Page 114 - Conflict, Terrorism, and the Media In Asia

Uyghur separatism and nationalism in Xinjiang 103
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1949. To some extent it was a multi-ethnic regime but the basis for its appeal was
Islam and Turkish nationalism. When the CCP took control of Xinjiang in 1949,
the ETR administration surrendered to the PLA and was incorporated into the
PRC, but support for genuine independence persisted.
Resistance by Eastern Turkistan loyalists, or separatists as Beijing would prefer to
call them, continued into the 1950s. It took the form of small activist units which
launched attacks on police and military barracks to obtain weapons and conducted
armed robberies to obtain funds. These groups were frequently associated with Sufi
orders and this religious connection was important in their attempts to win popular
support and convert small scale insurgencies into large scale resistance. The Sufis
used their network of connections to visit mosques in order to rally support for the
cause. Members of the Sufi orders were invited to meetings where they swore an
oath on the Qur’an to resist the infidel Chinese and support a jihad to install a
Muslim regime. The first major resistance to the CCP after 1949, the 1954 rising in
Khotan, which featured an attack on a prison camp in Karakash, was mounted almost
entirely by adherents of the Sufi brotherhoods. These activities were suppressed by
local police and troops and the militia of the XPCC. But the idea of an independent
Eastern Turkistan Republic did not disappear; it later resurfaced in the Eastern
Turkistan People’s Party (ETPP) during the chaotic years of the Cultural Revolution
in the late 1960s. Beijing claims that the ETPP was simply a creation of the Soviet
Union with which the PRC had been in dispute since the late 1950s, but it is clear
that there was considerable local support for independence (Xu 1999: 94–101).
After the death of Mao Zedong in September 1976 and the re-emergence of
Deng Xiaoping as the single most important political figure in the PRC leadership,
China’s economic and social structures began to be liberalised. Partly as a result of
this, separatist activity began to re-emerge in Xinjiang. The first recorded major
incidents were clashes between different social and ethnic groups in Aksu in the
west of the region and in Kashghar in the south-west, both in 1980. The collapse
of the Soviet Union in December 1991 and the emergence of independent Muslim
states in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan fuelled expectations that the
establishment of an independent East Turkistan state was imminent, and there were
further acts of insurgency throughout the region in the years that followed.

Xinjiang and the former soviet Central Asia
The Kazakhs and Kyrgyz of Xinjiang are from the same ethnic background as their
counterparts in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. There are Uyghur communities in both
of these former Soviet central Asian republics; the Uyghurs are closely related to the
Uzbeks of Uzbekistan and there are Uzbek communities in other parts of central
Asia including Xinjiang. The Uyghur and Uzbek languages are extremely close and
the two people share a common literary and cultural tradition. Many independent
analysts consider that they are essentially the same people although both Uyghurs
and Uzbeks prefer to maintain the distinction between the two communities.
It follows therefore, that, although Xinjiang is firmly under the administrative
control of the PCR, its most important social and cultural bonds are with the