"China facing the Muslim world: a thousand-year-old history today at the service of common interests"

Professor at the Institut Catholique de Paris, sinologist, Emmanuel Lincot is Associate Researcher at Iris.

China and Lands of Islam: a Millennium of Geopolitics

FIGAROVOX.

- Before interacting with Islam abroad, it is especially at home that China is in contact with the Muslim world, in particular in Xinjiang.

What are the issues that cross this region in the history of Sino-Muslim relations?

Emmanuel LINCOT.

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Xinjiang is a field of forces opposing, in the 19th century, the imperial powers of Russia, England and China in the context of the “Great Game”.

Literally meaning the "new frontier", this region is for Beijing a pioneer front.

From the time of the Han (2nd century BC), it was coveted because it opened China to both Central Asia and the Indian world. It remains to this day populated by a Turkish-speaking and Uighur majority. The history of this people is prestigious and its influence coincides with the early Middle Ages with a weakening of the Arab-Persian (Abbasid dynasty) and Chinese (T'ang dynasty) powers. This region saw the birth of an imperial Turkish dynasty, that of the Qarakhanids, the first to convert to Islam in the 12th century. Their capital, Kashgar, preserved the memory. The Chinese government deliberately destroyed it. This destruction is part of a sinicization in the forced march of the region.

Today, Xinjiang constitutes the pivotal axis of Chinese strategic interests.

Its security is crucial for the development of the New Silk Roads project and for maintaining economic exchanges with the European Union, its main trading partner.

Emmanuel Lincot

Crossroads, Xinjiang, long called Turkestan by Europeans, is - one will have understood it - a crossroads region between civilizations. Long before the Arab-Muslim invasions, it was crossed by the Sogdian merchants and before them the Kushans who were to transmit from India and to the Chinese world the foundations of Buddhist doctrine and its arts. It is obviously by these same routes that missionaries and merchants converted to Islam will pass by penetrating the hotspots of China, and in particular Chang'an (current Xi'an), capital of the empire for a millennium.

Today, Xinjiang constitutes the pivotal axis of Chinese strategic interests. Its security is crucial for the development of the New Silk Roads project and for maintaining economic exchanges with the European Union, its main trading partner. This province finds its extension through the Sino-Pakistani strategic corridor, established in 2015, and connecting via the port of Gwadar to Kashgar by a pipeline network connecting it to the Middle East and its hydrocarbons (Saudi Arabia and Iran). This is a Chinese response to the Malacca dilemma and the risks of blockade that China may face. This corridor follows a course parallel to that connecting, several thousand kilometers further east, China to the Bay of Bengal via Burma,which also gives China a strategic depth in a whole part of the Indian Ocean.

You point to a paradox in the book: Islam is today predominantly Asian while its political mythologies are inspired by an Arab-Muslim melting pot with a strong identity dimension ...

Our prejudices often lead us to associate Islam with the Arab world alone.

However, today Islam is predominantly Asian.

China is therefore particularly concerned by this phenomenon both on its own territory and abroad.

Protean, Islam nonetheless conveys a certain number of linguistic and mythological references shared by all converted peoples.

Starting with Arabic.

Language of Revelation, language of the Koran, Arabic structures because it is the language of faith but it also places any non-Arabic believer in a kind of exile at home, as close as possible.

Being a foreigner at home: an impossible stay, yet very real.

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This situation also says a condition of modern man. Because, whether one is Uighur, Pashtun or Punjabi, that is to say from an Asian Islam today in fact in the majority, “political mythologies” - in the sense in which Raoul Girardet defined them - and to which the we adhere are inspired by an Arab-Muslim melting pot that was forged for the Prophet and his companions in hardship. That of exclusion and, for members of the community as well as the Muslim states referring to it, this founding act remains an identity marker. It is in particular the episode of the Hegira and the exile in Medina where the first Islamic theocracy will be formed at his instigation. It is also theone of the most important founding myths of Muslim political thought, from which the fate of the Pakistani and Palestinian peoples will be replayed (exile of the

(1947) for the first,

a year later, for the second).

This is where the strength of Islam lies in telling everyone about a common history which is nevertheless experienced by each one differently.

How do you see the treatment of Uighurs currently in China?

Does this situation not handicap it in its relations with the countries of the Middle East?

