re: #242 Dark_Falcon

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China Threatens The ISI

SNIP

There is some controversy over China’s claim that Pakistan is behind some recent violence in Western China.

AP article

BEIJING (AP) — Chinese Muslim militants have been to Taliban-controlled parts of neighboring Pakistan and Afghanistan, but there is scant evidence supporting Chinese government claims that they returned home to carry out recent terrorist attacks.

Overseas analysts and Uighur activists call the Chinese accusations a smoke screen to obscure the anger and hopelessness among Muslim ethnic Uighurs in the Xinjiang region they say are driving the violence.

Violence in Xinjiang poses a challenge to China’s development plans in the resource-rich region, as well as Beijing’s contention that its policies toward ethnic minorities are successful. By blaming outside forces it avoids having to acknowledge shortcomings in those policies.

Authorities have pledged to increase pressure further in the far-western region, ordering a sweeping security clampdown and vowing “no mercy” toward anyone accused of violence or separatism.

What happens when a nation has minority populations that face stiff competition from a majority group that knows the dominant language much better, that has more education and better jobs training, that’s jobs hungry, and thus migrates into historically minority areas?

Some kind of trouble seems inevitable. China’s majority Han population is, in its view, simply exercising its right to follow individual opportunity anywhere it can be found in China. The Uighurs may get squeezed out and marginalized by this trend, but that’s just the way the cookie crumbles. Life is hard, and it’s hard for the Han too.

Uighurs see things differently, of course. But what can they do? Armed resistance is hopeless. Competing with the Chinese by improving their own educational standing isn’t likely to work either; the Chinese have stellar academic results not only in their Han homeland, but everywhere in the world where they find themselves a minority. Hunkering down and out-breeding the Han? That didn’t work for the various “hill tribe” remnant populations scattered across southern China, which was once their domain.

That leaves appeals to the international community. Which have got the Tibetans exactly nowhere.