Xinjiang

China's Muslim Far Northwest

Michael Dillon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN:
  9780415546317
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134360956
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Xinjiang, the nominally autonomous region in China's far northwest, is of increasing international strategic and economic importance. With a population which is mainly non-Chinese and Muslim, there are powerful forces for autonomy, and independence, in Xinjiang. This book provides a comprehensive overview of Xinjiang. It introduces Xinjiang's history, economy and society, and above all outlines the political and religious opposition by the Uyghur and other Turkic peoples of Xinjiang to Chinese Communist rule.

Part I
Introduction to Xinjiang

1 Xinjiang’s geographical position

Xinjiang, or the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region Xinjiang weiwu’er zizhiqu, to give it its full Chinese official name, lies on the northwestern frontier of China on its border with the former Soviet Union. It stretches some 3,220 miles (2,000 kilometres) from east to west and 2,660 miles (1,650 kilometres) from north to south, has an area of over 1,600,000 square kilometres (almost three times the size of France) and is by far the largest administrative unit within the People’s Republic of China. It lies so far west of, Beijing that it is effectively two hours behind the Chinese capital: Xinjiang operates on Beijing time, in particular for long distance air and rail transport and communications with Beijing and government offices, and also on local time for informal use. Local people almost always indicate which time they are using when making business and personal arrangements and Uyghurs use local time whenever possible as part of an assertion of the physical and cultural distance between Xinjiang and the rest of China.

Xinjiang has common borders with Mongolia, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India and with three of the Central Asian states that were part of the USSR, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. It is close to two other new Central Asian nations, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. Its nearest neighbours within China are Gansu province and the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, both of which have large and influential Hui Muslim communities, Tibet, which is usually considered to have been Beijing’s main separatist problem since 1949, and Qinghai, which is part of historic Greater Tibet, and is home to both Tibetan Buddhist and Hui Muslim communities.¹

An explanation for the spelling of ‘Uyghur’, which is used here for both the name of the largest ethnic group in Xinjiang and the autonomous region that is named after it, seems appropriate. The more familiar spelling in recent Western writing on the region is Uighur.² ‘Uighur’ has generally been replaced in English-language publications in China with ‘Uygur’ as this is closer to the spelling of the name in the Uyghur language, when written in the modified Latin script that was developed for it by Chinese-language reformers during the 1960s and 1970s. It is also the spelling used in the standard Turkish language of Turkey to refer to the language and people of Xinjiang. However, Reinhard Hahn in Spoken Uyghur, Seattle, 1991, suggests the spelling ‘Uyghur’ as being the closest to the local pronunciation. It is also the version used in Henry G. Schwarz’s monumental An Uyghur-English Dictionary (Western Washington 1992) and that form has therefore been used in this book. The Uyghur language and the people who speak it were also referred to in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writings as Turki or Eastern Turki and Taranchi (meaning ‘cultivator’ and used especially of those who migrated to and lived in the northwest of the region around Yining/Ghulja close to the border with Kazakhstan).

Xinjiang, although a provincial-level administrative division of China, is deemed by the Chinese government to be not a province but, since October 1st 1955, an Autonomous Region (zizhiqu) in deference to the non-Han, that is non-Chinese, majority of the population.³ Non-Han people in the region and émigré communities in Kazakhstan, Turkey and Germany often prefer not to use the name Xinjiang, which means literally ‘new frontier’, because of its connotations of imperial Chinese colonisation, and many of them refer to the region instead as Eastern Turkestan, or, in the Uyghur language Sharqi Turkistan. The name Uyghuristan has also been used by some supporters of independence, but it is not favoured by the Kazakh and other non-Uyghur people of the region. Earlier studies of the region have often used the spelling ‘Sinkiang’, notably Owen Lattimore’s Pivot of Asia and Sinkiang Pawn or Pivot by Allen Whiting and Sheng Shih-ts’ai and it has also been called Chinese Turkestan to distinguish it from the rest of Turkestan which is the name given to the Muslim Turkic speaking areas of the Russian empire. In this book, the name Xinjiang has been used throughout for consistency and simplicity, even when it is anachronistic, and this is not intended to imply support or otherwise for China’s control over the region.

