Documents / FOIA release
This Central Intelligence Agency conference report, numbered RTT 95-10039 and dated October 1995, presents the proceedings of a conference held 30 September to 1 October 1993. The CIA's Geographic Resources Division sponsored the conference. In it, academic geographers, anthropologists and US Government officials examined ethnic conflict by region, covering Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, Asia and South Asia. The report also discusses what these conflicts mean for US policy. It does not deal with UFOs or unidentified aerial phenomena.
“Nevers”25 pages
- Approved for Release: 2018/06/01 C00123268 historical power lines are noted in Frank Dikotter’s recent book, The Discourse bf Race in Modern China. During the Qing, interethnic conflicts (fenlei xiedou) or “armed battles to separate types (lei),” became common between Han and Muslims; Hakka (a minor- ity group of southeast China) and Hoklo (Hokkien- speaking Chinese); and Hakka and Punti (native Can- tonese). Ethnic feuds strove to “clear the boundaries” by ejecting exogenous groups from their respective tenitories. Such ethnic clashes could be extremely violent: a major conflict between the Hakka and Punti in 1856-67 took a toll of 100,000 victims. The reformers’ interpretation of racial war was based on lineage feuds. This vision was sustained by the semantic similarity between zu as lineage and zu as race. “Race,” as will be demonstrated in the next chapter, would create nationhood. On the basis of internal conflicts between lineages, the reformers constructed a representationof extemal conflicts between races (Dikotter, 1992: 70-71). In an articulated hierarchy of escalating opposition, interlineage conflicts became the model for anti- foreignism—“us” against “them,” our race against theirs. It is this awareness of intemal conflict, lineage, ethnic, and racial difference that drives a deep-seated anxiety about the possibility of China breaking up. The Chinese, in my opinion,‘ never take China for granted, culturally, politically, or otherwise. This is because most Chinese are all too aware of how easily and naturally China could break into its constituent parts. It was widely believed for a short period follow- ing the Tiananmen crackdown that the Beijing-based forces were more loyal to their city’s residents and would refuse to obey the command, while other armies, such as the Wuhan-based military district, were loyal to Deng Xiao-pin'g. At one point, heavy gunfire was widely reported to be heard on the out- skirts of the city. It was thought to be between the var- ious military forces converging on the city. These deep-seated fears reflected aconcem that China was on the verge of spiraling into a civil disunion reminis- cent of the warlord era, when local militarists com- manded personal armies and built up cultural, linguistic, and regional political power bases. lll The “Official” Minority Nationalities and Ethnic Separatism China is a multinational, multiethnic nation with 55 “official” minority nationality groups, identified mainly in the 1950s, that now total more than 92 mil- lion in population (see Dreyer 1976). This includes l0 Muslim nationalities—with a total population of at least 20 million—located primarily on China’s bor- ders with Russia and the new mainly Muslim Central Asian States. In the south, there are nearly I2 million Austro-Malay—speaking Zhuang people on the Viet- nam border and more than 24 separate minority groups in Yunnan Province alone, where cross-border relations with Bumia, Cambodia, and Thailand have increased dramatically in the past few years. The state has assigned levels of minority autonomous adminis- tration. There are five autonomous regions, scores of autonomous districts, and hundreds of autonomous counties and villages. Autonomous here primarily means that there is more local control over the admin- istration of such things as resources, taxes, birth plan- ning, education, and legal jurisdiction. It does not mean that control is in minority hands. Although most minority regions and districts have minority govern- ment leaders, the Communist Party in all these areas is dominated by the Han majority, reflecting China’s active watch over these so-called autonomous areas. The recent detonation of two bombs in a Kashgar Hotel in southern Xinjiang that killed at least six peo- ple convinced Beijing that its fears were well founded regarding Uighur separatism and the increasing influ- ence from the newly independent Turkic states on its borders. The longstanding struggles of Tibetan inde- pendence movements are also well documented (see Goldstein 1990). This supports the 1970s prediction by Victor Louis, understood to be a Soviet intelligence operative, who wrote in The Coming Decline of the Chinese Empire that China would fall apart due to the “national aspirations of the Manchu, Mongols, Uighurs, Tibetans, and other non-Chinese peoples” (cited in Friedman 1993: 270). Approved for Release: 2018/06/01 C00123268
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FOIA release, from the cia-readingroom collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is under it. 205 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.