The facility with which Washington's ill-concocted discourse of the so-called 'war on terror' has been instrumentalised by governments all over the world should remind us of the fact that politicians in general are the spawn of Machiavelli.

No sooner had the words 'international terror network' been uttered from the mouth of President George W Bush were they echoed by politicians from all corners of the globe. Indeed, the speed with which the discourse of 'anti-terror' has been transmitted, consolidated and hegemonised worldwide proves that the manufacturing of consent (at least among the global political elite) is a reality these days.

In South and Southeast Asia we have already seen how the discourse of 'anti-terror' has been put to work and made to pay dividends: In Pakistan, the administration of Pervez Musharraf maintains its close relations with the powers-that-be in the West by sailing close to the wind of the anti-terror campaign. In Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines the governments of Thaksin Shinawatra, Bambang Susilo Yudhiyono and Gloria Arroyo have likewise played the anti-terror card to the hilt, with the hope that by doing so they will remain in the good books of Washington and Wall Street.

Autonomy movement

Further afield China is not to be left behind. Immediately after the declaration of Bush's 'Crusade' against global terror networks, Chinese politicians made the startling discovery that countless 'terrorist cells' were operating in their country, notably in the strife-ridden regions of Xin Jiang and Tibet. While the Tibetans were luckier as most of them happened to be Buddhist, the Uighurs of Xin Jiang proved to be less fortunate.

In due course a concert of interests was manufactured: Via deft lobbying and playing to the hysterical anti-Muslim gallery, the government managed to convince the world that a host of Uighur movements and organisations such as the Eastern Turkestan Islamic Movement, Eastern Turkestan Liberation Organisation, Eastern Turkestan Information Centre and World Uighur Youth Congress were surprise, surprise dastardly underground Islamist terror organisations with networks extending as far as Osama bin Laden's bomb-proof basement.

That what began as a regional autonomy movement demanding fair and equal governmental treatment can (and has) now been transformed into a 'militant religious threat' is evidence of the usefulness of the instrumental fiction that is the 'war on terror' discourse. Almost overnight any Muslim organisation including the Muslim stamp collectors club can be re-designated a major threat to world peace if there is the political will and desire to do so.

But the Chinese government's handling of the so-called 'Uighur problem' has less to do with the bogus fear of terror than a failure to address its own shortcomings in the management of resources in the outer provinces of the country. As in the case of Tibet, the Uighur people of Xin Jiang feel that they have been neglected in the country's march towards industrial development. The region's resources have been depleted and the wealth from the area has simply been converted to capital to serve the developmental needs of other parts of the country. In this respect the calls for autonomy are understandable and certainly not unique to Muslims alone.

Then there has been the Chinese government's own mishandling of the question of China's demographic imbalance, and as in the case of neighbouring Tibet, the region of Xin Jiang has been the place where vast numbers of Chinese have been relocated. Needless to say, such state-engineered (and totally unnatural) transfer of populations is bound to lead to local resistance and unrest. Similar mistakes were made when Bangkok encouraged ethnic Thais to resettle in the predominantly Malay regions of Southern Thailand, and Jakarta relocated millions of Javanese from overpopulated Java to the outer provinces of Timor, Irian and Kalimantan.

The fundamental ideological problem, however, stems from the lingering traces of crude Marxist-materialist thought that remains in the mindset of China's pseudo-Communist political elite and intelligentsia. The Uighur's calls for respect and autonomy (like that of the Tibetans) has always been couched in terms of cultural identity and differences which maintain the distinctly Muslim character of the Uighur people.

While such demands may seem understandable to Wertern-educated liberals schooled in the norms of ever-so-trendy multiculturalism, they fall on deaf ears when they are submitted before the gaze of fiercely (and even irrationally) secular Communists who see religion as a case of mass delusion and an 'opiate of the masses'. China's Muslims (as well as Christians and Buddhists) have always been seen as somewhat 'irrational' and 'un-developed' as a result of their attachment to their religious identity for that reason.

China's future

But beginning from this less-than-charitable premise, the officials of the Chinese state cannot comprehend how and why any group of people within its borders would want to claim autonomy on the basis of a shared belief system, and a religious one at that. The tendency to regard and present the Uighurs of Xin Jiang (like the rest of China's Muslim minorities) as liminal constituencies on the fringes of the Chinese nation-state is one of the reasons why the Uighurs feel alienated in the first place.

Today, with the spectre of anti-Muslim riots and a renewed campaign of persecution against ethnic/religious minorities looming over the horizon, China's political elite and intelligentsia need to seriously ask themselves pressing questions about the future of China and its identity as a multicultural nation with internal differences. The notion of a unified China that is homogenous was never ever taken seriously in the first place, but the elite need to go beyond that recognition and accept the need to come up with workable steps to deal with the question of accommodation.

Bogus talk of 'clandestine terror groups' is hardly the right way to deal with such questions, for they can only lead to more suspicion, alienation and eventually violence. In any case, it should be noted that anger and frustration against the Chinese government is not simply emanating from the country's minority groups, but from the populace as a whole. It is for that reason that in 2002 it was reported that the best selling badges and stickers among ordinary Chinese teenagers in the cities bore the image of Osama and the somewhat punkish slogan: 'My name is Osama and I'm not afraid of anyone'.

Dr FARISH A NOOR is Visiting Chair of Asian Studies at Sciences-Po Paris, France, and a malaysiakini columnist.