Xinjiang is divided by the great range of mountains, the Tianshan. The Zhungar Basin lies to the north and the Taklamakan Desert and the settled Altishahr (Six Cities) region are in the Tarim Basin to the south and the two regions have significantly different histories and cultural identities.⁴ The southern part of Xinjiang is the Uyghur heartland, a mainly rural society which still lives by traditional oasis agriculture with the minimum of outside influence. In the north, with its mountains and grasslands, where Uyghurs have lived alongside Kazakhs and Mongols for centuries, pastoral nomadism is an important part of the way of life and the influence of the Russian empire has been significant. The north of Xinjiang is also the most industrialised with many large cities devoted to such modern industries as oil refining.

Although Xinjiang has often been depicted by Chinese officials and writers who were posted or exiled there throughout the centuries as a desolate and isolated wilderness, it is in fact a region of stunningly beautiful landscapes and the attachment that the Uyghur and other native peoples feel for it is understandable. While foreign visitors in the past have rarely failed to criticise the grey Soviet-style architecture of the regional capital, Urumqi, and the other main industrial centres, travellers who venture off the beaten track are invariably captivated by the rural landscape - the desert, the mountains, the steppes and the lakes. The vast Taklamakan Desert dominates the geography of Xinjiang and makes so much of it inaccessible. In the north the snow-capped mountain range known to the Chinese as the Tianshan (Mountains of Heaven) and to the Uyghurs as Tengritagh (Mountains of God or Heaven) towers over the plains and oases below and, with its northern extension the Alatau, forms a formidable natural barrier between the eastern part of the Turkic world which finds itself within the borders of the People’s Republic of China and the much larger western part in what was once the Soviet Union and before that the Russian empire. Travelling the northern route across Xinjiang between Urumqi and the grape-growing oasis of Turpan it is difficult not to be impressed by the majesty of the mountains, the colours of the rocks and sands which change dramatically as the sun rises and sets and the sheer barrenness of most of the landscape.

Xinjiang has been classified by geographers as part of the dry ‘dead heart of Asia’, which also includes Tibet and the Pamirs and Mongolia. This area is marked by a series of high inland-drainage basins to the south of the Tianshan range, running from the enormous Tarim and Zhungharian basins in the west to the smaller basins of Turpan and Ili in the east and west respectively. The Taklamakan desert occupies most of the Tarim basin and rather than being a sandy desert in the familiar sense, ‘consists really of fine, disintegrated particles of rock and is of the character of allluvial loess’. For a desert, it is in fact potentially extremely fertile and it is only the absence of irrigation that makes it barren. The Tarim basin, named after the most important river in Xinjiang and the others are surrounded by narrow belts of sparse vegetation and it is in these areas that the important oasis settlements have developed, some of them watered by small streams which flow from the Tarim river and its tributaries.⁵

It is in these dry and dusty oasis towns that most of the settled population lives. Many, if not all, of these settlements owe their development to an ancient system of subterranean aqueducts, the kariz, which supplement any existing irrigation from streams and rivers. The kariz, which may have originated in Persia, where they are called qanat, draw the melting snows from the mountains and carry them in underground channels to preserve them from evaporation while they flow to the oases. The kariz irrigation system, of which local people are so proud, is nowadays considered to be backward and inefficient and is being replaced by electrically powered pumps in parts of Turpan Prefecture. It is estimated that Xinjiang had over 1,500 kariz in the 1950s, of which over 1,100 were in Turpan but that by the late 1990s there were fewer than 600 and very few craftsmen capable of building them. The remaining kariz are being preserved, but only as museum pieces and local farmers are not permitted to dig any new wells near them.⁶

Many of these oasis towns such as Kashghar, Kargalik and Yarkant lie on the southern fringes of the Taklamakan, as far away from Chinese cultural influence as it is possible to be within the borders of the present day People’s Republic. They are the home of the most traditional Uyghur culture that remains in the twenty-first century and, as they also suffer from poverty and underdevelopment, they are the fertile ground in which militant separatist and, more recently, Islamist movements have flourished. In the north, the towns and villages in the foothills of the Tianshan mountains in the Yining/Ghulja and neighbouring regions also have their own traditional cultures although these are often Kazak, Kyrgyz or Mongolian as well as Uyghur.

