A Strongman Is China’s Rock in Ethnic Strife

by Michael Wines, The New York Times, July 11, 2009

As ethnic Han gangs roamed the streets of Urumqi on Tuesday at dusk, seeking revenge against Muslim Uighur rioters who killed scores of Han two nights earlier, a balding Communist Party bureaucrat abruptly appeared on the city’s television screens to call for calm.

The nine-minute speech by the bureaucrat, Wang Lequan, was mostly government boilerplate: the riots were no homegrown problem, but “a massive conspiracy” to sabotage ethnic unity; Urumqi citizens should “point the spear toward hostile forces at home and abroad,” not at their neighbors; attacks on Han or Uighurs alike were heartbreaking.

Then he turned to the Han who were on the streets, repaying the riots’ blood debt. “Comrades, to start with, such action is fundamentally not necessary,” he told them briskly. “Our dictatorial force is fully able to knock out the evildoers, so there is no need to take such action.”

Mr. Wang, 64, the Communist Party secretary and absolute power in the northwestern region of Xinjiang, is largely unknown outside China, and until lately stayed in the shadows even at home. But China’s leadership elite, and perhaps especially his patron, President Hu Jintao, have put their faith in him: they have let him run Xinjiang for 15 years, well beyond the usually strict limit of a decade in one powerful post. They have elevated him to the Politburo, the ruling party’s inner sanctum.

They have made him their go-to expert on policies toward minorities, which account for the more than 100 million of China’s 1.3 billion citizens who are not ethnically classified as Han. Those in power are reputed to have given him leading roles on senior advisory groups that coordinate and oversee ethnic policies. They have placed his protégé, Xinjiang’s former deputy party boss, in charge of restive Tibet.

They have done all this, those who watch Mr. Wang say, because of performances like the one on Urumqi television.

The government media may call this week’s rioting the worst outbreak of ethnic violence in recent Chinese history, killing at least 184 and injuring more than 1,000. But Mr. Wang is fully able to knock out the evildoers. He did so in 1997, quelling riots in Yining, near the Kazakhstan border, at a cost in lives that remains unknown.

Iron fist and velvet glove, he has suppressed Islam, welcomed industry, marginalized the Uighur language, built roads and rail links to the outside world, and spied on, arrested and jailed countless minority citizens in the name of stopping terrorism and subsuming Uighurs (pronounced WEE-gers) into a greater China.

Even his detractors allow that he has done a masterful job. His nickname is “the stability secretary” — a tribute to his ability to step into chaos and haul it to order.

“He consolidated a piece of territory that is one-sixth of China, and for centuries has been a headache for Beijing in terms of ethnic trouble and stability,” said Nicholas Bequelin, a researcher based in Hong Kong for the advocacy group Human Rights Watch and a sharp critic of Mr. Wang’s ethnic policies. “He firmly rammed into the ground the state’s control there. This is something that has weight in the political system in China.”

A signal question now is whether it will continue to have weight. For China is entering a period of backroom political jockeying, as Communist leaders prepare to name successors in 2012 to President Hu and Prime Minister Wen Jiabao. Some China analysts suspect that the violence in Xinjiang, and in Tibet last year, may become weapons in the struggle over China’s future.

At a simple level, the question is whether Beijing’s leadership will judge the quashing of riots in China’s two least-tamed regions as military successes or policy failures. But Chinese politics are rarely simple; they are a tangle of alliances based on loyalty, self-interest and ideology. Mr. Wang’s success or failure will be shared by his friends and mentors, and at the top of that list is Mr. Hu.

As leader of the influential Communist Youth League in the mid-1980s, Mr. Hu recruited talented league members as allies, including Mr. Wang, who at the time ran the group’s operations in Shandong Province, in eastern China. As president, Mr. Hu has moved dozens of league officials into the Politburo and other top government posts.

Mr. Wang and Mr. Hu share a second tie: Mr. Hu was the party boss in Tibet when Mr. Wang was moved from Shandong to Xinjiang in 1991. They embrace a hard line on minority issues. Mr. Hu’s sudden elevation to the top echelons of power in 1992 was sped by his swift action in crushing an uprising in Tibet in 1989.

