Xinjiang lies on the far western boundaries of the People’s Republic of China. An area three times the size of France, home to the vast majority of the People’s Republic of China’s Uyghur population (along with twelve other officially recognized ethnic groups), the Xinjiang Autonomous Region has been isolated from its central Beijing-based government by rough terrain, a language barrier, and starkly different religious traditions and economic structure. Even the region’s Chinese name, Xinjiang or “new frontier” implies both the relative recentness of the province’s acquisition by China and the imperialist nature of this acquisition. Early Chinese Communist Party policy in the region led to atrocious acts of cultural genocide. Separatist movements developed as resistance to the Chinese Communist Party’s attempts to incorporate the region into a culture with which it was incompatible. While Mao era policies had disastrous effects across the People’s Republic, the effort to promote a stronger Chinese identity lead to the isolation of the Uyghur community and the development of Uyghur nationalism as demonstrated by PRC policy towards the non-Han populace during the 1950s and the resulting Yi-Ta incident of 1962.
Xinjiang’s past status throughout Chinese history has been used as justification both for and against its incorporation into PRC, depending solely on political perspective. As a sparsely populated and resource-rich vast buffer region between the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic, Xinjiang was strategically and economically valuable. When the Peoples’ Liberation Army entered the province in 1949, despite a lack of familiarity with either the geography or the people, they successfully quelled resistance efforts . A provin...
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It has happened to most native peoples, they’re pushed out of their homelands by a big, foreign power. Peoples’ rights get violated, and they are treated as second class citizens. Native Americans, Africans, Siberians, Indians, it has happened to all of them. In Asia, a new superpower has risen up, communist China, and has gained a massive amount of influence, using the largest military in the world. The native peoples in the western borderlands have suffered the greatest, and most people have heard about the struggle of Tibet. Most of us, however, have not heard of another, more violent crackdown, on the Uyghur people. This paper will take you through all the inner workings of the conflict, from the background, to the reasons, to the violence.
... This essay critically analyses and examines the effect of Communism on the Chinese Society during the period of 1946-1964. The overall conclusion that can be drawn is that the Chinese Communist Party managed to defeat the Kuomintang (Nationalist) Party and achieve victory in the Civil War, in spite of alienation by the Soviet Union and opposition from the U.S. This was primarily because of the superior military strategy employed by the Communists and the economic and political reforms introduced by this party which brought more equality to the peasants in the form of land ownership and better public services. This increased China’s production and manufacturing, which not only boosted the country’s economy but also provided a more sustainable supply of food, goods and services for the Chinese people.
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Historical conceptions of China’s culture and global position shaped the PRC’s perspective. Central to this is Sino-centrism and its edict from heaven for dynastic China to spread civilisation (Xinning 2001: 70). Imperial China’s tribute system represented a “Pax Sinica” and the physical manifestation of Sino-centrism, with its success affirming Chinese cultural superiority (Y. Zhang 2001: 52). Instructive in this is Sino-centrism’s similarity to, and conflict with American Manifest Destiny, itself an articulation that Anglo-Saxon American’s are God’s chosen people, with a superior culture and who are pre-ordained to spread civilisation to inferior peoples (Hollander 2009: 169). The PRC’s nationalism can be seen in part as a rejection of this competing celestial mandate, linking China’s decline to foreign intervention and the acceding to unequal treaties that saw the loss of peripheral territories considered intrinsic to historic China (Kissinger 2011: 112). In this way, the PRC’s formation as a modern nation state is the recrudescence of Sino-...
The Warring States is the subject and title of Griffith’s third chapter, which gives an enlightening look at the life and times in China after the defeat of the rule of Chin at Ching Yang in 453. (p. 20) The country was divided into eight individual warring sects (with the exception of Yen...
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