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 PART 1
The last frontier: China's far
west
KASHGAR and URUMQI, Xinjiang - At
the Mother of All Bazaars, the atmosphere still evokes
Marco Polo's Travels. A monumental traffic jam of
donkey carts coils around the muddy borders of the Tuman
River - trespassed by horses, Bactrian camels, acres of
melancholic sheep and elders brandishing sickles and
testing  horseshoes, saddles and whips. Sandy
alleys bear the conspicuous accumulation of carpets from
Hotan, mountains of spices, laminated dowry boxes, bits
and pieces of dead animals, very much alive chickens and
ducks, the famous Yengisar knives, hats in all shapes
and colors, pots and pans, fruits, vegetables, riding
boots, prehistoric transistor radios, Pakistani silk
stockings, any imaginable agricultural tool hand-made
from wood or steel, and the usual paraphernalia of items
available in any self-respecting Oriental souk.
The food is delicious - from bread sprinkled with poppy
or sesame seeds to lahgman - noodles topped with
mutton and vegetables; from jiger (liver) kebab
to girde nan - Uighur bagels.
One hundred
thousand nomads and villagers converge every week on
this anthropological delirium, the Kashgar Sunday
market. Solemn barbers with long sharp knives perform in
the street. Multitudes gather in front of karaoke-TVs.
The cast of characters - with their long, pointed
beards, decorated hats, dark cloaks and black boots -
are all Uighurs: an ethnic subdivision of the Turks who
dominated Mongolia in the 8th and 9th centuries. The
language, of course, is Uighur. The music, still on
audio cassettes, is gecekondu arabesk, Turkish
pop. Most women wear multicolored scarves, but quite a
few wear a chador or a thick brown cloth thrown
over their heads.
Spiritually, the area points
to Mecca. We are more than 4,000 kilometers from
Beijing, and two hours behind Beijing time which is
supposed to apply to the whole of China. But here,
everybody is guided by Xinjiang local time. There's not
a single Han Chinese face in this bazaar.
This
is China's last frontier. From here to the west and
south, there's only desert, steppe and the mountains
along the Karakoram Highway, a few Tajik and Kyrgyz
nomads living in yurts, and the  Khunjerab Pass - the 4,700-meter-high
border with Pakistan, a key node in the legendary Silk
Road between the Chinese world and the Indian
subcontinent, and between China and the West.
An
agglomeration like this one every week in Kashgar is the
stuff of nightmares of Beijing's collective leadership,
especially after the Uighur independence movement in
Xinjiang was declared enemy No 1 of the Chinese state -
even more dangerous than Tibetan "splittists" and the
followers of the Dalai Lama government-in-exile in
Dharamsala, India. But from the point of view of any
Uuighur, the enemy - internal and external - is Han
Chinese. The problem is, the Uighurs are incapable of
defining themselves as a nation. When we ask where they
come from, they answer, for instance, "I am a
kashgarlik": tough man of the desert. The Uighurs
think in terms of their native oasis, not in terms of a
state.
Medieval Kashgar, still enmeshed in its
successive layers of legend and history, and the last
bastion of Uighur culture, does not expect anything from
China. The air is heavy with dust from the desert, dust
from old carpets, smoky coal fires: the filter gives the
impression that we are perpetually in the alternative
reality of an old, faded, 19th-century photo of Kashgar.
The city lives to the rhythm of rickety donkey carts,
fat kebabs, mare's milk and daily prayers at the
suggestive Id Kah Mosque, the largest in western China
and one of the largest in Central Asia. This Turcophone
people was never refined by the proximity of the
Mediterranean or Byzantium. And to add to the tragedy,
their culture was smashed by Mao Zedong's wasteland
tactics.
Cultural schizophrenia is the norm.
There's the Uighur old town - kadimi shahr - and
the Han Chinese town - yangi shahr. If Id Kah
dictates Uighur life, for the Chinese the privileged
meeting point is the inevitable People's Square, with
one of the largest Mao statues in China pointing to the
eternal glory of the masses. This giant Mao remains the
Orwellian symbol of the conqueror belonging to a more
organized and technologically more advanced
civilization. People's Square is filled with Chinese
soldiers promenading their belles in their ersatz 1970s
clothes which, compared with the catwalk in the Uighur
market, are frankly post-modern. A melancholic parallel
with Lhasa, sacred capital of Tibet, where a ghastly
People's Square was also imposed on the noble facade of
the Potala Palace, is inevitable. As in Tibet, in
Xinjiang the gap - cultural, linguistic, religious,
architectural, even gastronomic - is unbridgeable.
The Chinese established the Silk Road at the end
of the 1st century in part to supply a demand from Rome.
Silk was de rigueur for the vanity fair of
senators and lascivious ladies in the court of Augustus.
