More comments about how the National Endowment for Democracy is run by idiots

I do have some sympathy for ethnic minorities being one myself.  The reason that I work on Wall Street is rooted in large part in my effort to “be Chinese.”  What I figured out is that unless you are part of the majority power structure, then you don’t have any voice. Also it’s important to make it clear that you *are* part of the national community.  I pledge allegiance to the flag, and love the flag and the Constitution, and I do anything I can to make the United States a better country.  If I started waving signs saying “AMERICA STINKS, LET’S SECEDE” I’m not going to get anything done.

One thing that should make you think a bit is that the percentage of the United States that is Chinese-American is roughly the same fraction of the population of China that is Uighur.  If I got up and started calling for help from the Chinese government to establish a Chinese-American homeland or even for help to resolve ethnic problems in the US, I’d get a very *BAD* reaction.  Sort of the same reaction that Kadeer is getting.  If I say something bad about the United States, it is always from the point of view of a “loyal American” and I wave the US flag any chance that I get.

So one thing I find interesting about these democracy groups is how few US-based minorities there are in them.  Most of the people I’ve seen in them are white suburban types.  The kind of well-meaning person that joins the Peace Corps.

So I find articles like these, shocking……

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/09/AR2009070902425.html

This is sort of the brain-dead strategy that has destroyed a lot of Chinese democracy groups.  The more support you get from the US government, the less effective you are in China.  Also it seems *amazingly paternalistic and condescending*. Ah yes, those poor defenseless Uighurs, we Americans need to teach them to be civilized.  This probably sounds to the typical Uighur like the same sort of message from the Chinese government that they are so mad about.

One thing that is rather obvious looking at the pictures is that Uighurs *don’t* seem to want an identity based on secularism.  (Look at the women, they are all wearing headscarves), and I don’t know if they care about democracy in the way that the US defines it.  Also something that the US can do that would be more useful is to provide funding for preserving Uighur culture in the United States.  What I think the real danger for Kadeer is is that she’ll end up in the United States for decades, and all her kids will end up growing speaking English.  Or….

Maybe I should stop talking.  I think I have a lot of ideas on how to make the World Uighur Congress a more effective organization, but I’m not going to share any of those as long as she keeps waving the East Turkestani flag.  Start waving the right flag, and we can talk……

More comments on the NED

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/08/AR2009070804141_Comments.html

Also I’m quite upset at the National Endowment for Democracy. Kadeer is a political novice, but she gets advice from the NED and they should know better. It’s not that the NED is a secret arm of the CIA, it’s that the NED is run by well-meaning but native people that cause dissident groups to act in ways that completely destroy their ability to operate. I’ve seen the NED absolutely destroy Chinese democracy groups, and I’m really upset at this.

One problem is that most overseas groups are not very well funded. The Uighur World Congress probably has a few offices here and there. So when the NED offers them money and the promise of US official support. People go crazy and do and say whatever they think will make the NED happy, but usually this is *exactly* what will cause them to self-destruct.

The US is just not going to go to war over Xinjiang or provide and real aid to Tibetan or Uighur separatists movements. Getting your picture on the front page of the Washington Post and New York Times is intoxicating, but it’s dangerous because it makes you think that you may be more important than you are. What Kadeer has to realize that is that in three weeks, no one in the United States will remember who she is. She has fifteen minutes of fame, and she should have used that to build bridges with “liberal Chinese” rather than to make her diaspora supporters happy or count on support from the US government which may not happen. Without any popular support among the general Chinese population, she is not going to get anything done.

The other thing is that I think that someone made a *huge* tactical mistake. People in the NED seem to have as their image, a peaceful demonstration that will bring freedom and justice. The problem is that without understanding the local politics, you can cause more harm than good.

What I don’t think the NED understood was 1) after what is going on in Iran, the Chinese security forces would not allow any major demonstration and would crack down and 2) I think that they vastly underestimated the amount of ethnic tension in Xinjiang.

Also the NED vastly overestimates the power of demonstrations. Demonstrations work if you have a united people against a divided government. If the government is united or the people are divided, they will not work, and in this situation they led to a situation that I don’t think anyone wanted.

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Moving on to some analysis rather than personal attack….

One thing that I do find interesting is that there isn’t that much support among Han Chinese outside of Xinjiang for the actions of the local Xinjiang Han Chinese. Personally I see them as a lot of the Han Chinese mobs as thugs and anarchists, and I would hope that the police and government crack down on anyone that breaks the low regardless of ethnicity.

