May 13 in China
Picture USA 200 years ago when the first White settlers arrived from Europe. As they ventured inland, their first encounters with local Indians were sporadic, growing frequent the deeper they were into the North American plains. What later became identifiable as Indians were in reality different small and large bands of tribes, most of them only quasi permanently settled in any one place, without a walled city or such like places. That is, they were by and large nomadic.
Central Asia tribes were like those in USA, but in existence 5,000 years earlier and the encounters were the opposite in principle. Whereas White settlers regarded Indians as getting in the way of their seizing arable land, the Central Asian tribes treated settled Han agrarian populations as granaries and treasuries for the looting.
China, as it is known today, was five millenia ago a multi-state country (each state with roman names like Wu, Jin, Yue, Lu, and so on). Around the region of the present Great Wall route, the settled people were mostly Han Chinese, who before the unification of multiple states by Qin emperor Shi Huangdi, were scattered in agrarian places with walled cities, each ruled by a patrician “lord” over a populated area with its own army, system of government, and taxation. The most famous of these country-size “estates” (they are not fiefdoms in the European sense) is Western Zhou (with beginnings along the upper reaches of the Yellow River). That lasted about 500 years before it was succeeded by Qin Shi Huang, following a period of turmoil known as the Warring States era (the time of Confucius).
No mention of Uyghur is found in the earliest Chinese records, the most famous of which is the shiji (3,000 pages with commentaries in translated English) written by a court historian named Sima Qian (died c 86BC). He lived during the Han dynasty that had succeeded Qin. Ancient historical records first mentioned around 300AD the Uyghurs only in terms of the jiuxing 九姓, that is, Nine Tribes all of whom are proto-Turks in ethnicity but each tribe ruled separately. But in the shiji and prior to it (eg. the Spring and Autumn Annals, c. 722-481BC) there was frequent mention of the Xiongnu, a loose confederation of tribes north of the Great Wall.
The ancestors of the Genghis Khan then and the Uyghurs today are the Xiongnus. They were the reason China during the Zhou, Qin and Han and well into the Ming dynasties constructed the Great Wall in order to stop the frequent cross-border raids to take the crops, jewellery and women from the settled populations. They were also the reason that the Great Wall expanded under each succeeding dynasty, growing from a thousand-odd km to almost 9,000 eventually. (In some episodes, early Chinese records speak of emperors – the Tang dynasty in particular – in order to win the peace, gave away princesses to head of tribesmen and military generals as appeasement “gifts”.)
The strategic military value of the Wall worked until Genghis Khan, whose conquest of China had the effect of redistributing the nomadic populations westwards, well into parts of Turkey and the areas bordering Eastern Europe. That would include the Xinjiang province today where Uyghurs finally settled in areas the Chinese had abandoned because water needed for irrigation had dried up and the desert had moved in. During the Tang dynasty (618-907AD) and after the fierce Battle of Talas (751AD) in present-day Kyrgystan against the Abbasid Arabs and the Karluks (a Xiongnu tribe related to the Uyghurs), the Great Wall was extended to the outskirts of present-day Urumqi. This western end is in the Lop Desert, near a place called Loulan, site of a Chinese pre-Han dynasty.
The riots in Urumqi.
What the Tangs failed against the tribal incursions, the Qing dynasty (b. 1644AD) succeeded, first militarily pacifying areas beyond Xinjiang. These territories were subsequently placed under direct rule of Beijing (Qing rulers, also non-Han, were Manchus). Republic China did not keep all the Qing territories. Instead, it retreated south and eastwards into the present border, surrendering vast country-size tracts of land in what is today broken up into the states west of Xinjiang; these end with the suffix word “stan”: Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan.
Present-day Uyghur population today used the Western language of “human rights” and “freedom” to demand for independence on territories that their ancestors failed to obtain by force. Militarily the Uyghurs have aligned themselves to the Talibans next door, exploiting their only common identifier, Islam. Politically, they have combined forces with Tibet’s Dalai Lama (Tibetan tribesmen once fought Han Chinese in Xinjiang and occupied Xi’an briefly in 763). Hence, one sees frequent propaganda campaigns coming out of Europe and America in the name of Tibetan-Uyghur solidarity, again employing the language of “human rights” and “Free Tibet”.
Like Lhasa last year, Urumqi on Sunday, July 5, was a race-motivated rampage: video footages showed two large groups of men (each in the hundreds), pummeling down two parallel downtown streets in a pincer movement, then congregating at one place to burn shops, cars, buses and kill anybody who looks Han, women included. Like Tibetans before them, the Uyghur men had marched with clubs, daggers and bicycle chains. However, in Uyghur Internet messages and a number of English-language wire reports, they have called these kill marches as “peaceful student protests”.
Expect, as a result, instant “analysis” in the American and English-language media, and in the like of AFP, Reuters and Malaysiakini (Manjit Bhatia, Dean Johns, et al) to justify the murder and plunder on some noble political cause, but which was oppressed by a tyrannical regime. The rampage, they would say, have political origins, human rights causes and freedom objectives – so the fault lies in Beijing – and it took place not because Uyghurs, like their Xiongnu ancestors before them, simply hated and wanted to kill Chinese. This they succeeded, with more than 150 dead.
Except for extended dynastic periods during the Han, Tang and Ming, China was repeatedly attacked and looted to serve foreign tribesmen on horseback: Jin dynasty (under the Khitan, a proto-Manchu tribe), Liao (Khitan), Jin again (Jurchen, proto-Mongols), Western Xia (Tanguts), Yuan (Mongol), Qing (Manchu). After them it was Japan and the Western powers. But, five thousand years later, expect China to feel sickened with twenty-first century tribal-scale plunders against Chinese sovereignty once again.
UPDATE: July 7
Dead 156; injured 1,008.
Vehicles burned 200+, shops looted and burned 240+.
The reaction, such as from Nathaniel Tan (below), is as well-rehearsed as it is predictable. Not knowing from which side he should begin to see the problem – worse, not even knowing what it is in truth – he sits on the fence and mouths platitudes, the kind you hear from Western do-gooders with ready-made answers. As you would expect, the state is the culprit (“government heavy-handed violence”) even as he stares in the face of the facts that a thousand or more people had gathered to kill on account of your skin colour, and so to plunder at the same time. It would be nice if it is possible to stand him in front of the mob so that he may say, no, preach, to them:
I hope the world pays more attention to this. I really hope the Chinese government stops this heavy handed violence against Muslim minorities. Mass arrests are not the answer.
He can stand there like Jesus Christ, to add: “Killing me is not the answer. Now, knife me on the other face.” You have to wonder where was Nathaniel Tan on May 13. Since arrest is not the answer, perhaps he should – if he survives the mob – hug them and invite them to his home for refuge. You have also to wonder what would be his answer to the families of 156 dead if, after inviting them into his home, his mother was clubbed to death and they looted and torched his house: the poor killers, they are just repressed people.
