Enjoy The Silence

This week's explosion of violence in western China between native Uighurs and Han Chinese has exposed the deadly fault lines in China's ethnic mix. It has also exposed the hypocritical silence from the International Community that cares not a whit for the behavior of autocrats but happily jeers the US's imaginied sins: China Locks Down Restive Region After Deadly Clashes

The Chinese government locked down this regional capital of 2.3 million people and other cities across its western desert region on Monday and early Tuesday, imposing curfews, cutting off cellphone and Internet services and sending armed police officers into neighborhoods after clashes erupted here on Sunday evening between Muslim Uighurs and Han Chinese. The fighting left at least 156 people dead and more than 1,000 injured, according to the state news agency

To begin, there is the odd silence of the grievance mongers in the "Muslim Street," who stand ready to riot over rumors of flushed Korans in US prisons, but who are over the hills and far away when a dictatorship like China's kills their co-religionists. I am not a whiny Leftist, so I won't bore you with any fake outrage. I prefer the grim acknowledgement of eternal truths about human nature: China Silences The Muslim World

Han settlers take almost all the good jobs, business opportunities, and positions in the government and Party apparatus. Beijing has continually stripped Xinjiang of its mineral resources and crops. And now the Han are trying to take from the Uighurs their distinct identity. Beijing once thought that economic development would assimilate this minority, but relentless modernization — exploitation, really — has only created resentment. And so have policies that are intended to repress Uighur culture. Uighurs are ordered to shave their beards, not fast at Ramadan, and not pray in public outside mosques. Mosques are tightly controlled, and religious instruction for the young forbidden. Uighur-language instruction has been eliminated. In Kashgar, now known as Kashi, the government has been razing the buildings in the Old City to destroy the remnants of Uighur culture.

And, of course, Beijing employs brute force. The latest official death toll from this week’s disturbances is 184, but that number appears to undercount the dead. Observers say that this is the most deadly series of riots in China since the Tiananmen massacre twenty years ago, but that assessment is questionable. Ethnic fighting flared in Yining, the capital of the short-lived East Turkestan Republic, in early 1997. The unrest is thought to have led to at least several hundred deaths, and subsequent executions added to the toll.

Yet the death of hundreds, and probably thousands, of Uighurs and the systematic destruction of their culture has been met with an eerie silence from Muslim nations.

There is always talk about whether there is such a thing as American Exceptionalism. I don't think I will step on any toes when I say that the sophisticated American liberal elite would say "no, not really." The president himself has said as much. But, there is such a thing as Ameican Exceptionalism, whether you want to believe in it or not. Any country that takes it upon itself to stand astride the world stage has this. Would you deny that there is Russian Exceptionalism? French Exceptionalism?

This week we have seen Chinese Exceptionalism at work: Chinese Exceptionalism

The great part about being a Chinese dictatorship in a world with one rule set (Adam Smith's), is that your paramilitary forces can slaughter 140 156 protestors without even a whimper from the global community. Western political elites just don't care because a) business with China is more important than human rights and b) China reacts like a spoiled child when chastised, which makes it not worth the hassle. Of course, the reaction we see today on Chinese repression may become the same we see when similar things happen in the developed world.

America is still hearing about slavery and Bull Connor, events that are decades in the past, and which represent a vanished world. China is engaging in deadly ethnic and religious chauvanism right now. This is a vision of the world as it has been and as it apparently will be. Do you like what you see? The liberals at the NY Times do :A Strongman Is China's Rock In Ethnic Strife:

The nine-minute speech by the bureaucrat, Wang Lequan, was mostly government boilerplate: the riots were no homegrown problem, but “a massive conspiracy” to sabotage ethnic unity; Urumqi citizens should “point the spear toward hostile forces at home and abroad,” not at their neighbors; attacks on Han or Uighurs alike were heartbreaking.

Then he turned to the Han who were on the streets, repaying the riots’ blood debt. “Comrades, to start with, such action is fundamentally not necessary,” he told them briskly. “Our dictatorial force is fully able to knock out the evildoers, so there is no need to take such action.”