The Chinese also took the opportunity to export
porcelain, lacquerware, gunpowder, plants, and paper;
and to import, among other things, wool and glass from
Rome, lapis lazuli from Central Asia and wine from
Persia. Kashgar - like Samarkand to the west (today part
of Uzbekistan) - was a privileged oasis where two Silk
Road routes converged.
Uighurs only discovered
Islam in the 10th and 11th centuries: not through the
Arabs, but via a Turco-Persian dynasty that ruled
Bukhara (today also part of Uzbekistan). Genghis Khan
captured Kashgar in the 13th century. Tamerlane ruled in
the 14th. Europeans only saw it for the first time five
centuries later. British explorers at the end of the
19th century - at the height of the Great Game between
Russia and the British Empire - used to comment that few
inhabited areas in the world are more remote and
inaccessible than Xinjiang. This still holds - as
Xinjiang is in fact separated from China by the Gobi
Desert. Even today, Han Chinese cannot understand why a
foreigner would want to go "beyond the pale", west of
the end of the Great Wall.
Xinjiang means,
literally, "New Dominions". The dominator is Beijing.
And the dominated are the Uighurs. Before communism took
over, the region was known as Eastern Turkestan. Two
thousand years ago the Han dynasty, fearing Turkish
nomads, already maintained a military garrison in
Xinjiang. But Xinjiang was only annexed to China by
Manchu invaders in 1759. The strategic objective, from
the point of view of Beijing, has always been the same:
to isolate this part of Central Asia from the Turks,
China's historical enemies. Turbulence was inevitable:
Uighurs have revolted against Han Chinese at least 400
times. Xinjiang was even independent for a few
stretches. But Mao finished with any nuances when he
imposed mass migration of Han Chinese to "civilize"
Eastern Turkestan. In 1949, the dominators were slightly
less than 10 percent of the population; now they are at
least 50 percent, and rising.
Communication with
Uighurs is a nightmare. They refuse to speak Mandarin,
the language of the colonizing power. They speak only
Uighur, and rightly so: this used to be the court
language of the Mongols. It's one form of civil
disobedience still available in a situation where even
university graduates complain of having a hard time
finding a job because major companies are all Han
Chinese and only employ Han Chinese.
It's almost
a miracle to find someone in Kashgar like Ali, an Uighur
in his early 30s, educated in Beijing, a manager in a
mineral-extracting company and speaking passable
English. After a few cups of tea, Ali finally reveals
how he articulated an inevitable revolt against his
benefactors-oppressors: "You, journalists and tourists,
you always believe in Chinese lies. There's no
investment in Xinjiang where there's a majority of
Uighurs. Only where there's a majority of Han. Xinjiang
is the richest province in China. We have a lot of oil,
the Taklamakan Desert has more than 80 billion barrels.
We have gas, we have uranium. But the Uighurs don't get
anything. The Chinese steal everything. Did you see any
Western businessman in Kashgar? Of course not, there are
only backpackers, they have no money to spend. All over
China they are talking about development. Here we have
only unemployment. One day people will say 'Enough!'
'Enough' is what Beijing qualifies as 'splittism' or,
worse still, 'terrorism'."
The Uighurs'
resistance does not have a Dalai Lama to capture
headlines, but they are not intimidated: bombs have been
detonated, attacks have been perpetrated, and the
underground remains very active in Istanbul and Germany.
The Uighur diaspora in Central Asia - a potential source
of financing what is widely described as a future
"Uighurstan" - numbers at least 400,000. In the early
1990s, Kazakhstan allowed two Uighur liberation groups
to be based in Almaty. But China under Jiang Zemin
developed a turbocharged diplomatic offensive.
Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan duly obliged: they cracked
down on Uighur offices, arrested Uighurs who criticized
Beijing and kept the borders open for trade but not for
money, weapons or propaganda helping Uighurs in China.
Urumqi is the capital of the Chinese far west,
the last frontier of civilization from the point of view
of Beijing, and in itself quite a surreal spectacle.
Three thousand kilometers away from Beijing, literally
in the middle of nowhere - that is, south the
snow-capped Tian Shan Mountains and north of the
menacing Taklamakan Desert, the name of which in Uighur
means "you can get in but you can't get out" - we find a
metropolis of more than 1 million: a generic city
imported from the Chinese east coast, with 90 percent of
Han Chinese transplanted by force by communism and the
remaining vounteers avidly dreaming of getting rich
gloriously quick.
Street signs are in both
Mandarin and Arabic script. Urumqi taxi drivers, unlike
any in Central Asia, actually use their taxi meters. The
currency - the Chinese yuan - is totally stable. The
main office of the Bank of China is imperially
impeccable. Urumqi has gone digital, while Kashgar is
still in ink-on-paper mode. Urumqi tinkles to the sound
of colonization: department stores selling all manner of
cheap knockoffs, skyscrapers sprouting like mushrooms,
cranes, chainsaws, black smoke, hellish pollution
coupled with desert winds. Everything runs on - of
course - Beijing time: the sun "rises" at 8am. We feel
all the awesome power of the central state.