The situation is terrible. One million Uighurs are imprisoned in labor and re-education camps. Far from having renounced it, Xi Jinping's regime is returning to a totalitarian practice of sinister memory, which was the one initiated by its distant predecessor, Mao Zedong. Brainwashing, psychological abuse, torture and sterilization of women have been singled out by more than one international organization.

These repressions have redoubled in intensity but they are in fact old. The Cultural Revolution (1966-76) had been particularly violent and even if a phase of respite had been observed with the reforms initiated by Deng Xiaoping, in the 1980s, they resumed after the collapse of the Neighboring USSR, in 1991. Desires of independence for some, return to tradition for others will in return legitimize the choice of a “hard strike” (

), the name of the policy implemented by Beijing.

How does the Uighur question weigh against the billions of the New Silk Roads project?

In truth, not much.

Only Westerners have made it their hobbyhorse while the fate of Mongols and Tibetans seems forgotten and neither Washington nor Brussels comment on the atrocities committed against Christians in China itself.

Emmanuel Lincot

Radicalism on both sides will give rise, just a few months before the attacks of September 11, 2001, to the creation of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. Its intelligence office, based in Tashkent, allows members of the said Organization to fight against "separatism", "independence", "extremism" and to extradite any dissident or wanted person from the Chinese police authorities. The resources implemented are therefore considerable, but what Beijing fears above all is the existence of radicalized Uighur guerrillas, such as those who joined the ETIM, a small terrorist group close to Daesh, in regions that are difficult to access and coveted by Beijing with alliances of reverse. Hence thethe Chinese government's eagerness to recognize the Taliban regime, as it had done from 1996 to 2001.

What are these potentially critical regions for Chinese interests?

Kashmir, Balochistan, Afghanistan and Tajikistan, even where in the Gorno-Badakhshan region, the Chinese army has set up a military center that will grow.

Although its activities are discreet, they offer China a strategic depth and allow it to keep India at bay, which will probably strengthen its presence around the Tajik air base of Ayini, which proved particularly useful during the evacuation of Indian nationals from Kabul starting on August 15.

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Moreover, the Uyghur question remains taboo with regard to relations between China and the countries of the Middle East. Islam is less a spiritual issue there than a political one. The Chinese have also integrated it perfectly. In this, the reading grid that Westerners have adopted and according to which, to use the language of Gilles Kepel, there is a "belligerent line" between the Shiite and Sunni worlds, has, seen from Beijing, no relevance. . Besides, what does the Uighur question weigh against the billions of the New Silk Roads project? In truth, not much. Only Westerners have made it their hobbyhorse while the fate of Mongols and Tibetans seems forgotten and neither Washington nor Brussels comment on the atrocities committed against Christians in China itself.

One of the great moments of geopolitical convergence of the Chinese world and the Muslim world takes place during the Cold War with the non-aligned movement. Is it first by the existence of a common enemy - the West - that these two worlds are brought to converge? And what remains of the spirit of Bandung today?

Bandung (1955), the name of a conference organized by Indonesian President Sukarno, and the emergence of the "non-aligned" already enshrined, in the midst of the Cold War, an ideological division between Moscow and Beijing. Two communist entities as distinct as they were rivals now shared the

of the Third World. The support for the Palestinian cause by Mao Zedong remains in this a textbook case. He is not the only one. Long beforehand, revolutionary support and guerrilla tactics were part of this “third way” that Beijing intended to promote against the French and British colonial powers but also against Israel, vigorously criticized for its intervention in Suez in 1956.

Several levers were then activated: anti-Western resentment above all and Marxist sympathy to a much lesser extent;

the religious atavism of the Muslim elites playing here against the tide of an atheism inherent in the Chinese Communist regime.

Helpful idiots, or notorious anti-Semites, such as the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, were then approached by the United Front and other offices of the Chinese Communist Party.

Scrambling of the tracks and interlacing crossing ideological filiations sometimes radically opposed to each other allowed Beijing to rally many votes.

The writer Léopold Sédar Senghor will describe Bandung as a gigantic "lifting of the nut" and the promise of a better future for these countries of the South, most of them having been freshly decolonized.

Emmanuel Lincot

The extreme left was not the only obedience to be solicited.

From this nebula, Beijing reached a consensus between radicals of all persuasions.

This consensus, still mutant, is no less active to this day.

