For Chinese neighbours, caution is the byword and trade the catchword - part one

Removal of the textile export quota has created a big challenge for Mongolia. In 2004, Ulaanbaatar's textile industry produced about 16 per cent of the total export revenues. To save on high transportation costs incurred due to Mongolia's inland location, some companies are preparing to move their factories into China.

A mishandling of these issues may provoke an upsurge in Mongolian nationalism that would damage Sino-Mongolian relations. Mongolians and Chinese each have different historical viewpoints and while Mongolians see themselves as one of Asia's oldest ethnically pure groups, as do the Han Chinese, the Chinese regard Mongolia as a former part of its Middle Kingdom and view Mongolians as an ethnic minority. This is a deep-rooted contrary view that could have explosive effects in the future relations of Ulaanbaatar and Beijing.

At present, Mongolian nationalist movements may be found in Mongolia, the Chinese province of Inner Mongolia, and Russia's regions of Buryatskaya and Kalmykia. Based on their common traditional culture, Mongolian nationalism began quickening during 1989 when Mongolia was making a political turnaround. In 1990, after the Mongolian Democratic Party publicly stated its: "Uniting the Three Mongolias" stance (Mongolia, Inner Mongolia, and Mongolian Buryatskaya), the party also advocated "providing a unified spoken and written language and a nationality which could naturally be linked together". There was also support for a union between Inner Mongolia, Mongolian Buryatskaya, Mongolian Xinjiang, and other regions which would in turn unite Mongolians under one "Great Mongolia". China is taking note of those moves.

China’s northwest borders

Joint Pakistan-China military exercises began in August 2004 in Xinjiang in China's far west. The drill, including live firing, took place at a region of very high-elevation near China's border with Afghanistan, Tajikistan and Pakistan. The people of the area are mostly Tajiks, a Muslim ethnic minority who speak an Iranian language. In this region it might be better to look at cultural-linguistic affiliations rather than at national borders. This is because expansionist line-drawing has made a complex mess of the physical geography and has treated people more like things to be fitted inside borders rather than seeing their intrinsic value as human beings with a culture and way of life.

The Uighur ethnic group of north-western China's Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region are a Turkic Muslim people numbering about 9 million (the total population of the huge, resource-rich region is 19.25 million which includes about 9 million Han Chinese). Of all China's 56 official ethnic groups, the Uighurs are the most dissimilar to the majority Han Chinese and, along with the Tibetans, have caused the Han the most headaches since the Communist took over in China in 1949.

A Caucasian people, the Uighurs speak a Turkic language that is most like that spoken by the Uzbeks. As both are Muslim, they share a commonality. Uzbekistan is home to many Uighurs who have moved there in several waves since the 19th Century. Xinjiang, however, does not border Uzbekistan: it borders Afghanistan (with a tiny frontier), Kazakhstan and Krygyzstan and lies adjacent to Tibet.

The Uighur people, though they have maintained contacts with the Chinese for more than 2,000 years, consider the Han Chinese presence in Xinjiang, or Eastern Turkistan as they prefer to call it, an occupation of their ancestral homeland. This places a bias on all affairs with China and consequently causes the China Government to dig in its heels.

In the areas of China that colour the country with their different ethnicities there is a certain level of lip service paid to allowing locals to use their own language. But in reality the result of the cultural incursions by the Han is a roughshod standardisation of languages - with the Pu tong hua language topping the charts. Pu tong hua is creeping into bordering countries too and has become language of choice in both the street and in school curricula.

Global water commons

The Himalayas (claimed by China) give rise to all the principal rivers of Asia and form a natural boundary on the south-west just as the Altai Mountains do on the north-west. Countries that share China’s rivers voice strong complaints about uncaring developments that affect the quality of river waters and the rate of flow. What has happened to the Mekong has been well documented; it has its source in Tibet, an Asian-Himalayan country under the control of China.

Along with the strategic military advantages in holding onto the Tibet claim, there are also neighbourly responsibilities which go hand-in-hand. But so far China has refused to join Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam in the Mekong River Commission.

Maybe it is the Communist doctrine that has given birth to a highly materialistic outlook among Chinese Government officials, the military and private sector elite, but certainly roads, dams, bridges, more and more buildings and expanding cities, are this era’s phenomena within China. Notwithstanding that city gardens, parks and lakes do indicate there is an aesthetic side to the Chinese perspective, something that brings meaning into life, despite the strong control of a government with very earthly objectives.

Bridging East and West

China instigates and attracts major infrastructure projects which directly affect adjacent places. One such is a super highway planned to link far away India with China, via Bangladesh and Myanmar. The East-West Highway is attracting huge interest with its promise of other infrastructure projects. While some commentators see great bilateral trading opportunities with China as the fulcrum, others see a one-way flow of goods streaming into lesser capable countries and an economic-cultural dominance. The grand plan envisages rail, road and waterway communications but these themselves are subsumed under an even grander plan for a transcontinental route bridging Xinjiang, Central Asia and Europe.

When it comes to China and the stance of its neighbours, caution is the byword, trade is the catchword. In part two, next week, I shall examine the history and relationships China has on its other borders including Japan, Korea, Vietnam and Cambodia.