Posted on 09/27/2001 9:20:22 PM PDT by super175
It's a Chinese nationalist's nightmare. A United States military assault on a country bordering on China might well be the opening scene to the kind of anti-Beijing plot long imagined by many Chinese commentators and editorial writers. Self-proclaimed nationalist pundit Wang Xiaodong declares such a U.S. attack would allow the U.S. to "put a knife in China's back."
Beijing's leaders, however, are proving more flexible after the September 11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington. Having failed to persuade the ruling Taliban in Afghanistan to stop training Muslims from the northwestern Chinese region of Xinjiang, China now has a real interest in seeing the defeat of the hardline Islamic regime based in Kandahar. Even if it means allowing the U.S. to take on a neighbour of China.
A well-placed Chinese official estimates that Afghanistan is host to between 2,000 and 3,000 Uighur militants from Xinjiang. Opposition Afghan sources previously put the number in the hundreds. Either way, enough Uighurs are training in Afghanistan to sound alarm bells in Beijing, and make it see clear benefits in a U.S.-led offensive against such training camps--as long as an operation doesn't turn into a permanent U.S. presence.
Beijing fears that the military training and religious zeal acquired by Uighurs in Afghanistan will provide backbone to what is a fragmented independence movement back in Xinjiang. Though the Chinese government has kept the upper hand in the majority-Muslim region, Yan Xuetong, director of the Institute of International Studies at Beijing's Tsinghua University, notes "in the mid-1990s one-third of Xinjiang had a separatist problem."
China has tried other tacks. The goal of countering independence movements and Islamic insurgents made China a major force behind the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which since June has grouped Beijing with neighbouring Russia, Kazakhstan, Kirgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan in a permanent regional security and economic forum.
China has also relied on Pakistan to press the Taliban to bar Uighurs from its forces. And in the past two years, Beijing has reached out on its own to the Taliban. This campaign has included a visit by Taliban officials to Beijing; a mission to Afghanistan by members of the China Institute for Contemporary International Relations, a think-tank affiliated to China's Ministry of State Security; and a later mission to Afghanistan by the Chinese ambassador to Pakistan. There were also several low-level business schemes including providing telephone equipment from state-owned companies to Kabul and Kandahar.
All such initiatives were largely driven by purely domestic Chinese concerns. "Security in Xinjiang is the main element in China's Afghan policy," says an institute official.
But while China dabbled with the Taliban, it never had plans to extend diplomatic recognition to the regime, say analysts. A senior Asian diplomat says Beijing approached the Taliban the way that Chinese go to temples. "They go for insurance," he says. And even then, "they burn paper money, never real money."
The culmination of China's efforts to engage the Taliban was a meeting in Kandahar in December last year between Beijing's ambassador to Pakistan Lu Shulin and Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar, who usually refuses to meet non-Muslims. According to Asian diplomats, Lu sought guarantees that Uighurs would not receive military training from the Taliban, while Omar wanted China to oppose United Nations sanctions on his regime, initially imposed in the wake of the 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa.
Little transpired from the talks. A Pakistan-based Chinese diplomat said afterwards: "There are no plans to go again." In fact, the problem only worsened for China.
Another senior Asian diplomat in Beijing says that before Lu's visit, China put Islamabad under pressure to expel Uighurs from religious schools in Pakistan. Islamabad complied, but refused to send them back to China. Hundreds chose to go to Afghanistan, where they were welcomed by the Taliban, which resented China's failure to vote against United Nations sanctions. Some Uighurs now fight with the Taliban and others with the allied the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan.
"China has very bad relations with the Taliban. We try to ask Pakistan to impose leverage on the Taliban to stop that [training of Uighurs] but it is very ineffective," says Yan. Beijing appears to hope that U.S. firepower will prove more persuasive.
Sounds like a recipie for some guanxi, or quid pro quo to me.
There are some interesting facts though...
And both agreed that America is the grand hegemon...
Uh, yeah. Like the Chinese ever deal in fake money when it comes to their national security.
Actually, it's not a knife and it's not your back that we had in mind...
CCP will never allow freedom of religion because it againsts everything CCP is doing. There is a BEING is much more superior than CCP.
70 - 80% of Chinese claimed to be Buddhist before 1949.
They allow some state sanctioned party run churches, but that is about it. The party "cleans up" the stuff it does not like then tells everyone they have a choice. (aka choice = go to our version of church or don't go). Whenever the party line changes, so does the teachings of the church.
Everything else is completely underground.
I see another Sept 16 joining member.
All the 916ers seem to act as ChiCom apologists.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.