Our Views: The real pain of Uighurs
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| Advocate Columnists |
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The crackdown on ethnic rioting is being portrayed by the government of China as law and order.
What should not be lost in the discussion are the legitimate grievances of every ethnic minority in China, and every Chinese who wants to exercise his religion.
Freedom of religion does not exist under the iron fist of the Chinese Communist Party. China’s Muslims, such as the disaffected Uighurs in Xinjiang province, are not allowed to send their children to mosques. The Chinese government wants to steal the heritage of faith from a younger generation.
The government has promoted throughout its giant hinterlands — including Tibet — an economic and social ethnic cleansing. Han Chinese move there and get the good jobs, and Uighurs and Tibetans are second-class citizens in many ways.
Russell Leigh Moses, who is writing a forthcoming book on the changing nature of power in China, noted that ethnic minorities are basically shut out of the government bureaucracies. Moses wrote in The New York Times that it is in the government offices where most real business deals are done, or blessed. To be an outsider is an economic death sentence.
This system of state control has worldwide economic implications — even so far afield as Shreveport. A government bureaucracy threatens to block the sale of Hummer’s brand to a privately held Chinese company, and that might endanger whatever prospect there is of the Shreveport factory making cars after its closure by General Motors.
With all its imperfections and regulations, America’s economy is a free-market heaven by comparison with China’s. And the Uighurs, as the Tibetans before them, see themselves shut out even as the overall national economy grows.
Riots and torching Han-owned businesses are unfortunate results of a series of cruel and unfair policies by the Chinese government.
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