In the article "Dispatches from China's Wild West" , the writer used a tone of sympathy toward the Uygurs, which apparently means that the Chinese government is treating them unfairly. But, that's not really the case. There is a famous song in China describing the 56 ethnic groups in China together form a big family just like 56 flowers and the government is always trying its best to come up with policies to take into account the benefits of the minorities. For example , a child from a minority can get a 20 marks score added to his transcript for college entrance examination.
I have heard some Americans talking about China with biased opinions, something like Chinese don't dare to go out onto the streets just because there're too many policemen, this is not the case at all. If anyone can come here and see the reality for himself, he knows that he has been fooled by the media .

How much were you paid by the PRC Government for this propaganda on the intraweb?

Why is it that you abuse a country without seeing the reality for yourself? There's no point in arguing if the biased opinion is deeply rooted.

There are several official buffs that you get for being an ethnic minority in China. I'm not talking about greater agility or night vision, or plus damage to the undead. I'm talking about points automatically added to test scores when attending school, no limit on how many children you can have. Additionally, universities have minority enrollment quotas, so they lower their standards to admit the required number. Not exactly affirmative action, but close. Let's think about it this way. In the United States, there is also a group of improverished minorities of turkic/mongoloid descent. That's right, the Native Americans. I'd say before gambling, they really didn't do that well either, perhaps not better than the author's description of Uighers.

I think ichen9 may have been referring to the fact that Steven quotes a song that's clearly propaganda as evidence that minorities are happy in China. Yes, they may get extra points on the entrance exams, but that doesn't mean that the Uighurs are necessarily happy with the situation. It also doesn't stop some Han Chinese from believing that "All Uighurs are theives." According to them, it's not racial prejudice, because it's true.

To tell you the truth, I'm a Han Chinese born and living in China. And I don't think ordinary people just like me look down up people from ethnic minorities. I'm now studying in a high school and there are classmates from ethnic minorities, we all live and work in harmony just like others. As to the song I talked about, believe it or not, I really like it, a flouring country with people working hard. Isn't ture that every country has a song like this that shows patriotism?

What made me sad is some misconception held my some Americans. I read an article written by a diplomat who had been to the United States. He was astonished when someone asked him if Chinese still keep dressed like what they were in Qing Dynasty. Drastic changes have changed since 1949, but their knowledge about China still stays a hundred years ago.

He then pointed out that many Americans were mislead by the media. The media often show them scene from the poorest parts of China, making them believe that China is still a country focusing on agriculture. Many of his colleagues admit that they had been fooled after they came here.

I don't know if the situation still exists, but please, ask a friend of yours who has been to China about the living conditions here, you may get a different answer.

Stephen, thanks for your reply. I'm glad to know that you and your friends do not hold prejudices against minorities. I'm living in China, so I don't need to look far to find people who live here. The author of the "dispatch" as well, is in China, so you can see that not everyone who has been to the country shares your opinion about the situation of the minorities there. Please keep in mind that your experience within China is different from the experiences of other Chinese people, so the author may say something true about Xinjiang that is not true about where you live. You say that "China is not like this," but China is a big country, and it's very possible that parts of China *are* like this, just not the parts you live in.

The prejudiced views that I quoted were taken from a discussion in a class at Fudan University about two years ago, so I still believe that there are many prejudices in China, even though I am happy to hear that you and your friends are not like that.

Also, just because some Americans have some silly views about China does not mean that all American opinions on China are automatically invalid. There is a lot of poverty in China, even in the richest and most modern of Chinese cities. I have seen Chinese people living in terrible conditions by American standards.

The Chinese government goes to a great effort to control the flow of information within the country. There are rules about what the media is allowed to report, and what it cannot talk about. You are at a great advantage, because you can read the foreign media and get some different viewpoints and decide for yourself what you think is true.

Also, since this point is important to you, do you feel that Chinese have been "fooled" about America since they seem to think that the US lifestyle is like that on "Sex in the City" or other popular TV shows?

There's a point in your words as the image presented by some American TV shows in China may not really reflect their life. But we still get to know what the US is like, I mean, at least the architecture and the people. What I meant was that the media in the US may present an image from places other than cities in China. You named Fudan University, so you are a graduate of Fudan, right? You are probably a Shanghainese.It's a pleasure to meet you. I certainly realize that discrimination happens everywhere in the world, but when a journalist reports something he should condemn the phenomena rather than the country and the government as a whole. I'm new here and just want to know what others think of my motherland, that's why I argued a lot.

It is a good article except a few mistakes. The most obvious being the people who live around Kanas Lake are not Tuvas, they are Kazakhs, same people as in Kazakstan. There are no Tuvas in Xinjiang. As an Uyghur from the region, I would like to share my perspective on the topic in the following reply to a different post on this forum.

