Fen lie, with China's official translation of "splittism," has long been a hot-button word in Chinese communist terminology, and not just directed against Tibetans objecting to the ravishing of their culture.
Yet for all China's propaganda and the new science suggesting how genetically close the two peoples may be unity is elusive and "splittism" a constant threat.
And maybe (as Chait would probably argue) there is a distinctive form of whiny, self-defeating "splittism" on the left that's largely absent on the right.
What would be the correct communist term for describing that, Mr Barnett wonders: Meta-Über-Reverse Splittism, perhaps?Others respond that a plateau culture predating the migration is in fact compatible with the science.
Given that China already executes more than 10,000 people each year (that's the estimate of Human Rights Watch; the actual number is a state secret), the execution of men already declared guilty of terrorism and "splittism" in China would seem to be all but automatic.
Yet this is a loaded, even dangerous, theme within China, because of the government's hypersensitivity about what it calls "splittism" in any form — the concept that China's extent might ever have differed from its current borders, including those in Tibet and Xinjiang.
But southern Xinjiang is now less remote, and the state's security apparatus has been able to crack down more harshly on "splittism .Besides, the same roads and railways that take natural resources out also bring Han migrants in.
To China's rulers it is a backward kind of place whose former serfs, "liberated" by the Communist army, have repaid the favour with ingratitude and even outright "splittism".
