ABSTRACT
From the viewpoint of the Western media, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) suffers greatly from ethnic unrest; ethnic grievance and interethnic tension are rapidly on the rise. 1 This impression is certainly the case with regard to Tibetans and Uyghurs. For the past few years, ethnic Tibetans and Uyghurs have indeed mobilised politically to contest the Chinese national identity (Han 2013a). From March to August 2008, ethnic Tibetans were involved in a large-scale protest movement throughout Tibetan areas, both in the Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR) but also ethnic Tibetan areas outside of the TAR. Within this movement, the most noticeable event was probably the riot in Lhasa on March 14 (Han and Paik 2014; Topgyal 2011). Since that time, a series of cases of self-immolation have also been carried by Tibetan monks and laymen to protest the perceived grievance against the Chinese government. Likewise, sporadic incidents of unrest were also reported in Xinjiang in 2008 before the start of the Beijing Olympic Games. Then, a deadly riot broke out in Urumqi, the capital city of Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR), which claimed about 200 lives. Since then, there has been a noticeable trend of growing militarism among the Uyghurs, as exemplified in the violent rampage in a railway station in Kunming, Yunnan province in 2014. 2 It is indeed safe to say that the Chinese state’s nation-building projects to create loyal citizens among the ethnic Tibetans and Uyghurs have so far failed, and there is a tremendous amount of political, socio-economic and cultural grievance experienced by these two groups.