But one thing that is missing here is the issue of class and social position. People mention that the Uighurs are resentful of the fact that the good jobs are being held by Han Chinese. However, what people really don’t mention that much is that the Han Chinese that are beating people up are mostly poor migrants from neighboring provinces and *they* feel as oppressed as the Uighurs. To use a US analogy, it’s similar to the way a lot of poor whites feel about blacks getting what they see as “special treatment.” So simply saying, having the Chinese government give more rights and privileges to Uighurs doesn’t completely solve the problem because then the Han Chinese migrants in Xinjiang get *even* more angry.

A lot of the problem has to do with some unintended consequences of well-intentioned Chinese actions. First the Chinese government poured money into Xinjiang. If you look at the pictures, you see a big modern city. The second thing that the government did was to remove restrictions on travel. These were both good things, but what then happened is that you start having large numbers of poor Uighur and Han migrants moving into the big cities in recent years, and they are competing for the same jobs.

One thing that is interesting when you look at the interviews of people (of both Uighur and Han) in Urumiqi is that everyone seems to have moved there very recently. Also I think that the economic downturn was a *BIG* trigger for all of this. The initial rumor that started all of this in Guangdong was when a Han worker was angry at being fired from a toy factory.

It’s a big messy problem, and people that think that they have easy answers really don’t understand the problem. However, the same sorts of things happened in the US in the 1960’s, and it’s not out of the question that in a generation we’ll have the Chinese equivalent of Obama.

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All this talk about how the Uighurs need more cultural and political autonomy is going to matter if you convince most Chinese that they have too much cultural and political autonomy already.

There are some basic facts. I think China does a better job at cultural and political autonomy than the United States. In Xinjiang there are Uighur language schools up the the university level. Try getting *any* local school system in the United States to do even bilingual or Spanish-only education. It’s weird to see the Uighur diaspora complain about how bad the Chinese government is at wiping out cultures since all their kids in the US are going to be speaking only English. By law, a certain fraction of party and jobs have to go to the local minority. By law, the mayor of Urumqi has to be Uighur and the governor of Xinjiang has to also be Uighur (the party secretary is usually Han).

In 2005, the Chinese government moved from a Uighur only system to a bilingual Uighur/Mandarin system for primary education because a Uighur only system was causing ethnic segregation. Part of the new policy was intended to encourage Uighurs to learn Mandarin but it was also intended to encourage Han Chinese migrants to learn Uighur, which a lot them do. Of course, then you get the same reaction as when you try to force Anglo-Americans to learn Spanish.

Now some people think that this is not enough, however there are a lot of Chinese that think that this is *too much* and that China should do what the United States has done and try to assimilate everyone. If you have people running around with East Turkestani flags talking about “self-determination” then it just convinces most people in China that the Chinese government is too soft and needs remove whatever cultural and political autonomy there is.

If you have 50000 colonial settlers against a 10 million native population then you can go for independence. If you are a minority of 2 million people in a nation of 1.2 billion, then if you get most of those non-Uighur people mad at you, you are going to lose and lose very badly.

The Dalai Lama has figured this out. In think in his heart, he wants Tibetan independence, but he knows in his mind that it just won’t happen, and he is trying to get as much as he can get.

Part of the reason that I think you have clashes in Xinjiang that you didn’t in Tibet is that the Dalai Lama’s message of non-violence affects people, so Han Chinese in Tibet didn’t think that it would be a good idea to fight back. There are a lot of Buddhists in China, and there are enough so that if a Tibetan Lama hits you, you aren’t going to fight back. The Uighurs don’t have that sort of moral authority, and so if they hit, they get hit back. So I think that what Rebiya seems to be doing is very dangerous.

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One other thing is that what happens next is going to be determined by a huge debate in China that is likely going to be similar to the debate about race in the United States. There are going to be people in China that think the problem is that Uighurs need more economic and political autonomy. However, there are going to be a lot of people that say “enough is enough” and that minorities already get too much from the government.

If you hear a lot of Han Chinese talk about Uighurs, its like hearing white Americans talk about African-Americans. Even the racial stereotypes are similar (i.e lazy welfare queens that just need to get a job and learn to speak proper English/Mandarin rather than black English/Uighur).

The problem with Rebiya’s strategy is that I think it’s actually going to strengthen people in China who want to be “tough on crime and terrorism” and thing “affirmative action is a bad thing and all Chinese need to learn the national language.”

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Rebiya Kadeer is getting lots of interviews because she and her organization are going out to the newspapers that getting interviews. That’s not a bad thing, that’s their job. If you talk to the NED folks that’s what they teach people do to.

However……

1) The overall strategy that she is using makes no sense to me. If she gets people in the West to love her, and Han Chinese in Chinese hate her, then the Uighurs lose. Much of the problem is that everyone in the United States is going to forget who she is in three weeks, but people in China are going to remember her, but not in ways that she probably would like.

