A cake and a national social media movement

Even as a Chinese I don’t quite get the point of this cake joke. But it is so popular among netizens, on Weibo(Chinese twitter) or renren, or any popular forums in China. I think this situation itself explained something.

Some background first: Basically Qie Gao(切糕) is a kind of big dense cake sold along major inner land’s cities streets by Uygurs, who came from Xinjiang Province of China. Customers can ask to cut it and only buy a small piece, priced by weight. Recently, in an incident at Yueyang city, an inner land city, a customer and seller started to argue against the price, and it has been upscaled to a fighting. The local police at Yueyang, announced that the damaged cakes valued ￥160,000.00 RMB (about $25,706.00 USD). Instantly, this ironic news has been quickly spread out on Internet and netizens have developed it to different forms of jokes, thanks to the unbelievably high price for just a cake. From this incident and the spread of the news, it can be observed that a lot of people had considerable negative experience with those cake sellers. One major problem is that customers usually didn’t know the cake is so dense so that a small piece could be very heavy; and the sellers didn’t tell customer the unit price they talked about was for per 50 gram, not for 500 gram (the later one is more commonly used in China). And many reported they were forced to buy it even when they were ask to pay an extremely high price.

Some jokes are about the value of the cake, others are targeting Uygurs. One famous sentence is:”if the seller hit an old lady with the cart, the old lady then running away, not the sellers”. It implies that majority of the netizens think how peremptory the sellers are. And most people believe it is the minority identity allows the sellers to act outrageously without due consideration of any regulation, since the police don’t want to be accused of discriminating minorities by taking actions against them.

For ordinary Han Chinese, this group of sellers’ behavior freeze their impression over Uygur people. Han think they are cheating the customers, and think some Uygurs have been even engaged with stealing, by experiencing other similar incidents. The sense of humor on social media does not conceal the real problem. Instead, it reflects the tension between Han and ethnic minority groups in numbers of inner land cities, as well as serious development predicament in some ethnic minorities’ concentrated provinces.

Han Chinese hate unfairness, especially when it comes to minority issues. In China, there are various kinds of policies favor ethnic minorities, ranging from education to child policy. Beyond those formal policies, when Han Chinese see these Uygur sellers can repeatedly cheat customers; can sell things along the street without licenses; can do unlawful things without being punished, while Han Chinese can’t, Han feel being discriminated against. Adding the consideration of the facts that Han perceive themselves as the host of inner land cities and thus should be treated well, they can hardly tolerate this kind of unfairness. Though one may argue these people can not represent Uygers population as a whole, the fact is that the negative consequence caused by such institutional setting has become serious enough to stir up a national social media movement.

However, the economic and social development in Xinjiang and many other places like Xinjiang are becoming increasingly distorted. According to a research conducted in 2008, 71% of the high-end job positions (government or management) and 57% of the technology related jobs were held by Han Chinese in Xinjiang. In contrast, that number for Uygurs are only 17% and 30% respectively, while more than 61% of Uygurs are working in agriculture sector. Moreover, the percentage of Uygurs population to provincial population has decreased from 67% in 1950s to less than half in 2000. That means Han Chinese have been flooding into the province and taking more fruit from the development process than Uygurs. It has forced a lot of young Uygurs to seek their livelihood in inner land cities. But without specialized skills, they cannot earn enough to feed themselves. In addition, they are more or less excluded from the process of natural resources exploration inside Xinjiang. Overall, those seemingly favorable policies do not actually bring balanced benefit to minorities.

Till now, all the ethnic autonomous regions’ top seats are still controlled by the CCP’s appointees. To be concrete, even though the chairmen are usually local ethnic people,  the Party Secretary of so-called autonomous regions, who hold the real power, remain Han Chinese. A quick answer to address the problem is to allow Uygurs and other ethnic minority groups to decide their development policies and agenda by electing their own leaders and to improve the security operation and judicial process in a more impartial manner. Yet, essentially, the ethnic cleavage cannot be easily addressed even under more democratic rule. The tension reflected through the ethnic cleavage is fundamentally about the competition over scarce resources. Currently, for Uygurs youth and other minorities at Xinjiang, to get a good job requires formal education and willingness to keep their loyalty to the Party. But both are risking going against their own religions and cultural transitions. Thus it would still be difficult for them to really participate into the modernization process.

New directions to settle ethnic tensions are badly needed now! If the Party really wants to have control over this place, at least they have to listen to minorities’ opinion in a truly humble manner. Too few actually understand what’s going on.