Manufacturing Dissent

From time immemorial the conquests of territorial imperative have resulted in a native population being subsumed by its successful invaders. Over a period of time, ruthless and indiscriminate suppression of the native population has historically resulted in the culture, religion, heritage of the original peoples slowly being absorbed and integrated into the invading culture. Which was no guarantee that lingering resentment would not create defiance.

Ancient Rome sought to subjugate and eradicate the founding cultures of the people it dominated and it did so through the use of cruelly effective punishment against all those who fomented organized defiance. The European maritime countries like Spain, Portugal, France and England shipped their religion and their culture to other, primitive societies (South-Central America; North America) unable to counter the relentless advance of a superior military.

They also sought to advance their trade, and to take ownership of the vast and impressive natural resources of countries like India and China, and those of the Middle East, along with African countries, in a great imperialistic sweep of triumphant hegemony-and-resource-gathering. And they fought among themselves for ascendancy and priorities, and with other countries like Russia and eventually the United States, to achieve a greater territorial advantage for themselves.

The international community is comprised of a great many nations and geographic areas whose borders are far different than what might have been expressed in a natural ethnic or tribal territorial or geographic division, thanks to the interference of invading administrations, and that remains the nexus of many simmering little wars of ongoing enmity between tribes, both inter- and intra-country. China presents today as the world's foremost territorial-aggressor nation.

Currently, Russia still suffers the most blow-back of angry resentment from those countries surrounding it that were once subsumed into a (subservient coalition of) the greater United Soviet Socialist Republic. Great Britain, at least, left a useful heritage of jurisprudence and civil service administration behind when she withdrew from India. And while China does, likely, believe what it asserts when it says it is invested in equality of opportunity for all its disparate parts, the reality of human relations dictate otherwise.

From its anger over the defiant autonomy of Taiwan, to its insistence of territorial ownership of Tibet and its domination of the Xinjiang region, where Han Chinese have been flooding those territories to dilute, diminish and weaken the dominance of a majority population, China has an ongoing struggle on its hands to contain the grievances of native populations whose territories have been occupied by a foreign culture, religion (ideology) and heritage.

The ongoing resistance of Tibetans against Chinese domination of their ancestral home, insisting on their human rights to a measure of autonomy (yet hoping for outright independence), and the return of their revered Dalai Lama, presents as an insult to Beijing, an affront against its right to occupy and to govern as it sees fit. The continued resentment of the Uighurs, demonstrating against their belittled and undignified existence as a people deprived of their natural heritage another case in point.

China claims Uighurs bent on independence have joined themselves with international Islamists. The brutal clashes between the opposing groups of ethnic-equal populations in Urumqi - the Han Chinese, relatively newly imported to the region, and the traditional occupiers of the land, the Uighurs - spell out clearly enough that territorial conquest, although an ancient concept, insults the natural order of ethnic, tribal and religious rights.

For the Chinese, this presents as a problem of huge proportions, with the world's greatest population numbers whose numbers are increasing at a rate that the current territory is hardly sufficient to accommodate.