Terrorist violence is not an ethnic problem

Editor's Note: The following is part of an interview Zhu Weiqun, director of the Committee for Ethnic and Religious Affairs of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, the country's top advisory body, gave with the www.ifeng.com website on China's anti-terrorism struggle in the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region and the country's work on ethnic issues.

The occasional occurrence of terrorist events in China's northwestern Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region is a result of the interaction of such factors as historical roots, the international environment, religious extremism, and economic backwardness in the southern part of Xinjiang, and these factors cannot be completely eradicated within a short period of time.

The ideological basis of terrorism in Xinjiang is the separatism that originated from the pan-Turkism among Russian Tatar intellectuals in the 19th century and the pan-Islamism of the debilitated Ottoman Empire. Their combination after infiltrating into China's Xinjiang has given birth to the idea of separating the Uygur-majority region from China and setting up an East Turkistan state. With the support of foreign forces, Xinjiang's separatists held aloft the separatist banners of an "East Turkistan Republic" in 1933 and an "East Turkistan People's Republic" in 1944, planting the seeds for separatism in the region in the following decades.