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Danny, I am an Uyghur, and was born in Urumchi as well. My parents and grandparents were also born and liven in Urumchi. It is funny you said that Uyghurs would be offended to be catagorized as a separate people from the Chinese. How would you know that? Since when have "your Uyghur classmates" been allowed to speak their minds? By the way, growing up in Urumchi, how many Uyghurs do you know and how many Uyghur friends do you have? As I remember, Urumchi is one of the most ethnically segregated cities on the planet. Have you seen any Uyghurs at any Chinese weddings, funeral or other ceremonies and vice-versa? For your information, all the Uyghurs I know, quite a few, you can count on, regard Uyghurs and Chinese as separate concepts. I would not blame you if you did not know. A lot of things you do not know about us just like the rest of the Chinase people living in our land. It would be safe bet that you know much more about the Americans than the Uyghurs. For the Chinese, we simply do not exist, if we say we do, we would end up in jail. But, as long as we keep singing and dancing and smilling as if everything were ok, the we would be left alone. If give away the slightest sign that we also actually have families to feed, minds to think, emotions to feel, and ability to judge what is fair and not, that would spell doom for us. You do not know what people do and say to survive. To have a remote sense of what it would feel like, you may imagine this:you are apparently a well-educated person, imagine if you could not get employment appropriate for your skills because you are not white, imagine if the hiring people tell you that they would hire only the whites because they are themselves are white. And we talking about a discrimination in a foreign country for you, but I am talking about discrimination in my homeland by people who migrated to the land from other places.

Before you compare our language situation to the spanish people in US, you have bear in mind that Uyghurs are living in their own land for thousands of years using their own unique language and written alphabet, and they did not invite your parents or the other Chinese to their land. The spanish people in US at the other hand are immigrants. Immigrants naturally have to speak the language of the land just as you and me do. But in our land, the immigrants are imposing their language on us. I do not think the spanish immigrants imposing spanish on the American people. By the way, how may Uyghur words do you know other than the usual "hosh" and "yakshimusiz"?

You said Uyghurs are given preferencial treatment in employment. You should be ashamed of yourself to say such a lie. It is true that the law signed when we had an army capable of fighting then the weak red army in 50's that the governor and some top government positions have to be Uyghur. Therefore, the governor is always an Uyghur, so are some other top government positions, but we also know that they do not have real authority and everything is determined by the party secretary who is always a chinese. Uyghur employees in government inistitutions are tylically less than 5% in Urumchi and about 10% in local governments. I used to work for a provencial government department with 800 employees among which only 32 were Uyghurs. All the Uyghurs except a driver had college degree while 70-80% of the Chinese employees were at best high school gratuates.

You talked about the Universities. Most Uyghurs can go to only the 5 or so Universities in Xinjiang, while your people can go any University in China. Even so, there are more Chinese students in those 5 Universities than the Uyghurs even though the population of Uyghurs in Xinjiang are higher than the Chinese. I am sure you are capable of doing the math, afterall you are a Chinese, from the inteligent and not-lazy stock.

People go to college to have a better job and better life. That is what motivate them to study. If you know that your chance of putting what you learned to good use and get a good job after graduate is slim because you are not white, I am sure you would be asking yourself if it is worth it try that hard.

The 20th Century brought many people from the relatively backward societies to the modernity. This included the Chinese who went through a remarkable journey of losing the funny looking pony tails, and mostly uneducated dirty looking backward peasants and becoming a modern nation claiming its place in the 21th Century. Some people in Asia, Africa and other part of the world were living in jungles without clothes at the beginning of the 20th Century, but today they are more modern than the Uyghurs, Tibetans and other minorities in China who had long history of civilizations and written languages. The minorities are the only ones left out of the progress because they fell victim for the Chinese national pride hurt by the foreigners, the others. Since the Chinese could not touch the others, they took it on the other outsiders they can tough and abuse, the minorities in China. It is sort of like a psychopath behavior of a father who lacks self-esteem and try to boost it by abusing his own children.

Before you try to accuse us that we are not capable of doing things, try to stay the hell out of our land and see how we manage it ourselves. Look it the Kazakhs in Xinjiang and Kazakhstan. They are like people from different plannet. The Kazakhs in Kazakhstan are running a modern and prosperous country while their kins in China are little different than who they were 100 years ago, poor, uneducated nomads who still largely live on the moutains. The Kazakhs in either side of the border were same 100 years ago, today they are different thanks to the inteligent, enlightened, educated and hard-working Chinese.

In short, what China is doing in Xinjiang, which by the way is called East Turkistan in my own language and it is a crime to call it that name today, is the worst form of colonialism. Only in China colonialism still exists today thanks to enlightened and superior race of Chinese. Just to verify my credentials as an Uyghur from East Turkistan, I would like to add a few words in Chinese:

Hanzuren shi zui meiyo xiuyangda minzu.

See, the "brotherly feelings" are mutual, we are a not that different afterall. We just live at the dirrent side of the fence. You have the most populous country on earth on yourside, but I do not have anybody. Good for you!!!

Steven,

Thanks again for your thoughtful reply. In fact, I am not Shanghainese, and I did not greaduate from Fudan, but went to teach a class and have friends who taught there for a while.

I don't believe that the journalist was condemning China as a whole. I believe that he was condemning the racism against the Uighers and the government propaganda that made it sound as if the racism did not exist.

The US media reports on Beijing and Shanghai, as well as on some other cities and on rural areas. In fact, if you watch "Mission Impossible 3," you will see that it is based almost entirely in Shanghai, with scenes on the expressway and even on the top of sky skyscrapers in Lujiazui (the most modern area of the city).

It has been my experience here in China that most people know next to nothing about American people. I doubt that they know any more about the architecture, but I haven't spoken to them about it because I can't be sure. To be honest, I'm not sure exactly what you mean by "architecture." Are you talking about famous architectural styles within America, or just famous buildings?

lisaz, so you are in the US,right? Just another guess. I meant the building style when I said "architecture", just how the buildings look like in America. It seems that American's knowledge about China has increased a lot from your description. I really appreciate your excellent English. Here is one of my pubs where we can further discuss the topic: <link>
Take care!