Not only is Xinjiang unstable politically, it also suffers from chronic instability in its climate and geology Dramatic and dangerous weather conditions are common and the more remote communities in the mountains are often cut off by heavy falls of snow in the harsh winters. Earthquakes are frequent, especially in the mountainous border areas, as they are also in neighbouring countries such as Afghanistan. Most quakes are mild, but they are occasionally severe enough to threaten lives and the livelihood of whole communities. On November 2nd 1995, an earthquake measuring 5.2 on the Richter scale struck Zhaosu county in the northwest of Xinjiang and also affected Baicheng, Yining/Ghulja and Aksu.⁷ A quake of 7.1 occurred in the Karakorum on November 19th 1996 was followed by aftershocks and the Zepu region was hit by an earthquake of 5.0 on November 23rd 1996 but no casualties were reported in this sparsely populated area.⁸ On January 21st 1997, a quake of 6.4 on the Richter scale badly affected Jiashi county near Kashghar, killing twelve people and leaving over thirty injured.⁹ A further quake registering 6 on the scale destroyed thousands of buildings in Jiashi in March of the same year.¹⁰

The region was again affected by an earthquake of a similar magnitude on April 6th, with no deaths but injuries to twelve people the loss of livestock and damage to 3,000 buildings.¹¹ A further quake struck on April 11th¹² and on May 17th a quake of 5.4 on the Richter scale caused some damage and serious injury to one person.¹³ On March 19th 1998, a quake measuring 6.0 on the Richter scale struck Artux in the Kizilsu Kyrgyz Autonomous Prefecture, as had been predicted by a national congress of seismologists earlier in the year.¹⁴ A quake of magnitude 5.2 was recorded in Aksu and neighbouring areas on June 25th 1998 and one of 5.5 on July 28th in Baicheng county¹⁵ August 4th saw a magnitude 6.0 quake in Jiashi county with some damage to property and livestock but no human casualities and on August 27th a quake of 6.6 on the Richter scale struck on the borders of Jiashi and Bachu counties in the west of Xinjiang.¹⁶ Another earthquake measuring 5.7 on the Richter scale was recorded on Wednesday December 25th 2002. Its epicentre was 20 kilometres southeast of Ulugqat, some 50 kilometres away from the city of Kashghar.¹⁷

This is far from being a complete list of all the earthquakes that Xinjiang has suffered in recent years, but it is sufficient to indicate the frequency with which Xinjiang is affected, the seriousness of the problem and the need for measures to ameliorate the effect of earthquakes. The need to take a long-term view of how the people and government of Xinjiang should come to terms with seismic activity of varying degrees of intensity was acknowledged in August 1997 when new building codes were issued by the local authorities with the intention of ensuring that all new buildings were earthquake resistant.¹⁸

Between January and March 1998, heavy snow in the Bayanbulak District of Hejing county high in the Tianshan mountain range caused three deaths and the loss of over 8,000 head of cattle.¹⁹ High winds and a sandstorm that struck many parts of Xinjiang in April 1998 caused at least six deaths and many injuries and caused severe damage to houses, the tents of nomads and communications, telecommunications and electricity generating equipment. As many as 100,000 head of livestock may also have been killed.²⁰ Not all of Xinjiang is subject to such extremes of weather and they do not occur all the time but they are important aspects of the character of the region.

All of these geographical features, in particular Xinjiang’s isolation, the chronic shortage of water (a problem which it shares with both its Central Asian neighbours and inland regions of China such as Gansu and Ningxia) and the problems that local communities have encountered in making a living from difficult land have all had, and continue to have, a profound influence on the region’s history and its economic and social development today

2 Xinjiang before 1949
A historical outline

Although this study is primarily concerned with contemporary developments in Xinjiang, it is essential that some consideration be given to the history of the region from the earliest times. This history has been used by Uyghur and Chinese historians and writers to argue their very different cases for either the legitimacy of the independence of Eastern Turkestan or its incorporation into China. What follows is necessarily an incomp...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Plates
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Part I: Introduction to Xinjiang
• Part II: Turkic opposition and CCP response
• Part III: The changing international context
• Part IV: Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography