feel more secure and be able to carry out a more effective economical development program in its deprived Muslim province of Xinjiang. Russia could build a more realistic relationship with Central and South Asia based on economic realities rather than a false hegemonic ambitions, while laying its Afghan ghost to rest.”
Investment in the region had been increasing. Coca-Cola recently opened a new bottling plant in Xinjiang as part of its plan to invest US$2 billion in China in the next three years. The Urmuqi plant not is part of Coke’s plan to reach more and more Chinese consumers, but located as it is next to Kazakhstan, can be seen as a stepping stone to the Central Asia states beyond.
A joint China-Kazakhstan oil pipeline was also recently completed, giving China access to its Central Asian neighbors resources. With 80 percent of China’s oil imports coming by sea, Beijing moved in the past few years to diversify its energy options through cooperation with its Central Asian neighbors. In addition to the pipelines that run through its deserts, Xinjiang is energy-rich it its own right – oil and gas accounts for 60 percent of the region’s GDP.
How the continued unrest in Xinjiang will effect these or other long-term investments in the region remains unclear. State-sponsored oil and gas pipeline construction are unlikely to be slowed by the simmering ethnic tensions. But investors like Coke, who cater to the people, not the government, will find it harder going should the troubles continue.
