The Chinese ?art? of dialogue

 

 

 

 

 

“…It is no injustice to conquer the lands of barbarians. It is not an inhuman act to kill barbarians. It is not dishonest to deceive barbarians…” — prominent Chinese philosopher Wang Fu Zhi, who lived in the 17th century

 

In Chinese socio-cultural and political lexicon, the term ‘barbarian’ stands for every other race on earth that is not Han. That explains the burden of being the ‘supreme’ race or being ‘the Middle Kingdom’ which generations of Hans have been carrying on their shoulders across the centuries. That also explains why the Qin dynasty and successive generations of Hans chose to build the ‘Great’ Wall to hide behind it in order to protect themselves from a host of ‘barbaric’ nomadic invasions from Inner Asia who included Tibetans, Mongols, Uyghurs–and you just name them. That also explains why Chinese hold the distinction of being among those very few races in the world who take pride in their art of ‘deception’ and cheating.

 

When Comrade Mao Zedong was in the last leg of his successful Communist revolution in China, his ‘Peoples Liberation Army’ (PLA) faced stiff resistance from a host of Uyghur clans of ‘The Republic of East Turkistan’ in the far West. Uyghurs, a fiery and self-respecting Muslim race, dominated this mineral-rich region which has been off and on under the control of various warlords. As Mao’s Communists were taking control of one after other regions of China the Uyghurs had successfully broken off from the control of Nationalist Kuomintang rule in 1933, though for a short period. But they had regained their independence again since 1944. That explains why they would not submit themselves to yet another era of slavery of the Hans.

 

It was this moment when Mao used his charm of Communist sweet talk and offered to settle all those thorny issues through a ‘friendly dialogue’ which were on the minds of Uyghur leaders. Along with his invitations to the Uyghur clan leaders in August 1949, Mao also sent a plane to Novosibirsk in neighboring USSR to fetch the Uyghur leaders for this ‘friendly dialogue’. A large section among the influential leaders fell for Mao’s bait. But before the plane could reach Beijing, it exploded midair on August 26 and almost an entire generation of East Turkistani leadership was wiped out in a single go.

 

Following this ‘victory’, Mao did not have to make much efforts before he could identify some collaborators among the surviving leaders. Professing loyalty to Mao’s Peoples’ Republic of China, Saifuddin Azizi, one of the surviving leaders, joined the Chinese Communist Party. The rest of job of suppressing anti-invasion uprising of Uyghur and Kazakh populations was not difficult for PLA General Wang Zhen who soon took control of the Second “Republic of East Turkistan”. The ‘Republic’ was renamed as “Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region” (XUAR) of China. And collaborator Saifuddin Azizi was appointed as the first Communist Party Governor of the ‘Ili Kazakh Autonomous Prefecture’ of the new PRC.

 

History repeated itself in Tibet two years later in 1951 when neighboring Tibet was occupied by China following a so-called “17-point Agreement between China and Tibet” that they signed with a celebrated Tibetan collaborator Ngapo Ngawang Jigme who was never authorised by the Dalai Lama government of Lhasa to sign any agreement with China. In the case of Tibet, the Tibetan independence from China had already lasted from 1913 to 1951.