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TIBET AT A TURNING POINT: THE SPRING UPRISING AND CHINA’S NEW CRACKDOWN
majority of Tibetans, as are his claims that “The Central
Party Committee is the real Buddha for Tibetans.”
TAR Party Secretary,
Zhang Qingli
Zhang’s political career started when he joined the Party in
the early 1970s in his native Shandong province. During the
latter stages of the Cultural Revolution, a period when a
degree of aggressive political fanaticism was essential to protect
and advance one’s career in the Party, he quickly rose
from being a general worker at a large fertilizer plant to become
Deputy Party Secretary of the plant’s Party Committee.
In 1979 he was seconded to the Central Committee of the
Communist Youth League of China (CYLC) in Beijing. He remained at the CYLC in various
capacities until 1986, during which time he became an associate of Hu Jintao,
who headed the CYLC from 1984–1985.
Following postings to a sequence of increasingly senior Party positions mainly in
propaganda departments, Zhang was transferred to the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous
Region (XUAR) in October 1999 where he served on the regional Standing Committee
— a core group within the regional Party Committee — as well as serving concurrently
as Deputy Secretary and Commander of a large quasi-military industrial
and agricultural concern in Xinjiang, the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps
(XPCC), commonly known by its abbreviated name in Chinese, the bingtuan. The
bingtuan has de facto jurisdiction over several large towns in the XUAR, as well as over
vast swaths of farmland, operating its own courts, prisons and other services such as
schools and medical provision. Founded in 1954, the bingtuan has enabled the settlement
of millions of Chinese farmers and workers in the XUAR, and has done so with
a strong political message of promoting stability in the XUAR, as well as settling and
consolidating the XUAR’s international borders.
It was while he was in the XUAR that Zhang Qingli worked under the long-serving
Party Secretary of the XUAR, Wang Lequan (see below), and where Zhang developed
a reputation for his ideological fervor.
As with Tibet, there is a long history of opposition and resistance to China’s rule in
Xinjiang, fuelled in large part by a conviction among many of the 8 million or so
Uyghur people that Xinjiang — which Uyghurs frequently refer to by its historical
name of East Turkistan — was an independent nation for much of its history, aside
from occasional periods when imperial powers, including China, Russia and Britain,
held military or political sway over the local political elites.
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