2) The second thing is that the Chinese government is *much* better at media relations than at any time in the past. Ten years ago, China would have closed off Xinjiang, she would have been able to talk about massacres and heroic protests and the Western media would have eaten that stuff up, but and the Chinese government would have responded with some spokesman that doesn’t know what is going on, looks bad in front of reporters, etc. etc. etc.

This time, the Chinese government has been letting reporters into Xinjiang, and what they’ve been reporting involves Han and Uighurs that are fighting each other, a professional police and military that are doing their best to restore order, fighting hooligans and protecting law-abiding citizens.

The New York Times was reporting on a media tour that they said was a “disaster” for the Chinese government, but it really was a “disaster” for Rebiya. You had the police surrounded by very upset women, who the police let demonstrate peacefully for 90 minutes, and then only when the demonstrators started smashing police cars, they pulled in tear gas to disperse the demonstrators. Now I’m sure that any Western reporters who sees this will come to their own conclusions about whether the stuff that Rebiya is talking about is credible, and it doesn’t help that she gets her facts wrong about other things.

Because Western reporters are seeing Xinjiang with their own eyes, the coverage is far more favorable to the Chinese government than anything that I’ve seen in a long time, and this is because the government has learned more about how to handle demonstrations and the media.

Comments on the Xinjiang situation

Posting a bit on the Washington Post community forum

Personally I don’t think that Kadeer is a terrorist. She is a nice well-meaning woman that sincerely believes what she is doing. I also think that she really has no real influence over events in Xinjiang, and that she is just one of dozens (if not hundreds) of tiny idealistic groups in Washington DC with no real money or power.

I am upset at the National Endowment for Democracy. I don’t think that they are controlled by the CIA, because I think that the CIA would be a lot smarter than the people at the NED. Instead I’ve seen the NED *destroy* Chinese democracy groups just like they are *destroying* Kadeer, and personally I think it’s much more likely that the Chinese Ministry of State Security runs the NED than the CIA. The NED gives bad advice and tainted money to the groups that they try to “help.” Kadeer probably thinks that my increasing the profile of her group, she can get more money and influence in the United States. What she doesn’t realize and what the NED doesn’t make clear is that the United States is not going to ever provide any real help or support for the Uighurs. The US and the NED *talks* a lot about human rights, but when you get to real decisions, it’s all about money and power, and honestly there are hundreds of places in the world with situations worse than Xinjiang. All the Chinese government has to do is to convince the world that Xinjiang is just another “race riot” and in three weeks no one in the US will care.

What Kadeer really needs to do is to get support for her ideas among *Chinese* particularly Chinese in China. She had a very brief moment where she could do that, and she blew it. In her interviews she said *EXACTLY* what the Chinese government wants her to say, and she made some very basic mistakes. Again, I don’t blame her. She is a political amateur. I really blame the NED. They should know better. Also, I do think that the NED did *something* that set up the demonstrations.

The NED is composed of former 1960’s people that like demonstrations, and so a lot of NED training to groups is how to set up a peaceful demonstration. The problem is that what ended up happening in Xinjiang was like throwing a spark into a room full of gasoline, and whatever the NED started, it has ended up with Uighurs probably being in a *worse* situation than before, since support among people in China for more ethnic autonomy has probably gotten a lot lower than it was before.

Also, it *is* the situation that the press coverage in the Washington Post and New York Times is probably more favorable to the Chinese government than anything that I’ve seen in the past. One thing that you have to understand is that reporters *are* biased, but if you scream at them about bias, that doesn’t help you get your message out. There are a lot of techniques that you can use to make sure that your side of the story gets published, and the Chinese government has gotten a lot better at using them. The basic ones are treat reporters like human beings, and don’t act as if you are hiding something. The other thing is that doing true to deal with bad coverage by restricting information, but rather *add* information. Finally, part of getting better press coverage is just doing your job right. The impression that I’m getting from the Western newspapers of the riot police is favorable which is that they are mainly there to restore order and prevent revenge killings. This takes a lot of training.

Imagine yourself holding a gun, and then being surrounding by angry people that are trying to beat you up. Learning *not* to fire the gun, takes a *huge* amount of training, and it’s the training that any well-trained policeman has. Western reporters are seeing that sort of training, and that destroys Kadeer’s efforts at getting sympathy by making the Chinese police look like thugs.

What Uighur activists really want is some picture or video of the Chinese police doing something really nasty, and the big effort of the Chinese government is to avoid having that picture or video being seen. Since you can’t restrict press access, then you just train your police so that nothing they do looks bad if some reporters sees them do it.