Some China scholars say they suspect that Mr. Hu’s abrupt return to Beijing this week from an economic summit meeting in Italy was a mission to shore up support among Politburo members and to ensure that the riots out west did not lead to political conflict within the leadership.

Yet it is not at all clear that the Xinjiang riots will be viewed as a black mark. China’s leaders see success and failure very differently from, say, American leaders.

“No one is going to engage in any fundamental rethink of policies toward ethnic minorities unless those policies fail to produce stability,” said Russell Leigh Moses, a Beijing analyst who closely follows issues in China’s leadership elite. But in Politburo terms, stability has a special meaning.

“It’s not about stability in the streets,” he added. “It’s about legitimacy.”

Mr. Wang has also amassed his own political capital, much of it based on his reputation as an efficient, if pitiless, troubleshooter of Beijing’s most daunting problems.

Mr. Wang “is one of the major figures in the hard-line faction who thinks that more than an economic downturn, ethnic issues are the potential Achilles’ heel of this regime,” Mr. Moses said.

Mr. Wang was born in Shandong, China’s industrial and petroleum capital. At 21, he was sent into the countryside as a laborer during the Cultural Revolution. When he returned in 1966, he joined the Communist Party and began a 25-year rise to vice governor.

His familiarity with the oil industry may have played a role in his transfer to Xinjiang, an oil-rich region. But he made his mark there by combining relentless economic development with punishing social policies to remake Turkic Xinjiang in Han China’s image.

Mr. Wang arrived in Xinjiang as the Soviet Union was dissolving, its central Asian pieces shedding their colonial chains. Millions of Han citizens transplanted by Mao after China’s army occupied the region in 1949 were leaving. Beijing feared that Xinjiang’s growing Muslim Uighur population would try to follow its Soviet neighbors into independence.

Mr. Wang’s antidote was a heavy dose of modernization for the ancient Uighur culture. He opened the region’s oil and gas fields to drilling, laid pipelines east to the Chinese heartland and west to Kazakhstan, and turned the Production and Construction Corps, a creaky make-work project for mustered-out Han soldiers, into a moneymaker listed on the Shanghai stock exchange.

Han workers began flowing back, lured by industry and government jobs that Uighurs say were disproportionately parceled out to Han migrants. During the 1990s, Mr. Bequelin of Human Rights Watch said, about two million Han relocated to Xinjiang.

At the same time, Mr. Wang tightly constrained Uighur culture and religion. He substituted Mandarin for Uighur in primary schools, saying minority languages were “out of step with the 21st century,” and banned or restricted Islamic practices among government workers, including the wearing of beards and head scarves and rituals like fasting and praying while on the job.

Yet Mr. Wang’s efforts intensified after the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States. Within months, he began a campaign against terrorism and separatism that he linked to the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, a little-known Uighur group. The Bush administration agreed, adding the group to its list of allies of Al Qaeda in 2002.

In later years, Xinjiang waged a series of “strike hard” campaigns, dragnets that swept up thousands of Uighurs accused of terrorism or religious extremism.

The same year that the campaign began, Mr. Hu rewarded Mr. Wang with a Politburo seat.

“Wang Lequan came in and cracked heads, launched a ‘strike hard’ campaign, and lo and behold, he gets elevated to the Politburo,” said Dru C. Gladney, a China expert and president of the Pacific Basin Institute at Pomona College.

Now that Xinjiang has exploded in violence, Western critics may contend that Mr. Wang’s hard-nosed rule has failed, much as urban race riots in 1960s America were seen as a failure of social and legal policies then.

As yet, there is no sign such arguments will move Beijing’s leaders.

Mr. Wang’s deputy in Xinjiang, Zhang Qingli, became party secretary in Tibet in 2005 and quickly became known for the same unbending policies that are Mr. Wang’s hallmark. In 2008, Tibet suffered its worst unrest in decades. Today, Mr. Zhang sits on the party’s central committee.

Jonathan Ansfield and Xiyun Yang contributed reporting from Beijing, and Edward Wong from Urumqi.