I will be spending more time in China in the next few years. I should get a feel for if their will be a civil war or not after I have been there for a few months.

If they have a civil war, it will most likely result in a break up of the country, which might actually be good. The Chinese economy would probably grow even faster with it separated into competing entities rather than under a single, monopoly authoritarian entity. Think of centralized government as a monopoly. Competition is always better than monopoly at driving technological innovation and economic growth.

Why is everyone here and in Europe so in love with large scale social institutions? All large social institutions are bureaucracies and eveyone knows that bureaucracy is incapable of productive endevours.

There are even idiots on the web who think that a world government would be a good thing. I think the 1000 state sovereignty model is a goog and likely future for the world.

What I fear about with China is that in the event of a revolution the Communist Party will be replaced by a intensely nationalistic regime that will trigger all sorts of tensions (and maybe even violence) with China’s neighbors. I’m not saying that the current regime is already doing that to some degree, but the popular sentiment right now is hyper-nationalist.

I would just like to point to this post by AE.

Or, you could follow current CCP policy and flood the area with Han to dilute the local homogeny.

Thanks for the link, Younghusband.

As for the Singapore model, I think it would be too much bad PR for China, especially considering it wants to add legitimacy to its growing power. If you can’t even hide a good old summary execution at the Tibetan border from Youtube, how can you hide such a huge land migration like that?

Jing, put yourself in the shoes of a Uighur subjected to the treatment you just recommended. Maybe you weren’t sympathetic to the terrorists before, but how would you feel after being forcibly torn from your home and sent far away, your family and friends scattered to the four winds? I’d be feeling a lot more sympathetic, myself.

Instead of a marginalized group in one corner of the country, the Uighurs would become a marginalized group scattered throughout the country.

Yago’s made a good point. As bad as the CCP is, Chinese nationalists will be much worse.

Jing, I’m not sure there would be as much of a purge of ethnic Chinese in Xinjiang as you expect. Sure, the Uyghur resent the Chinese pretty heavily and they would probably deport all the migrant workers and newcomers who have been settled there in recent years as part of the western frontiers development strategy, but all of the Turkic Central Asian countries are used to having significant ethnic minorities of neighboring countries and I expect Uyhgurstan would be the same. I think Chinese who were established long term in Xinjiang would have a much better chance of being allowed to stay than the current wave of immigrants. For example, look at Kazakhstan, which was colonized by Russia for well over a century, and today has something like a 30% ethnic Russian population.

what you guys are discussing here are hypothetical.

in reality, in most of the counties in xinjiang, uighurs are not majority. there are kazakh, uzbeks, mongols, etc. i.e. if there is a democratic election in XJ, uighur would not win.

in fact, CCP has been preparing the demographic zoning for a democratic election, since the early 1950s. county boundaries have been redrawn and redrawn and people have been moved.

1) CCP anticipate and is preparing for a USSR like meltdown, and took counter-measure

or
2) CCP knows that democracy is unavoidable

therefore, i do not think anything like USSR will happen to china, but that is not a result of what CCP did, but that China’s demographic and culture is fundamentally different from USSR, or even from Russia Federation

In the long term, you’re right Jing. But in the short term, scattering them throughout the country against their will would be a good to to MAKE everybody miserable.

Personally, I agree with Tomojiro on this one. If the CCP wants to settle the Uighur problem, it needs to treat them better and give them a stake in China’s future.

Jing

If all the chinese and the chinese government maintain the same logic as yours, then uprisings in Uighur and Tibet will never cease until the Chinese conduct a kind of genosite against them.

The problem in contemporary china is that the CCP has inherited the territory of a multi-ethnic and muti-cultural empire, and that they are trying to turn this multi-cultural and multi-ethnical space into a monolithic nation state based on the language of the majority.

I don’t think what you are proposing is the best way to integrate china. Tibet and Uighur , they have still vivid memory when they had their own government. The CCP must find a way to respect these facts and their historical memories.