Book Review:China’s Other Minority, Seen by One of Its OwnBy HOWARD W. FRENCHThursday, 23 April 2009

Rebiya Kadeer/Photo by Sahlan Hayes

DRAGON FIGHTER
One Woman’s Epic Struggle for Peace With ChinaBy Rebiya Kadeer with Alexandra Cavelius
Illustrated. 423 pages. Kales Press. $28.95.It is the awkward
fate of China, more than any other country, to be arriving late to any
number of parties where most other revelers are either long gone or
leaving, having declared the celebrations déclassé. Such is the case
with China’s booming smokestack economy and with its ardent new fling
with the automobile, with its desire for a deep-water navy built around
aircraft carriers, and with its ambition for a space program that will
land on the Moon.China is also just beginning to grapple with
the creation of what most in the developed world would recognize as a
modern legal system and acceptable standards for human rights, and it
is in much the same position with its cobbling efforts to reinvent the
welfare state.Most anachronistic of all, though, is the
country’s treatment of its two largest minorities, the Tibetans and
Uighurs, both old, non-Han indigenous civilizations that claim
meaningful autonomy in China’s vast, resource-rich and sparsely
populated west. Our Western legacy of land expropriation and slaughter
of native peoples by European settlers and imperial armies may give us
little to cluck about, but in today’s world the rights and interests of
native peoples have rightly won greater recognition.In this
memoir, “Dragon Fighter,” part defiant political tell-all, part
engrossing personal saga, Rebiya Kadeer paints a vivid picture of her
life as a mother of 11 and a businesswoman who spent nearly six years
in prison on her way to becoming the Uighur people’s most prominent
dissident.Since its Communist revolution of 1949 China has
employed a brimming catalog of tactics to bring its western region to
heel. These include invasion; disappearing of political leaders;
gerrymandering to disperse minorities across new, eccentrically redrawn
provinces, flooding the cities with subsidized Han immigration; limits
on worship, government control of clergy, desecration of temples and
harsh repression.Even Westerners who pay relatively little
attention to China will be at least vaguely familiar with the plight of
Tibetans, whose religious leader, the Dalai Lama, has been lionized by
the Nobel committee and received at the White House.Such is not
the case with the Uighur, a central Asian people who are distant
relatives of the Turks and native to what China calls the Xinjiang
Uighur Autonomous Region, or the New Frontier, an area three and half
times as large as California, whose indigenous people look all but set
to join the ranks of history’s great, overrun losers.One thing
the Uighur, spelled Uyghur in this book, have never had is a leader
with great recognition outside China, like the Dalai Lama, who has
contributed a brief introduction for this memoir of Ms. Kadeer. She
writes: “Politicians and human rights organizations from all over the
world were active on behalf of Tibet. The conditions in the Uyghur
nation were much the same. But interest from abroad in the two, though
literally we were next-door neighbors sharing a common border and both
under Chinese occupation, could not have been more dissimilar.”Nor,
she might have added, scarcely could the plight of these two
neighboring peoples, both of which have long maintained cultural and
often political autonomy on the periphery of imperial China, be more
fundamentally similar. That the Uighur have never enjoyed anything like
the global sympathy extended to Tibetans stands out as a historical
oddity that may have something to do with their predominantly Muslim
culture, which evokes little of the warm feeling engendered by Tibet’s
red-robed, incense-burning, sutra-chanting Buddhists.In the
end, though, even this may not matter. Ms. Kadeer writes perceptively
about the many humiliations imposed by Beijing on the Uighurs,
including routine business harassment and forced abortions, massacres
and barriers to trade and contact with other central Asian neighbors.
Beijing makes it hard for the Uighurs to believe in anything but
ultimate submission to the grand, centrally conceived plans of a
powerful China.On one level Ms. Kadeer’s book is a routine
account of recent Chinese history. Much more interesting is its core
autobiographical story: the remarkable rise from modest roots to a life
as, the author claims, the wealthiest woman in China and a politically
prominent member of the National People’s Congress.Here,
though, the book is marred by language that betrays limited modesty and
perhaps even limited self-knowledge. We are constantly reminded of the
author’s qualities: she is chaste, smart, beautiful, clever, strong,
indomitable, selfless, moral, wise and fearless — especially fearless.By
the end of the book, however, the last of these claims will leave few
readers in doubt. Through sheer force of personality Ms. Kadeer
overcomes a bad marriage to an abusive husband, then seeks out and
marries a former political prisoner and poet, telling him flatly that
“after our wedding, our first task will be to liberate the land.”Years,
several children and many arduous commercial voyages across China
later, having built a fortune (and a big reputation) in department
stores and real estate, while she and her second husband dreamed of
liberating the land, Ms. Kadeer begins to attract the wooing calls of
the party. Her big moment comes in a speech before the Congress in
Beijing, in which she boldly switches the approved text to ask: “Is it
our fault that the Chinese have occupied our land? That we live under
such horrible conditions?”If not the first time she had spoken
truth to power, it was certainly the beginning of the end. Soon
afterward Ms. Kadeer was arrested on her way to a meeting with a member
of the United States Congress. She was tried, imprisoned for nearly six
years and exiled to the United States.This remarkable life is now added to the saga of the Uighur people, a people without leaders.–Reproduced from The New York Times