FATHER FRANK’S RANTS - Storms over China

Rant Number 368 22 October 2009

‘In Xinjiang, Uighurs and other Muslim groups struggle against Sinification’. A line from page 255 of The Clash of Civilisations. That controversial Zeitgeist book, mentioned only in ritual refutations and shrill anathemas. But Professor Huntington was right. The brave people of East Turkestan are indeed rising in revolt against forced assimilation by the Chinese. The Uighurs, a people whose name Westerners do not even know how to pronounce correctly, fight on to defend their culture and religion. Like little David taking on Goliath the giant, the battle seems pathetically unequal. Perhaps 15 million Uighurs versus 1.300 million others, mostly Chinese. But here the priest thinks of Hegel’s phrase, the cunning of Reason. It means events that occur at crucial times in human history. Causing tremendous upheavals that nevertheless result in the triumph of freedom. Who knows whether the neglected, defenceless Uighurs be not one of them? Are they perhaps the spanner in the works? The joker in the pack? The tiny, insignificant speck of grit that will grow and grow and eventually cause the Chinese tyranny to break up and disintegrate? Only God, the mysterious, Supreme Reason, knows...

The Uighurs are the forgotten Muslims of China. An ancient people. They appear in the medieval Travels of Marco Polo. Actually, the great Jesuit missionary to China, Matthew Ricci, wondered why Marco Polo’s names of Chinese cities are not Chinese names. After he met a Uighur man, the lights dawned: Marco had approached China via and with the Uighurs. A Turkish people who speak a Turkish language. So many of Marco Polo’s names are Uighur names, not Chinese. And the Uighur chap appeared to Father Ricci visibly non-Chinese in looks. His eyes were not narrow, almond-eyed, but round, like a European. Nor did the man think of himself as Chinese. Interestingly, he would not eat pork. Because he was a Muslim. Blood is thicker than water, eh?

When I visited East Turkestan, back in 1991, on a trip from Ankara where I was the turbulent chaplain, I was struck by how many words heard in the local markets sounded like Turkish. So I tried out my modest Turkish. Faces beamed. People festively gathered about me, as if I was a long lost relative happily come back. They assumed I was a Turk. A large fellow with a wispy beard even pointed to his daughter whom he said I should have married. (An offer I was sorry to refuse, as the girl was rather pretty.) But when I asked about their lives some lowered their voices and looked about, as if fearing being overheard. Some Chinese-looking men hovered nearby, clearly spying on us. My would-be father in law spoke enough broken English to convey his meaning: ‘We are not free. They are killing our culture. We can’t practice our religion. Can’t go to Haj. Young people are not allowed to the mosque’, he confided, sotto voce. Others agreed.

China is desperate to crush the Muslim Uighurs. They realise how Uighur resistance might encourage other minorities to rise up. So the Communist regime squeals hysterically about separatism and terrorism and Islamism. But various human rights organisations speak of brutal repression, religious and cultural. Furthermore, the Beijing dictatorship has altered the ethnic make-up of the population of East Turkestan, by pouring in millions of immigrant Chinese, while forcing natives to emigrate. Uighur girls especially, lured away with false promises. Talk of ‘ethnic identity’ makes people uncomfortable in the West, but for the Uighurs it means a very simple thing: survival. The survival of their people, their culture and their religion.

Back in March I heard a talk given by Uighur Enver Tohti at Abrar House in London. (Enver! Huh! Dig it? Shades of Enver Pasha and his Panturanism dream!) He said that East Turkestan has been the home of Uighurs of 2000 years. A free and independent country for most of them. But it was only in 1876 that the Manchurians succeeded in invading the country, butchering a million people. The Manchurians renamed their conquest Xinjiaing. Ever since, the country has been under military occupation. Still, the Uighurs never relinquished their hope of independence. An Islamic republic was proclaimed n 1933, and again a Uighur state existed briefly before Mao took over after WW2 and the Communists invaded in 1949 and again changed the country’s name. Today East Turkestan languishes under an alien colonial rule. The people’s sufferings have been ‘unimaginable’, Enver said. And he spoke of cultural genocide. But despite all the dangers involved, the Uighur spirit remains indomitable. It culminated in the spontaneous uprising in the capital, Urumqi, last July. ‘The worst riots since Tiananmen Square’ a journalist called them. Apposite comparison, as a similar, cruel repression followed. Now six Uighur men have been sentenced to death for the revolt. My heart goes out to the young men, whom I saw on TV in the dock, held by Chinese cops. An obscene mockery of justice. It should be the blood-drenched gangsters in Beijing to hang, methinks.

China is plugged as a financial wonder of all wonders. An unbelievable success story. Soon, it may become the world’s largest economy. The biggest producer of industrial and agricultural products. Its teeming cities seem the apotheosis of post-modernity. Immense skyscrapers, glamorous shopping malls, nouveau riches, trendy-looking, Westernised young people, wealth and prosperity galore, all that jazz. Yet the Communist regime is insecure. Above all, it fears religion. It keeps savagely persecuting the harmless Falung Gong practitioners. (Even doing breathing exercises is a threat to tyrants, apparently.) It has formed a ‘patriotic’, alternative Catholic Church, muzzled and subservient to Communist Party ideology. Significantly, the Hong Kong Cardinal Zen Zekiun has exhorted all Chinese Catholics not to kow-tow to Beijing. Protestant groups also languish under many disabilities. But it is Islam, a religion on the march, which could well prove to be the nemesis of the heirs of Mao’s Long March, insh’allah.

The cunning of Reason. Marxist-Leninist dogma, for Marxists the intellectual and concrete incarnation of Hegel’s Reason, saw religious beliefs as doomed to gradual, final extinction. National sentiment, too, was prophesied to be on the wane, to be replaced by a universal classless society, an undifferentiated, maybe miscegenated, amorphous humanity. The old Soviet Union was meant to be a prelude to that. All nonsense, mercifully now defunct. As the Uighur heroic resistance shows, the divine, transcendent Reason we call God may have the last word.

Revd Frank Julian Gelli

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