reprise

China Locks Down Restive Region After Deadly Clashes

i saw the headline and thought, "china's fucked." china is soooooooo fucked. i dont mean china is messed up; that goes without saying. i mean that in a decade or so, when china takes over as the world's superpower, it's gonna have a couple good years ballin out and then

1. civil war
2. islamic extremism

you can only fuck a minority in the ass so many times before they start doing some major damage. last year, navigating the great firewall for coverage of the tibet uprising, blanking out the 'i' in t-bet so our email accounts wouldnt be shut down, i had the thought that the tibet riots were eerily similar both in cause and effect to the watts riots of the 60s, and the rodney king riots in the 90s. a politically oppressed group lashes back, causing massive collateral damage, not only to the local community, but other disadvantaged groups in the proximity. for the rodney king riots, korean small-business owners were caught in the crossfire, somehow both the intended and unintended vicitims of violence stemming from race-based frustration. in tibet, migrant han workers from sichuan and other poorer provinces watched their small enterprises go up in flames as ethnic tibetans took to the streets, first in tibet, then throughout western china.

xinjiang appears no different. uighurs are marginalized culturally and economically, face the same sort of social problems that low-income minority groups face in the united states. but limit someone's ability to worship and then there's a huge problem. you can say that said damage has already commenced, but this is just the tip of the iceberg. once china dominates the global economy, islamic extremism is going switch focus from the us to the prc, funding is going to be funneled into islamic pockets in china to feed an expanding fundamentalist base. the actions of the central government are simply fueling the beginnings of massive civil unrest.

i'm not saying china should democratize. in fact, i dont think it should. but it can be smarter about what rights to give (anti-discrimination laws, right to worship), and how aid should be allocated (propaganda free schooling, hiv/aids prevention). if it doesn't, the system will conceivably turn around and bite it in the ass sometimes in the near future.

dum-dum-dum....

it's strange to think that in the us, i'm part of a pan-asian minority, and working within that framework, esp in nonprofit, endows you with a sense of subversion, that you're fighting against the dominant mentality, the colossal mainframe. but in china, i'm han chinese. i'm the man, an exponent of the ruling hegemony. suppose i head off to xinjiang to teach some poor kiddies engrish. where does that put me on the sliding scale of majority-led neo-colonization?

in conclusion, simplified chinese sucks.