The Ides of March

Welcome to March! The most beautiful and terrible of all months for a whole host of reasons which can sometimes (as our tyrannical friend Caesar found) be political. To be more direct on Tuesday twenty people were killed in a riot in north-western city of Kashgar in Xinjiang province in China.

Courtesy of the BBC

Wait what? Well for those of you who don't know Tibet is not the only region which China has colonized. The Xinjiang autonomous region of China was reconquered in 1949 and half of its population are Uighurs. China has always been a large ethnically diverse country (there are over nine different versions of spoken Chinese after all) and its various governments have used various policies to deal with this issue. The current policy under the PRC has been to create a large overwhelming ethnic majority of Han Chinese (which has recently absorbed groups like the Cantonese) and spread that group throughout China (and while I support the building of China's high speed rail network on environmental grounds, this policy is one of the reasons its being built in the first place) in order to create a false (or perhaps real) sense of cultural, ethnic, and national hegemony allowing for easier governance. 

However, in many cases the exact opposite is happening. Groups like the Uighurs, Tibetans, and Cantonese are beginning to question these policies claiming that they are active forms of discrimination that decrease likelihood of employment as well as a form of destructive cultural erosion. However, The CCP doesn't really take all that well to criticism so the complaints, through normal channels, go unheeded. Resulting in: 

2008 Lhasa unrest

2009 Xinjiang unrest 

Which forces the CCP to do the only thing it knows how to do:

Since the 2008/2009 urrest in both Tibet and Xinjiang China has increasingly tightened security. And with China's parliament meeting frighteningly close to the anniversary of the Lhasa riots this coming week, certain members of the government are calling for even tighter control. With officials like the party's secretary to Tibet, Chen Quanguo, calling for tight monitoring of  "Mobile phones, the internet and other measures for the management of new media need to be fully implemented to maintain the public's interests and national security."

Which raises a rather interesting issue that I'll let Princess Leia voice:

Preach Friend, Preach!

It'll be interesting (and probably horrifying considering the PRC track record on these things) to see what unfolds in the next few weeks. Are the fears of the CCP unfounded? Or are things going to exploded and if so what will that explosion mean. 

I guess will just have to wait and see (but I'm beginning to think there more to that geomancer's story then ever before)

Till next time 

Jacob 

Articles: 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-17195886 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-17211909

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-17216650