Uighurs are nowhere to be seen in central Urumqi
- except as beggars or tacky felt souvenir dolls. Most
have been deported to suburbia at the edge of the
desert. But mosques are bursting at the seams. Uighurs -
desert nomads - are not particularly religious, but
Islam has been a powerful way of expressing their
distress. As well as speaking only their own language,
Uighurs also don't take taxis with Han Chinese drivers
and only eat halal food. The young don't listen to
Chinese pop, but to the pungent guitar sounds of Akbar
Kahriman. At Erdaoqao market, hundreds of merchants sell
the same items that are found in Kashgar . The area
around it is a mini-replica of Kashgar. Unfazed, Han
Chinese built their own, sanitized version: the
"Xinjiang International Grand Bazaar", complete with its
own mosque, an array of camel statues (plus one genuine
article for tourist snapshots), piped music (Natalie
Imbruglia or Chinese pop: no Uighur tunes) and a
5,000-square-meter "Joy Square". There's not a whole lot
of joy around, though. Carved in the faces of elder
Uighurs, there's a feeling of not so much anger as
profound sadness - at the disappearance of their culture
and at not even being able to pick up the crumbs from
the Great Han Materialist Banquet.
To top it
all, Beijing has radically cut off aid to the so-called
"etnic minorities": there are 12 in Xinjiang alone, and
apart from Uighurs (42 percent of the population) they
include Hui (Chinese Muslims), Manchu, Mongolian,
Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Tajik, Uzbek and Tatar. Only Han Chinese
could come up with a concept like "minority food
street". Beijing is only interested in promoting
"mysterious" Xinjiang for tourism purposes: but it has
to be a Xinjiang reduced to theme-park status. If you
are a Uighur and you happen, by a miracle, to work for a
Chinese company, you cannot go to the mosque. Signs on
many mosques, in Arabic, say they are forbidden to
teenagers - which is a frankly absurd ruling that has
nothing to do with Islamic law. All public
demonstrations by Uighurs are forbidden. And if you are
an Uighur in Urumqi and you talk about independence, you
are arrested on the spot, assures a trader in Yengisar
knives. In March 2000 Beijing formally adopted an
ambitious plan for "the large-scale development of the
West". The key point of this massive "Go West" campaign
is to resettle millions more Han Chinese in Xinjiang.
Beijing would not be too displeased if in the long run
this official policy exports many of the 7.5 million
Uighur and 1.3 million Kazakh "minorities" toward the
more unstable pastures of the former Soviet Central
Asian republics.
Mao Zedong used to talk about
the possibility of a "super-chaos" in China. Arguably
the mindset remains the same in Beijing, as the
Politburo knows very well that Uighurs and other "ethnic
minorities" are less than 6 percent of the total
population of 1.3 billion, but they occupy more than
half of Chinese territory. Xinjiang is almost as big as
Western Europe. Beijing's greatest fear is the - at
least for the moment - remote possibility of new
alliances between regional chiefs and business elites
capable of redrawing China's map, as happened many times
in the past. Since the implosion of the Soviet Union and
the birth of the new Central Asian republics, Xinjiang
has had a constant influx of people from Kazakhstan,
Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan: both parts of Turkestan
started in a way to unify. That's exactly what Beijing
does not want. Beijing wants very well defined - and
patrolled - borders (more in Part 2 of this series).
But the fact is that here, amid mighty Central
Asian mountain ranges, it's impossible to talk about
defined borders. Xinjiang anyway remains the laboratory
of the future of this China riding a tiger at full speed
and at the same time trying to control all the
"super-chaos" it is capable of creating. With more than
25 percent of the world's population and the most
coercive of birth-control policies, China still has not
managed to contain its population explosion. Ten percent
of Chinese territory, inhabited by two-thirds of the
overall population, and producing 70 percent of the
national wealth, is prone to inundation by major rivers.
China's economy needs to grow at least 10 percent every
year just to absorb new contingents of job seekers.
According to Minister of Labor and Social
Security Zheng Silin, in his latest report to the
National People's Congress, a staggering 150 million
Chinese rural workers are unemployed of a total of 485
million; and of 94 million farmers who have recently
migrated to big cities, the majority are still
unemployed.
Growth at a median 8 percent
annually - something the West can only dream about - is
still not good enough for China. While some sectors of
"market socialism" have degenerated into gangsterism,
and human rights, from Beijing's point of view, means
only economic development, hundreds of millions of
people are involved in the largest internal mass
migration movement in history. Dozens of millions of
unemployed threaten social cohesion. In the event the
Dragon starts to disintegrate, the implosion will begin
on the periphery, at the last frontier, in the
wilderness that shot from the 14th century straight into
the 21st: Xinjiang.
(Copyright 2003 Asia Times
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