When violence erupted in China’s Xinjiang Autonomous Region, home to the country’s Uighur Muslim minority, China’s state media rushed to cover the news. Western media followed their lead.
"The clashes between ethnic Muslim Uighurs and China's Han majority in Xinjiang that left more than 150 dead signaled a new phase in a region used to seeing bombings and assassinations by militant separatists but few mass protests," wrote Associated Press.
“The death toll from violent ethnic riots in China’s northwestern Xinjiang region has risen to 156, and police on Monday dispersed ‘rioters’ in a second city, the official Xinhua news agency said early on Tuesday,” reported Reuters.
But media experts and Uighur activists say that China’s state-controlled media are working to frame the story in favour of the regime, a strategy one Hong Kong-based Chinese media expert calls “Control 2.0.”
“By getting the information out, officials can get the ‘peripheral media’ (influential portal news sites, and commercial newspapers) to work for them,” writes David Bandurski editor of the China Media Project Web.
“These media feed off of the original Xinhua reports, amplifying their effect. Those same reports, with only slight permutations in many cases, become AFP, Reuters, and AP reports.”
While Bandurski was talking about riots in Shishou city in June, the pattern holds.
China’s state-controlled media have framed the riots as a violent Uighur uprising led by terrorists and overseas anti-China forces that have attacked Han Chinese. Freedom House, a U.S. ngo that supports expanding freedoms, said the reports were part of the regime’s effort to manage coverage of the unrest. The group called on state media to stop such reporting because it fuels ethnic tensions.
While few media have given much credence to the suggestion that Uighur activists in the U.S. and Germany are behind the unrest, many have carried the rest of that angle as well as the suggestion that ethnic tensions are the primary cause of the conflict.
That is especially true for media relying on wire content. Canada’s major newspapers including the Toronto Star, Globe and Mail, and Toronto Sun, have all run wire stories along those lines.
But the Chinese regime has gone a step further to massage the message. During the riots in Tibet, the regime stoked the ire of international media by keeping them locked out. In Xinjiang they have brought them in on guided tours, though reporters have not been allowed to interview anyone without their cadre handler.
“They’re getting more sophisticated. They learn from past mistakes,” Xiao Qiang, a journalism professor at the University of California who closely follows the regime’s media controls told the New York Times. He said the new tactic aims to keep foreign media in check.
The success of that effort can be seen in a Globe and Mail headline for a story by a reporter there to cover the unrest. The headline read: “Internet restricted to prevent organizing of protests.”
Most experts on China’s media, including Xiao, have framed the regime’s efforts to cut off all communications in the region as an attempt to keep uncensored sensitive content—such as evidence of the attacks against Uighurs—from getting out, much as it did at the beginning of the unrest. As the crackdown began, people in Urumqi posted videos taken with cell phones and digital cameras on the net that showed events in the city.
Tala Dowlatshahi, with Reporters Without Borders in New York, said more than 50 Uighur-language Internet forums were closed yesterday, and other communications including Twitter were cut back.
“The people of that region are completely cut off from the rest of the world,” she said. “I don’t have a lot of answers for you but I can tell you that we are not getting the real story.”
Uighurs in Canada say that friends and family have disappeared from instant messenger services, don’t answer their cell phones or reply to e-mails, and their landlines register permanent busy signals.
They later said police went door-to-door arresting male inhabitants. That allegation was repeated by a crowd of Uighur women in Xinjiang who approached police in front of visiting reporters and demanded their loved ones be released.
News reports about Xinjiang that sourced Chinese state media also failed to mention that these media are commonly regarded as propaganda tools of the communist regime.
“[News media] should be greatly concerned about the accuracy of any reports by Chinese state media because Chinese state media reports one side,” Dowlatshahi said, noting that all coverage serves the regime’s political interests.
Also missing from most reports has been any real explanation of the cause of the Uighur unrest.
The history of Xinjiang is remarkably similar to Tibet though not nearly as well known. Both regions were populated by distinct ethnicities with unique languages and religious traditions. Xinjiang, called East Turkestan by Uighurs, has historically struggled against Chinese rule, at times being a part of some Chinese dynasties, at other times independent or under other rule.
When the Chinese Communist Party came to power in 1949, the new regime worked quickly to crush any independence of the region. Amnesty International says gross human rights violations have occurred since then.
