Page 110 - Conflict, Terrorism, and the Media In Asia

Uyghur separatism and nationalism in Xinjiang 99
the north-west of the region in the 1940s and the tradition of these self-governing
administrations lives on in the thinking of many Uyghurs in twenty-first century
Xinjiang, including those who have been involved, directly or indirectly, in separatist
movements.
Media coverage of Xinjiang has been inconsistent. The conflict between
Beijing and the Uyghurs has featured only rarely in the western media when there
have been major disturbances. In China, there has been regular reporting of
positive news, particularly where it supports the picture of successful economic
development that the government wishes to present. Coverage of separatist
activities was extremely rare until the 1990s when there was press and television
coverage of the trials of those accused of separatist activities. The political case
for independence is never allowed to appear in the official media in China, and
virtually the entire media remains under state control. There is an alternative
source of information on Xinjiang in the newsletters and, more recently, the
websites of Uyghur organizations based outside of Xinjiang, but these do not
have the resources of professional press and television organizations and their
access to first hand information is often limited.

Political control
Political control at the local level in traditional Xinjiang was inextricably bound
up with the religious hierarchy. A combined secular and religious bureaucracy
controlled the towns and villages and Islamic law played an important role: the
Chinese imperial presence was limited to Urumqi and garrison towns. After the
collapse of the empire in 1911 warlords ruled Xinjiang as they did in China
proper. With nationalist attempts to reunify China in the 1920s, Han Chinese
governors were imposed by Beijing, but they ruled partly through the old mixed
system of administration and Xinjiang remained effectively an independent political
unit until 1949.
The government of the PRC was determined to treat Xinjiang just like any
other province of China. It was brought under military control in 1949 and its first
political leaders were Wang Zhen and Wang Enmao, both long-standing senior
officers in the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and both ethnic Han Chinese.
Land reform policies in the 1950s, under which land owned by landlords and
religious foundations was requisitioned and redistributed throughout China,
undermined the economic basis for the political control that the mosques and
other Islamic foundations had exercised. The ‘Anti-Rightist’ campaigns of 1957
and the Great Leap Forward mobilisation of 1958, which affected the whole of
China, were targeted in Xinjiang at breaking down the authority of the religious
structures once and for all.
Xinjiang was designated an Autonomous Region (AR) on 1 October 1955.
Other ARs were Tibet, Inner Mongolia, Ningxia and the largely Zhuang region of
Guangxi. The AR concept was an attempt to give formal recognition to the fact
that there were major ethnic and religious differences between these areas and
the predominantly Han population of China proper. Minority politicians were