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China Offers Cash to Erode Uighur Culture
9-10-2014
Chinese authorities have been offering incentives in parts of troubled north-west region of Xinjiang to interethnic couples as part of a drive to assimilate the centuries-old cultural identity of the Uighur Muslim community.
Qiemo county's interethnic marriage policy "seems of a piece with general assumptions about Chinese policy in the region, in the sense that the party appears to believe that material incentives can overcome or mediate most political, economic and social problems", Michael Clarke, an expert on Xinjiang at Griffith University in Australia, told The Guardian on Tuesday, September 2.
The new incentives were first declared last August in Qiemo county, part of the 460,000 sq km Bayinguoleng autonomous Mongolian prefecture.
According to the new policy, the Chinese authorities have promised a "big celebratory gift package" for couples in which one member is an ethnic minority and the other is Han Chinese.
The package includes annual cash payments of 10,000 yuan (£980) for interethnic couples during the first five years of their marriage, as well as housing, healthcare and education subsidies, according to a statement on the Qiemo county government's website.
"Ethnic groups are different only in that we have different languages and different customs, but we have the same blue sky above our heads, the same fertile ground beneath our feet, and the same love in our hearts!" Yasen Nasi'er, deputy secretary of the Qiongkule township Communist party committee, told journalists during the announcement on 25 August.
"I believe that intermarriage between ethnic groups is a foundation of Chinese culture, and will strengthen the concrete expression of exchange, association, and mingling of all ethnic groups."
A county official confirmed the policy when reached by phone.
"This is meant to promote ethnic unity – that's the main thing," he said.
Expanded Policy
A similar incentives policy has been applied in other areas including Tibet according to a slew of state media reports published this summer.
"This seems to be part of a much larger effort by the government to essentially socially engineer support for a decidedly Beijing-centric perception of what a society should look like – or at least to minimize objections to the central government's policies," said Sophie Richardson, China director at Human Rights Watch.
"It seems to presume that Han will be supportive of government policies – a reality which is manifestly not true – and somehow, that the construct of marriage will promote that political loyalty."
Interethnic marriages in the region grew from about 700 in 2008 to more than 4,700 last year, according to a report by the research office of the Communist party in Tibet.
"It certainly strikes me as one of the perverse efforts by a government that's known to engineer its way out of human rights abuses rather than removing the abusive policies that lead to protests in the first place," Richardson added.
Uighur Muslims are a Turkish-speaking minority of eight million in the northwestern Xinjiang region.
Xinjiang, which activists call East Turkestan, has been autonomous since 1955 but continues to be the subject of massive security crackdowns by Chinese authorities.
Rights groups accuse Chinese authorities of religious repression against Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang in the name of counter terrorism.
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