Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama speaks at a conference in New Delhi in November. (Tsering Topgyal/AP)
BEIJING — China has mounted an extraordinary set of attacks against its own cadres in its troubled western regions of Xinjiang and Tibet, accusing some of disloyalty to the Communist Party, of secretly participating in religious activities, sympathizing with the Dalai Lama or even supporting terrorist attacks.
The accusations form part of a hardening of the Party’s stance both in Buddhist Tibet and Muslim-majority Xinjiang, experts said, as well as President Xi Jinping’s determination to push for ideological purity within the Party nationwide, with a quashing of intra-party debate and dissent.
But for critics, they also reflect the fact that the Party’s hardline approach towards crushing “the three evils of separatism, terrorism and religious extremism” in both regions has not only alienated many ordinary ethnic Tibetan and Uighur people, but also provoked significant disquiet in its own ranks.
Some party officials openly criticize policies handed down from above, complained Xu Hairong, the secretary of Xinjiang’s Commission for Discipline Inspection, making the unusual admission in a commentary published last week.
“Some waver on clear-cut issues of opposing ethnic division and safeguarding ethnic and national unity, and even support participating in violent terrorist attacks,” he wrote in his agency’s official newspaper.
“This does not mean the cadres participated in attacks,” said Nicholas Bequelin, East Asia director for Amnesty International, “but rather is the equivalent of local officials saying: ‘the central authorities are sending leaders who are so ham-fisted they have driven people to the edge and understandably they have started blowing up things.’”
With President Xi Jinping taking the lead in formulating policy towards Xinjiang, “everybody has to march to the same drumbeat,” Bequelin said.
An article on China Tibet Online, a Party website, published Friday, said 355 cadres had been punished in Xinjiang last year for violating “political discipline.”
One had joined a social media chat group entitled “Uighur Muslim,” that was meant to undermine ethnic unity, while another had reposted an interview given by prominent Uighur intellectual Ilham Tohti, who was controversially sentenced to life imprisonment last year on charges of advocating separatism, the article said.
Some officials blamed social problems on ethnic discrimination, the article complained, thus inciting ethnic hatred. “There is also a lack of faith in Marxism. Some grassroots party members even participate in religious activities,” its author Zhao Zhao wrote, adding that this would never be allowed.
Critics say there is widespread economic, cultural and religious discrimination against Uighurs and Tibetans in Xinjiang and Tibet respectively.
Indeed, in the wake of 2009 riots in the Xinjiang capital Urumqi, in which at least 192 people died, the Party acknowledged it needed to address Uighur grievances, said Bequelin.
But then, with violent attacks by Uighurs rising, the Party changed course, asserting at a major meeting on the region in 2014 that stability and unity were the priorities, rather than economic development and battling discrimination.
The imprisonment of Tohti, a moderate economist whose work had detailed the problems Uighurs faced, sent a strong signal to academics and party officials alike that the debate about discrimination had been closed, Bequelin said. Instead, the Party now vehemently asserts, Uighur terrorism is directed by Islamist extremists based abroad and increasingly rooted in Jihadi ideas picked up over the Internet.
At the same time, the Communist Party has also been recruiting, with the number of cadres in Xinjiang reported to have risen by 21,000 to 1.45 million in 2014. That has brought its own problems.
“The Chinese Communist Party believes that it is witnessing a ‘crisis of faith’ in Xinjiang and Tibet in particular,” said Julia Famularo, an International Securities Studies Fellow at Yale University.
“It has actively endeavored to draw ever greater numbers of ethnic minorities into the Party, but it now fears that these new recruits possess only superficial loyalty to the party-state,” she wrote in an email.
“Beijing laments that these minority Party members still make clandestine visits to mosques and monasteries, and that they still have stronger ties to their own people than to the Party or to China.”
In Tibet, 15 cadres were investigated last year and 20 so far this year for violating political discipline, China Tibet Online wrote, saying some had participated in organizations supporting “Tibetan independence."
Last month, Tibet party boss Chen Quango said the party would go after officials who held “incorrect views” on minority issues or who“profess no religious belief but secretly believe,” including those who follow the Dalai Lama or listen to religious sermons.
China accuses the Dalai Lama, who fled into exile in 1959, of trying to divide the country and prize Tibet away from China, although he insists he only wants meaningful autonomy for the region.
Xu Yangjingjing contributed to this report.
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Simon Denyer is The Post’s bureau chief in China. He served previously as bureau chief in India and as a Reuters bureau chief in Washington, India and Pakistan.