The other orientalism: China's Islamist problem.

• Author: Horner, Charles

A GENERATION ago, men of divergent personal appearance, political experience, and cultural inheritance ascended to political leadership in the Third World and decided to embrace a transcendent secular radicalism. Whatever their inherited differences, they hoped to construct a united front against the First World and all its evil works, and thereby gain standing for themselves and power for their countries. This was an ambitious project, for as partisans of a broadly-conceived Third World they would need to submerge intramural rivalries of religion, race, culture and conquest into a vocabulary of left-wing solidarity that had been devised by and intended for Europeans.

China invested heavily in this undertaking, for there seemed to be good possibilities in it. The old China--that is to say, mere Imperial or Republican China--could not have imagined the extension of its influence into so much of this world. The ambitions of Imperial China had certainly been great and its confidence in its own universalism highly developed. It was also long-accustomed to being the richest and most powerful country in the world. Even more, Confucianism, China's homegrown ideology, was integral to the growth and consolidation of China's influence in Korea, Japan and Vietnam. But the New Thinking of New China--Communist and Maoist China--carried even grander ambitions to make China a force in places where it had never before been well-established. Among those were the core countries of that other great non-European center of culture and power, the Islamic world. This was an improbable development, perhaps, but one made at least conceivable by the Cold War's admixture of geopolitics and ideology.

In at least this one respect, China's day-to-day encounters with the Islamic parts of the post-colonial world resembled our own. The representatives of the "new emerging forces" (the term is owed to Sukarno of Indonesia, then and now the most populous Muslim nation in the world) convened conferences, held summit meetings, issued declarations, and established worldwide personal reputations. Their comings, goings and pronouncements were closely scrutinized. A new kind of Great Game was being played in all these regions, and it required the contestants with real power to pretend that their local interlocutors were something more than buffoons.

But there was another part of the play that was neither flamboyant nor ridiculous, but deadly--murderous internal violence and protracted cross-border warfare. To stay for a moment with Indonesia-a prominent case study of the day--one can cite the events of 1965, when secular radicalism informed both Chinese strategic ambitions in Southeast Asia and Indonesia's own internal political vocabulary. The Communist Party of Indonesia, made up mostly of local Chinese, attempted a coup d'etat that, had it succeeded, might have solidified a much-feared Beijing-Jakarta axis. Instead, what we remember about "the year of living dangerously"--aside from the classic motion picture made about it--is that it laid the foundation for decades of anti-Chinese authoritarian government in Indonesia, beginning with the murder of hundreds of thousands of ethnic Chinese Indonesian nationals.

Our worries today, of course, focus on other sources of political energy. The most dangerous plotting in Indonesia now is based in extremist Muslim madrassas, not in Maoist cells. ("Mr. Abu Bakar, 63, is the leader of Jemaah Islamiah, a regional terrorist organization whose goal is to create Daulah Islamiah, an Islamic state that would include Indonesia, Malaysia, and the southern Philippines. Under pressure from its neighbors, Indonesia has agreed to summon him for police questioning." So begins one account.) If we imagine a successful Islamist coup d'etat, one that does not miscarry as did the Communist one, we do not see Beijing at the other end of the axis but rather some "Islamic" power or person--and with local Chinese again on the receiving end of great brutality in the bargain. Even Indonesia's separatist movements have lost their secular "internationalist" character; the oil-rich enclave of Aceh on Sumatra wants greater independence from Jakarta to give greater sway to local Islamic intensity and to hold on to more of its money. If it succeeds, it will become another statelet too rich for its own good, a financier for Islamic violence and terror, and perhaps a pivot in some kind of international Islamic archipelago in Southeast Asia.

It is a similar story in other countries nearby, where "Islam" is understood to have replaced "Third World Solidarity" as the wellspring of political energy. In Malaya during the 1950s--even before there was a Malaysia--Communist China had bet on an insurgency based on local ethnic Chinese to produce a pro-Chinese regime. In the Philippines, China had comparable hopes for the Huks' "national liberation movement." Today, these episodes are remembered in footnotes, if at all. Now, it is Muslim, not Maoist, malcontents who have achieved worldwide celebrity and, were they to prevail, it would not be a strategic gain for Beijing but an enormous setback. This, then, is one measure of the changing situation on the Islamic side of the Sino-Islamic frontier in Southeast Asia and the South China Sea. It is as though China's situation vis-a-vis the Islamic world has been turned upside down in the course of a mere quarter century.

There have also been changes on the Chinese side. Twenty-five years ago, China stopped looking to Mao Zedong Thought and its slogans to inspire socialist construction at home or to gain standing in the world. The Chinese know that Mao's grand world design failed as utterly as did his domestic one. The World Countryside did not surround the World City after all. Relieved by China's abandonment of blood-curdling rhetoric and massive subversion, the outside world decided to help this change along. But neither China nor its associates in America, Europe or East Asia thought very much about an Islamist challenge to China as these changes worked their way along. Now we must. Of...