The unrest in Urumqi and the massacre of Muslim Uighurs once again highlighted the instability of Chinese society and the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) cruel, merciless nature.
At 11pm on June 25 in Shaoguan City in Guangdong Province, a fight broke out between Han Chinese workers and Uighur workers over rumors that a Uighur had raped a Han Chinese girl at a factory. The result was that two Uighur workers were killed and 118 people injured, 79 of them Uighurs. Armed police did not intervene until after 4am. With the CCP’s ability to stop protests even before they get started, this was a very slow response, which in effect meant the party approved the beating of Uighurs. The Chinese government’s long-term nationalistic propaganda aimed at giving the Uighurs a bad name has resulted in most Han Chinese viewing Uighurs as suicide bombers, splittists and terrorists.
After the incident, Chinese authorities did not release any news on how they intended to stop the ethnic conflict. When a group of Uighurs protested in Xinjiang’s capital Urumqi last Sunday, it turned into a bloodbath. How this peaceful protest turned into conflict remains a mystery because the CCP had blocked all information in and out of the area, including telephones and the Internet. News reports at around midnight on July 5 said only two people died, but the morning after, officials announced that the death toll had jumped to 140 with 828 injured. Not long after the second set of figures were released, Beijing announced that the death toll had increased to 156 and yesterday raised it to 186 — with many believing that the real figure is much higher.
Thanks to the authorities rapidly “calming the unrest,” many people were killed that night and their corpses quickly disposed of, with thousands more arrested. Reporters from outside of Xinjiang were then allowed into designated areas for interviews, while the government laid all the blame on the president of the World Uighur Congress Rebiya Kadeer, a 62-year-old Uighur businesswoman who lives in exile in the US. The surprising effectiveness of the Chinese government’s actions imply that the incident was carefully planned in advance to draw the Uighurs out and give them a beating without leaving any traces behind.
The Uighurs have been wrongly accused and even with reporters from other areas and abroad arriving on pre-arranged tours, there were brave people who — like the monks last year in Tibet — directly exposed the CCP’s tricks and violent acts, saying troops drove directly at protesters in armored cars and raided the houses of innocent Uighur civilians taking away all able-bodied men.
This is the second mass slaughter conducted by the CCP after the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. Is this how Beijing has “improved its human rights” record as President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) has claimed? Because China is a powerful country, the international community has been relatively silent in its response. The UN should step forward and investigate these racially motivated killings. While an investigation team may be deceived by the CCP, at least it would force the CCP to restrain itself somewhat.
If the CCP really views Uighurs as Chinese, blood should prove to be thicker than water and the CCP should stop the killings. If however, the CCP views the Uighurs as some foreign tribe, they should be given the right to self-determination.
The reaction of the Taiwanese media was slow and television talk shows did not even touch on the issue on Monday evening. Have they forgotten all about the 228 incident? Last year and this year, the 228 Memorial Foundation held international symposiums on Xinjiang and invited Kadeer to provide a written statement. This year, I submitted a report on the latest state of human rights in Xinjiang and said Chinese President Hu Jintao’s (胡錦濤) concept of hexie (和諧), or harmony, is not applicable to the Uighurs and that the current secretary of the CCP in Xinjiang, Wang Lequan (王樂泉) and his empire have deliberately stirred up tensions to increase conflict. Judging by the recent developments, I was right.
Taiwanese should open their eyes and see what is happening. If Taiwan is swallowed up by China because of Ma’s surrender to the CCP, the Han Chinese — who long have been brainwashed into viewing Taiwan with hostility — will sooner or later be manipulated to kill Taiwanese and another 228 incident will become a reality.
Paul Lin is a political commentator.
TRANSLATED BY DREW CAMERON
Donald Trump’s return to the White House has offered Taiwan a paradoxical mix of reassurance and risk. Trump’s visceral hostility toward China could reinforce deterrence in the Taiwan Strait. Yet his disdain for alliances and penchant for transactional bargaining threaten to erode what Taiwan needs most: a reliable US commitment. Taiwan’s security depends less on US power than on US reliability, but Trump is undermining the latter. Deterrence without credibility is a hollow shield. Trump’s China policy in his second term has oscillated wildly between confrontation and conciliation. One day, he threatens Beijing with “massive” tariffs and calls China America’s “greatest geopolitical
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) made the astonishing assertion during an interview with Germany’s Deutsche Welle, published on Friday last week, that Russian President Vladimir Putin is not a dictator. She also essentially absolved Putin of blame for initiating the war in Ukraine. Commentators have since listed the reasons that Cheng’s assertion was not only absurd, but bordered on dangerous. Her claim is certainly absurd to the extent that there is no need to discuss the substance of it: It would be far more useful to assess what drove her to make the point and stick so
The central bank has launched a redesign of the New Taiwan dollar banknotes, prompting questions from Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) legislators — “Are we not promoting digital payments? Why spend NT$5 billion on a redesign?” Many assume that cash will disappear in the digital age, but they forget that it represents the ultimate trust in the system. Banknotes do not become obsolete, they do not crash, they cannot be frozen and they leave no record of transactions. They remain the cleanest means of exchange in a free society. In a fully digitized world, every purchase, donation and action leaves behind data.
The Honduran elections seem to have put China on defense. The promises of trade and aid have failed to materialize, industries are frustrated, and leading candidate Salvador Nasralla, who has increased his lead in the polls, has caused Beijing to engage in a surge of activity that appears more like damage control than partnership building. As Nasralla’s momentum has grown, China’s diplomacy, which seems to be dormant since the establishment of diplomatic relations in 2023, has shown several attempts to avoid a reversal if the Liberal or the National party — which also favor Taipei — emerge as winners in the
RSS