Putin

Until now, Beijing has dealt with Xinjiang much as it has dealt with Tibet. It has flooded the region with Han Chinese to tip the population balance against the indigenous locals. (The current population in Xinjiang is about 45 percent Uighur and 40 percent Han.) Mandarin is the language of social advancement; the local language, culture, and religion are viewed by Han officialdom as impediments to progress. Job listings frequently stipulate native Mandarin speakers only. But perks have been offered to those who are willing to cooperate with authorities: some Uighurs were exempted from China’s one-child-per-family policy, and the government has offered soft loans to small farmers.

Beijing wants a docile Xinjiang—but this seems increasingly unlikely. China’s nightmare would be collusion between the two great Western provinces of Tibet and Xinjiang. Tibetans are, however, more likely to express their discontent by means of self-immolation, whereas the Uighurs tend to opt for overt violence against Chinese officials and citizens. Though Beijing declares that these rebels are instigated and financed from abroad, their benefactors must not be very generous: an attack on a police station in Xinjiang in June 2013 that left twenty-seven dead, including nine police officers, was carried out with knives. That pattern changed briefly in 2015 with a car bomb attack in Tiananmen Square. But the Uighurs, who have an old tradition of making knives and daggers, will probably continue to favor them—knives are portable, concealable, impossible to ban. Even at close range a gun is impersonal, but there is something hideously intimate about a knife attack.

Xinjiang is important to China not only because of what is beneath the ground—the country’s largest gas deposits and considerable oil—but also because of what moves across the ground. Much of China’s imports and some of its exports must pass through Xinjiang. A new rail line, already called the New Silk Road, is faster than shipping through the Suez Canal. Just as important, China increasingly gets its gas and oil through pipelines that cross Xinjiang west to east. If a reasonable, just, and humane solution to the “East Turkestan” problem is not found, China can expect the Uighur rebels to graduate from knives to explosives that can cut those rail and pipe lines.

Unlike the United States, which has no offshore neighbors able to interfere with its merchant shipping or the movements of its navy, China is not blessed with a safe and open coastline. A glance at a map shows that China’s coastline, though long and variegated, would not be particularly advantageous during periods of tension or conflict. China is still very dependent on oil from the Middle East that must pass through the Strait of Hormuz, which could easily be closed by the United States in the event of conflict with China. Any goods China imports (e.g., 82 percent of its crude oil) or exports by sea also have to run the gauntlet of the Strait of Malacca, also easy to choke off, not to mention passing several countries with which China has territorial conflicts: Vietnam, the Philippines, South Korea, and Japan. And then of course there is always Taiwan—that “unsinkable aircraft carrier” off China’s coast, to use General Douglas MacArthur’s still relevant phrase.

In the event of serious conflict at sea, the western provinces, especially Xinjiang, will attain exceptional significance as the primary conduits of energy and raw materials for China. Then China’s survival will depend in large part on how well it has solved its Uighur problem. One example of how China is failing to solve that problem is Kashgar, the main city of the Uighur region. In the days of the Silk Road merchants traveling west from China would encounter a huge, forbidding desert called Taklimakan, meaning “Go In No Come Out.” At that point the Silk Road split into two routes, one skirting the desert from the north, the other from the south, with both reuniting in Kashgar. Fearing the role the city could play in a Uighur resurgence, the Chinese, under the pretext of earthquake safety, are currently dismantling Kashgar’s ancient labyrinth of streets and exiling their inhabitants to cheap, sterile high-rises where their culture dies.