The United States and China in Power Transition - Strategic Studies ...

complicate the Tibet problem and loosen up the Tibetans-in-exile
to pursue their course with resort to violent
means. Zhu Weiqun said that China would not be
afraid to meet force with force if the Tibetans were to
turn violent. As Zhu put it, “we have fought before;
you should remember your defeats in the past; and
there is no chance for you in the future.” 191 This future,
according to Wang Lixiong (王力雄), a noted Chinese
dissident writer and self-made Tibetan observer, for
the Tibetans as well as the Chinese, is doomed. 192
Xinjiang, China, and the United States. In many
ways, Xinjiang is more complicated and explosive
than Tibet. Unlike the homogenous Tibet, Xinjiang
has many different ethnic groups longing for different
futures. While the Tibetans have the Dalai Lama
as a religious leader preaching for nonviolent ways to
pursue their goals, the ethnic groups in Xinjiang are
fragmented and have no commonly-accepted leaders.
Worse, many in Xinjiang are influenced by their
radical and extremist Muslim brethren in the troubled
areas of Central Asia and the Middle East, and look to
their experience for answers to the Xinjiang problem.
What is the Xinjiang problem? It is about the fate
of a piece of land in the very center of Asia known in
Chinese as the “Western and New Territory” (西域新
疆) or in Uyghur separatist terms, “East Turkistan.” 193
The issue is whether it should stay as an “intrinsic and
inseparable part of China,” or become an independent
homeland for the Uyghur people, or to be partitioned
along ethnic lines to accommodate the interests of the
East Turkic ethnic groups and the Han Chinese.
The Xinjiang problem has a long history. The Chinese
claim of this land, for instance, goes back to dynastic
China’s Western Han era of 200 BC. Over the
ages, there have been changes of possession among
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