Years of Poems and Spirits

I was really disturbed by what happened in Xin Jiang broke out. I thought of two friends (JY and JG) who had connections there but didn’t get anything more than what I could found on the Net.

However, what happened there really helped me to put together much of what I have learned in the last several years. Felt like being pounded by revelations  one after another. I miss Joel, so much so that I almost wrote a letter to him just to say Thanks.  His thoughts on belonging-dominance, on social capital, on social-integration all come together suddenly. It is a awe-inspiring feeling.

I tried to put my thoughts on paper but the draft is still in the unpublished bin. On the one hand, I felt I had so much to say, on the other,  I don’t know there is anything new to say. Joel told me so.

Then received a message from YSL. Strange thing is I never met him but felt comfortable enough to write him a long message .Whoever he works for, the work he’s done is outstanding. This message is perhaps the best I can do now. I am not unhappy with how it came out. This is a revised version -

My wife and I have been to Xin Jiang but never Tibet. We love the region, me in particular. What happened in Urumqi saddened me a great deal.

I wanted to blog what I thought but found it very difficult to put my thoughts on paper.  Beyond the obvious, there are still more questions to be answered. For example, according to the Uighur, what triggered the riot was an earlier incident in a toy factory in Guangdong, where a mob of Han killed several Uighur co-workers living in the next dorm. If you followed the original report, it was said that the Han mob was angered because a Han woman was assaulted by several drunk Uighur first.

To me, the story has all the trappings of a racial hate-crime. In other words, I strongly suspect that the assault story was a rumor spread by some Han worker who are not happy with the presence of the Uighur laborer. The fact that the toy factory had to hire Uighur from XJ, bypassing the vast labor pool in between, seems to suggest a very exploitative motivation.

If you look back history, when American capitalists expanded West ward, they hired a lot immigrants from Ireland and China as cheap laborers. Those poor immigrants instantly became targets of racial hatred once they arrived. Local laborers thought they were cheap, shameless union-breakers. The Chinese immigrants actually had the worst of it.

With regard to “woman being assaulted” story, it is an age old ruse to fan hatred. Before the Civil Rights movement, there was a long period in American South called Jim Crow era when the Blacks were often beaten or killed by the whites for trumped up charges. The worst of the charges was black man raping white woman. Some black were lynched (publicly beaten to death, see http://www.centropian.com/religion/issues/wright/lynch.jpg)

I am saying so not to excuse the brutality committed by the Uighur rioters. What they did not only was against the law, but also was against universal humanity. It is only fair to say that those rioters are barbarians.

However, EVERY society has that kind of people. That is human nature. Yet some societies are better at suppressing the thugs, others are not. That difference is an indicator of the maturity of a society. In a civic-minded, living-by-rule-of-law country, the thugs are dealt with by the society itself. Even at the worst moments, say during a conflict against another country/race, etc., a mature society is led by reason and law, not by emotion and fear. The weekend riot in Urumqi and the earlier incident in Guangdong just show how immature both Han and Uighur societies are.

This doesn’t mean we Chinese are stupid or incapable of managing our own lives (which gives the Chinese State a perfect reason to intervene). Towards the end of Man-Qing dynasty, during the Taiping Rebellion, the Imperial government was all but gone. The central State was not longer functioning. However, among all the regions suffered from the Taiping wars, some learned to organize and to protect self, others degenerated into total chaos. The difference is not in how they were governed by the CENTRAL government, but how they SELF governed.

Similarly, after the Sichuan earthquake, some government institutions were totally destroyed. But at the same time, large amount of supply were coming in and needed to be distributed properly. I have heard reports that in some villages, peasants started to form self-governing committees spontaneously. They adopted open and democratic practices that eventually served them well.

What I am trying to say is, just like every society has bad people, I believe every society has the instinct of organizing itself in a civic and just manner. Whether the instinct can turn into real action depends on the bond the society has amongst its members. Political scientists call this “social capital”. The Japanese and the Germans recovered from their disastrous past quickly and became not only prosperous but also just and stable. That is perhaps they are ethnically and culturally homogeneous. In other words, the bond that bind each of these societies together is blood and language.

But there are countries (very few) that are stable, just but not ethnically homogeneous. The U.S. is a good example. This is so not only because there is a strong central government, but also there are many equally strong civic organizations–the churches, the trade groups, unions, sports clubs, hubby groups, etc. People get to know each other through civic activities and they learn to live with other people–some maybe very different from themselves–through civil means: keep an open mind, ready to give-and-take. In this kind of environment, it is difficult to see extremism taking over collective behavior. In other words, the civic life in America is at the same time a citizenship training and a community police.

I enjoyed your production largely for the same reason. As I said in an earlier email, I like your work because you really captured a vibrant civic life in America, whether it is a rodeo show, a bike city or scullers practicing together–they all tell the story how people can come together, have fun and learn to be a member of a community.

In China, civic life, particularly civic life of large scale, is ruthlessly suppressed by the government. About 10 years ago, a group of urban laborers from Sichuan started a self-help group, called 打工妹之家 or something like that. It grew and grew, until one day the government forced them to have a 党支部 so it could be better managed. The Communist Party’s paranoia of any civic force, its deep mistrust of Chinese people is destroying the nation’s future. We don’t have citizens, we only have a collection of individuals who mistrust each other.

I can only speculate, if there is a true worker’s union in Guangdong, when the Han laborers didn’t like the fact that the management hired cheap labor from Xin Jiang, they might have gone through the union, instead of taking their anger to the Uighur. In Urumqi, if the Uighur could have their own community organizations, if they were truly represented in the political process, their unhappiness of large Han migration, of unfair resource allocation, of lack of business opportunities might have been voiced very differently. No to say having those civic organizations would have prevented everything from happening. But they would certainly have lessened the damage.

As you can see, I have much to say about this. I was as disturbed as much as you surely have been. But saying anything doesn’t really bring me any comfort. I feel very sad because on the one hand, history is screaming to anyone who’d listen: we don’t have to live this way (full of hatred and mistrust). On the other, people I care (both Han and Uighur) are killing each other as if not hearing anything.

I still remain hopeful, in part because I have seen some Chinese posting on the Net that people are shocked by the violence and started to question why. As I said, there is always something innately positive in any society. Maybe that is what we call Humanity.

Thank you very much for giving me this opportunity to write this out.