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The PR disaster for China in Tibet, whose effect seems to be ebbing,
has swelled again with news that (according to Reuters) “Chinese
authorities in the restive far western region of Xinjiang have
demolished a mosque for refusing to put up signs in support of this
August’s Beijing Olympics, an exiled group said on Monday.”
The group is the World Uighur Congress. It said
the mosque was in Kalpin county near Aksu City.
The Uighur are the Turkic people of central or
interior Asia most of whom are now found in northwestern China’s
Uighur Autonomous Region of Xinjiang (called Xinjiang province by
outsiders). In the Chinese pinyin romanization Uighur (pronounced
Wei-wer) is spelled Uyghur.
A few Uighur communities live in the various
Central Asian republics. There are about 8 to 9 million Uighurs in
China and some 400,000 in Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan.
Xinjiang is bordered by Mongolia to the
northeast, Russia to the north, Kazakhstan to the northwest,
Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan to the west, Afghanistan and the
India-Pakistan disputed territory of Jammu and Kashmir to the
southwest, the Tibet Autonomous Region to the southeast, and the
Chinese provinces of Tsinghai and Kansu.
Xinjiang is oil-rich and the site of China’s
most important nuclear facilities. Many Uighurs resent, just like
the Tibetans, Han Chinese economic, political and cultural
influence, maybe even dominance.
Uighurs are Muslims
The Uighurs are Muslims. Pictures of their land
and people published in the Maoist-era China Pictorial and China
Reconstructs magazines showed breathtaking verdant pastoral expanses
and some of China’s most beautiful non-Han Chinese women.
According to Reuters, the “spokesman of the
office of the Xinjiang government said it had no immediate comment
[about the rebel groups’ statement], while telephone calls to the
county government went unanswered.”
The emailed statement of the World Uighur
Congress spokesman says, “China is forcing mosques in East
Turkistan to publicize the Beijing Olympics to get the Uighur people
to support the Olympic Games (but) this has been resisted by the
Uighurs.” Officially, there is no Chinese province or independent
state called “East Turkistan.”
Just as virulent toward rebel Uighur groups as
it is to Tibetans, Beijing, according to the Reuters report, claims
that “al Qaeda is working with militants in Xinjiang to use terror
to establish an independent state called East Turkistan.”
The rebel spokesman adds that the Chinese
authorities accused the Kalpin mosque mullahs of “illegally
renovating the structure, carrying out illegal religious activities
and illegally storing copies of the Muslim holy book the Koran.”
He claims that the Chinese government has seized all the Korans and
detained and tortured dozens of Uighurs.
Just as in Tibet, the Olympic torch relay passed
through Xinjiang last week under tight security, said Reuters.
Happier news in Sichuan
Meanwhile, also last week, Xinhua (China’s
state news agency) happily reported that in Bailu town, in the
southwestern part of Sichuan province, the government will rebuild a
100-year-old Catholic seminary that was destroyed in the powerful
May earthquake.
“Experts on ancient buildings from Beijing and
Chengdu have started drawing up a reconstruction plan. Original
building material will be used as much as possible to restore the
seminary,” an official with the Sichuan provincial bureau of
cultural relics protection told Xinhua on Saturday.
Known as the Bailu Upper Academy, the
three-story building, according to Xinhua, is the first Catholic
seminary in southwest China. It was built in 1908 in the Bailu
township of Pengzhou City in Sichuan.
Xinhua said only 2 percent of the seminary
building survived, most of the rest was destroyed within eight
seconds after the May 12 earthquake struck.
The town’s residents are now accommodated in
tents around the seminary and live in the ruins, their homes having
been destroyed.
The Xinhua report did not say if the seminary
was still being used by the Bailu Catholics and whether these are
affiliated with the government-approved Catholic Church under the
Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association or are of the “underground
Catholic Church” whose obedience is to the Vatican.
Xinhua reported that hundreds of churches,
temples and mosques have been toppled in Sichuan by the earthquake,
and their reconstruction would take a long time, said Yu Xiaoheng,
deputy director of the Sichuan provincial bureau of religion.
It’s a pity that the People’s Republic of
China’s Olympics preparations and efforts to make the Olympics its
debut as a world-class and accomplished country are being stained by
PR disasters like those in Tibet and Zinjiang.
Greater tolerance
The fact is that China these past decades has
become more tolerant of religious activities. Believers are still
not as totally free as in China’s Taiwan province and the Hong
Kong Special Autonomous Region. But adherents of religions in China
have much more freedoms now than during the Maoist decades.
Under the Chinese Communist Party as the PRC’s
organizational vanguard and power structure, China has come to be
the world’s fastest growing economy. President Arroyo is making
China the Philippines’ closest trading partner and source of loans
and investment—overtaking Japan and the USA. Even if they deny it,
I’m sure this will be on the agenda of the meeting between her and
President Bush.
rqb@manilatimes.net
rq_bas@yahoo.com
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