Non-Han minorities may comprise only nine per cent of China’s population, but as the violence in Tibet and simmering resentment in Xinjiang indicate, the problem is one that Beijing is unable to resolve.

This is a blow to President Hu Jintao, who is supposed to be an expert on Tibet, where he was once secretary of the Communist Party. He ordered troops as well as police forces into Tibet and Xinjiang last year to guard against pre-Olympic disturbances, but to no avail.

There are three reasons for the Communist leadership’s inability to address the issue other than by repression. First, given that Beijing’s first priority is government centralisation, the official designation of any “autonomous region” in China is a facade.

Second, there is the innate belief in the superiority of the Han race, a notion historically reflected in China’s attitudes to all its neighbours as well as toward the non-Han minorities within its borders.

Third, the three regions with significant minority populations that are actual or potential trouble spots are all frontier areas that Beijing regards as strategically important. The minorities in southwest China are no problem because they are small, isolated and near frontiers from which China has never been invaded. The homelands of former invaders — the Mongols and Manchus — still exist, but they are now overwhelmingly Han. But Tibet — with its long history of isolation, immense cultural, linguistic and religious differences and on-and-off independence — is a different matter.

Communist China has not formally expanded the borders it inherited from its predecessors, but it has made strenuous efforts to use migration to spread Han people, culture and commercial power into Tibet and Xinjiang.

Some Tibetan majority areas were also transferred to Han-majority provinces — Qinghai, Sichuan and Gansu.

Most recently, at huge cost, Beijing brought the railroad to Lhasa in an effort to reinforce integration.

China is incapable of offering minorities either cultural equality or autonomy. Officialdom and much of the population treats minorities either with suspicion or as colourful tourist attractions. This leads to an informal apartheid — evident in the housing, schools and social organisation in Tibet and Xinjiang — reinforced by official arrogance. The Han ethnic basis of Chinese identity is seen even in cosmopolitan Hong Kong, where it is easier for ethnic Chinese born in Malaysia or Canada to get full citizenship than for a Hong Kong-born person of Indian or Philippine background.

For now, the Olympics notwithstanding, China will rely on an iron fist to quell dissent. Over the longer term, Beijing will have to consider whether to step up efforts to integrate the minority regions into China through money, infrastructure and migration. That might well raise the level of resentment among Tibetans and Uighurs against their relatively rich, commercially exploitive colonisers. Han Chinese may, however, become increasingly reluctant to live in restive minority regions when a better, safer living is available elsewhere.

It is possible that Beijing might eventually allow a little real autonomy in the hope that separatism can be contained. But it is more likely that China’s own rising nationalism will meet its match in the determination of Tibetans, Uighurs and Koreans not to be swamped by a Han version of Manifest Destiny.

International Herald Tribune