It aims to create an alternative, and often revisionist in nature, to the dominant Western discourse, whether on the Uyghur question or that of human rights.

Isn't this another form of guerrilla warfare?

Born from these operations, which are as stealthy as they are incisive, and often carried out in circles cultivating their own marginality, this guerrilla thrives on words and postures.

It provides the most striking proof of these forms of conditioning, both psychological and existential, which is always subordinate to the definition of the enemy.

The spirit of Bandung remains prevalent in all Chinese communiques addressed to date to Arab or African countries because it is the first active participation of peoples who consider themselves humiliated by history. All discuss the iniquity of the Westphalian system imposed by the Westerners who reject them as outcasts and do not take into account their own peculiarities or their choice of development. Chance of the calendar: a certain Claude Lévi-Strauss published the same year

.

Slowly the outlook of the West on their former colonies will change.

The writer Léopold Sédar Senghor will describe Bandung as a gigantic "lifting of the nut" and the promise of a better future for these countries of the South, most of them having been freshly decolonized.

In this, Bandung remains a myth.

Today, like a thousand years ago, relations between China and the Muslim world are structured around a major concept: the Silk Roads, now called New Silk Roads.

Can we say that it is a constant in their history?

Yes.

Without speaking of geographic determinism, the routes initially are the same.

But what changes is the relationship with technology, the erasure of distances and the challenges posed by digital technology.

It was not until the election of Emmanuel Macron that in France the highest authorities of the State finally understood the importance of the New Silk Roads.

Read alsoWestern response to the "silk roads"

Do we know how to respond to it in an adequate manner by subscribing to the competing Indo-Pacific project as defined by Washington and its closest allies in the “Anglosphere”? Obviously not, and the denunciation of the contract for the sale of our submarines by Australia strongly reminds us of the divergence between each of our points of view. Because this logic of confrontation with China is foreign to the history that we have over the long term with this country. Also, we must maintain links with China in order to prepare for the future. This is the job of academics in particular. They are

less prisoners of their functions than diplomats or soldiers and must thus maintain channels of communication. Including with Taiwan, in this case; island with which MEPs practice a form of informal diplomacy. It is proving very necessary in the climate of tensions that we know. Provided that it is followed by concrete actions. To say as one of our MPs recently did to his Taiwanese hosts that they “are not alone” is emotionally sympathetic. But it has no more effect than dew on the petals of a flower in the early morning!

The France of General de Gaulle had recognized the People's Republic of China, and cultivated a proximity with the Arab world. What is our position today in relation to these two worlds?

De Gaulle has always bet on the long run. He refused to speak of the USSR, for example, but rather of Russia. Why ? Because there is a Gaullian certainty that men and regimes pass while countries remain. If de Gaulle recognized China in 1964, it was certainly not out of Communist sympathy but because he understood that one could hardly act otherwise. Weight of demography, Beijing's mastery of nuclear weapons the same year, a counterweight that could be used for Soviet hegemony: all these factors contributed to this decision ... Likewise for the Arab world with which relations should be privileged for to remove it from Soviet influence and for even more pragmatic reasons: the guarantee of access to oil.

Gaullism is both a strategic, long-term aim, and a very pragmatic approach to international relations.

When de Gaulle spoke to his Chinese and Arab interlocutors, it was on behalf of France.

Today, our leaders do it in the name of the Republic, secularism, human rights.

It is obviously inaudible.

So ineffective.

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Not only is our software obsolete, but we have multiplied blind spots in our diplomatic choices. We have lost the meaning to give to a hierarchy of subjects that are undoubtedly priority. Pakistan, Central Asia, Iran are considerable issues that we have neglected, for example, and for the benefit of China alone. We are entangled in ideological prejudices that isolate and alienate us. France will be at the head of the presidency of the European Union within a few months. This is an opportunity to regain control, to reinvent yourself, to regain your full height of vision.

But for this, we must reconnect with practices that were those of the Greeks, putting the

(the art of trickery) at the heart of our practices.

Let us reread Machiavelli, work on understanding the peoples, their languages ​​(a difficult bet when we know that the French Academy is leading a rearguard fight on the "preservation" of our very questionable national monolingualism ...) let's hide our intelligence - which is often synonymous abroad with arrogance - and we will shine in a whole new light!