Uighur/Han Clashes in China
| Date | Friday, July 31, 2009 |
| Location | Cannon House Office Building, Room 121 |
July 31, 2009 — Dr. Sean Roberts, director of the international development studies program and associate professor of the practice of international affairs at The George Washington University, joined us for a discussion on the current state of affairs in the Xinjiang region in Western China.
Clashes in early July between Uighurs – a Turkic ethnic minority of Muslims in an officially atheist country – and Han Chinese following a demonstration in protest of an alleged rape at a local factory brought to the surface a long history of ethnic tension in China’s western Xinjiang province. While the Uighurs have only recently garnered widespread international attention, the ethnic group has rested at the heart of a tenuous state of affairs in China for over a century.
Numbering roughly 7.5 million people today, the Uighur population once dominated the Xinjiang province only fifty years ago. Both organic economic expansion and China’s recent “Develop the West” campaign, however, have led millions of Han Chinese migrants to flock to the province, creating a situation in which the Uighurs may no longer represent the majority in Xinjiang. Whereas the Uighurs once accounted for nearly 75% of the population in Xinjiang, they now number only a slight plurality officially, and some claim that there are in fact more Han Chinese in Xinjiang than Uighurs today.
Beijing’s tolerance for protests and political demonstrations has grown in recent years, yet as with the Tibetans, this détente has thus far not been extended toward the Uighurs. For both the Chinese government and many of the nation’s billion ethnic Han Chinese, all Uighur demonstrations represent separatist challenges to the sanctity of China. Uighur leaders contest this assertion – some carried Chinese flags as a sign of solidarity during the initial demonstration – yet tensions remain high in Xinjiang.
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