China’s Domestic and Foreign Challenges

The flip side of China’s impressive economic achievements is the emergence of negative internal and external side effects. One of the domestic issues is ethnic tensions. Within the Uyghur population there is a small but militant separatist group who resent massive Han migration and what they perceive as a “foreign government” occupying its land. Its members have been carrying out suicide missions to “reclaim” their land. In 2014, for example, a car driven by four or five Uyghurs plowed into a crowd, killing or wounding a number of people in front of the Forbidden City.1 In the southern city of Kunming, knife-wielding Uyghurs slashed and killed a number of bystanders.2 The purpose of both attacks was to reestablish an independent nation, East Turkmenistan. Another difficult issue is strong opposition from Taiwan in reunifying with the mainland. Most people do not want to live under Communism, albeit two-thirds of the population preferred the status quo of de facto independence.3 In Hong Kong, the majority of its people do not support reunification because their memory of Communist repression is still fresh. A small minority even advocates independence or return to British colonial rule as, demonstrated by the 2014 prodemocracy student protest, said to be engineered by founders of the Occupy Central movement and the pandemocratic parties.4 It was a protest against the central government’s stance that nominees of the Hong Kong chief executive position must be chosen by a committee of 12.000 persons representing the territory’s major constituencies as outlined in the Basic Law (Hong Kong’s mini constitution), a process that the protesters labeled as “fake democracy.” Other domestic issues include corruption, environmental degradation, unequal wealth distribution, and cronyism.