Different cultures

Submitted by Cephas (United States), Nov 11, 2019 at 00:03

China's problem with the Turkic-speaking Muslim population of Xinjiang is an old one (it is Stalin who decided that those agricultural Turks of Eastern Turkistan, who were accustomed to calling themselves either Turki, Kashgarlik, Turpanlik, Khotani, or whatever place name fit them, were the heirs of the medieval Uighur Khanate occupying what's now Mongolia). In the 1990's, when I lived in China, a Chinese business jounralist described the situation out there as a "guerrilla war". Although I lived in Guangzhou, I bought bread and raisins from Uighur migrants, and heard some pretty harrowing and angry tales. A lot of the local Han Chinese thought I was nuts to deal with them, since "those people always carry big knives". Indeed, at the time, they'd made their migrant enclave behind the train station something of a no-go zone for the local police (a little like the Chechens in the late, unlamented Soviet Union?).

But there was also dissidence cropping up among the Hui, who are Chinese-speaking rather than Turkic, and who traditionally identify as part of the Chinese state. Indeed, during WWII, the Hui mullah Hu Songshan declared China's resistance to Japan a jihad. Hui dissidence, however, seemed more interested in greater religious liberty rather than ethnostate separatism.

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