In an effort to overwrite the region’s distinct ethnic characteristics, the Chinese regime has suppressed traditional religious and cultural traditions. It has also made an intensive effort to have Han Chinese move to the area and displace the Uighur minority. According to Amnesty, in 1949 the local Turkic population, the majority of whom were Uighur, accounted for at least 93 percent of the region’s population; today the population is roughly half Uighur and half ethnic Chinese.
Restrictions in the area increased through the late 1990s and the Uighurs watched their social, economic, and cultural rights steadily erode.
“Economic development in the region has largely bypassed the local ethnic population, and they have faced increased restrictions. This trend has exacerbated long-standing ethnic tensions between Uyighurs and Han Chinese in the region, and contributed to the escalation of violence,” said A.I.
Recent policies have seen Uighur families coerced into sending their children to inland schools and their young women to work in inland cities.
Few of the women ever return and Uighur activists say they are forced into prostitution.
“Over the years, attempts by Uyighurs to air their views or grievances and peacefully exercise their most fundamental human rights have been met with repression,” said Amnesty, adding this repression has raised tensions.
Interestingly, this pattern is common throughout mainland China in recent years. Official reports of “mass incidents” grew by more than seven times over ten years to 74,000 in 2004. Since then, Chinese officials have been tight lipped about the details of unrest in China which suggests that the numbers have continued to rise.
Reports on other recent riots in China reveal a pattern: local people protest a perceived injustice linked to government corruption or police brutality.
The protest is quashed by police, while the perceived injustice is not addressed. The often heavy-handed response then triggers further protests, some of which become violent. The protests then turn more squarely against the regime and sometimes involve damage to government vehicles and buildings.
Riots with similar scenarios occurred in Shishou city in Hubei province in June and Longnan city in Gansu province last November. Uighurs say this is also what happened in Urumqi.
Uighurs in Canada and the U.S. say it has been disturbing to watch media in those countries follow the story lines of Chinese state media.
“Most of the media just show [the] Chinese side, take the Chinese media’s pictures and photos,” said Rukiye Turdesh, president of the Uighur Canadian Society.
Chinese state media reports focused on Han Chinese, she said, and presented Uighurs as violently attacking Han Chinese people. Western media then followed suit.
“They don’t show any pictures of how Uighurs are killed. They don’t say anything about the Uyighurs, what happened to the Uighurs, they just say the Chinese were beaten, the Chinese were killed. What is this—it is not fair, right? They just copy the Chinese media,” Turdesh said.
“Uighurs are helpless, they don’t have soldiers, they don’t have guns, they have nothing. The Chinese have everything and the Chinese blocked the information. We don’t know what is happening over there right now. Even if China killed all of them, massacred all of the Uighurs, nobody could know.”
Turdesh said it was unbearable to watch the footage that escaped China early in the crackdown showing Uighurs being attacked and killed.
Alim Seytoff, general secretary of the Uighur American Association, the umbrella group that the Chinese regime accuses of orchestrating the riots, said later coverage of the riots has improved, with more media talking to Uighur sources. However he is still concerned that too many news sources give credence to Chinese state media.
“It is wrong for the international community to take words coming out of the Chinese media as facts. They should be cautious about that because it is always prejudiced and one-sided.”
Like Tibetans, Uighurs are consistently portrayed as “barbaric, lazy, and stupid,” said Alim.
The fact that Uighurs are Muslim has further confused the issue, said D.J. McGuire, co-founder of the China e-Lobby and author of Dragon in the Dark: How and Why Communist China Helps Our Enemies in the War on Terror.
“The problem is that people have already been preconditioned to not believe what the cadres say on Tibet, so there was something of that in the Tibet coverage,” said McGuire, referring to the fact that media coverage on the Tibet riots was more sympathetic to the Tibetans.
“But they don’t understand that as much with what is going on in Urumqi [Xinjiang],” he added.
“After 9/11 it became much easier to paint any Muslim resistance as terrorist and anti-Western than it is to do the same with any resistance in Tibet, so that is what colours the coverage.”
McGuire said any coverage that takes the Chinese regime’s account at face value is not responsible.
“Until we are able to get people who speak without fear of reprisal from the communist regime, it is very difficult to find out what actually happened.”
