China's Forgotten People

Xinjiang, Terror and the Chinese State

Nick Holdstock

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781784531409
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780857738158
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Chinese History
• Index: History

One of the few Western commentators to have lived in the region, journalist Nick Holdstock travels into the heart of the province reveals the Uyghur story as one of repression and hardship. With Islamic terrorism in China likely to increase over the next decade, how the Party responds will have global repercussions. China's Forgotten People explains why terrorism is on the rise in the world's most powerful one-party state, and what this means for the way we think about China.

‌1

Drawing Boundaries

It was noon and the market was packed. The stalls were selling tights, packs of henna, crystal sugar, dried grapes, rubber-bunged medicine bottles of what appeared to be blood. Then I saw the husks, their niches, and thought pomegranates. The women’s heads were covered by brightly coloured scarves, the men’s by many kinds of hat: homburgs, trilbies, pork pies, stiffened skullcaps. The faces looked Turkish, Russian, Iranian, but they were definitely not Chinese. The same was true of the words they were saying: they could have been any of those languages, but they were not Mandarin. At the end of the stalls a man with a cloudy eye was selling books written in Arabic.

There was then a space full of chairs and tables where parts of sheep were being consumed. A boy was fanning kebabs with cardboard, making the coals glow. There was smoke and yelling, a pile of rams’ heads; chunks of yellow lung were being dropped in bowls.

Further on I saw men trickling into a mosque. Its gate was decorated with green and orange tiles; next to it an old woman knelt on the ground, her head covered, one bony hand outstretched. After that there were no more stalls, just low houses with cyan walls, turquoise doors and decorated shutters. Clay ovens were baking bread; old men slammed chess pieces down; a flock of sheep flowed through. It could have been a neighbourhood in many places: Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan or even Turkey. But it would be untrue to say I was confused about where I was. I never forgot I was in Kashgar, in south-west Xinjiang, and, above all, in China. I knew this, and yet – it didn’t quite make sense.

‘Xinjiang’ or ‘East Turkestan’?

When I first visited Xinjiang in 2000 I was living in a small town in Hunan province, and the two couldn’t have been more different. The countryside around Shaoyang was a patchwork of rice fields that went vivid green in spring. South Xinjiang, where Kashgar is located, was a vast expanse of pale desert abruptly broken by oasis towns. In Hunan the people were almost exclusively Han (the ethnic majority that makes up 92 per cent of China’s population) and the only language I heard and saw was Chinese. But in Kashgar there was much greater ethnic diversity. Apart from Uyghurs – the largest ethnic group in Xinjiang, who account for 44 per cent of its population, according to the 2010 census – there were also Uzbeks, Kyrgyz, Tajiks, Kazakhs and Hui. The Uyghur language was totally different from Chinese, which is unsurprising, given it’s from a different group of languages: Uyghur is part of the Turkic family, which also includes Kazakh, Uzbek and Kyrgyz.

Uyghur food was nothing like the boiled rice and wok-fried dishes I ate in south China. Instead there were thick soups, chunks of mutton with rice and carrots, long wheat noodles, savoury pasties and, best of all, circles of freshly baked nan bread.

When people invited me into their small courtyard homes built of brick and adobe, the customs of hospitality were also different from those of the Chinese people I knew. Instead of perching on hard chairs and drinking green tea, I reclined on floor cushions and drank black tea while eating dried fruit and nuts from a low table. The fashions of my hosts were also different. Many of the women wore loose, brightly coloured dresses and covered their hair with scarves. Some of the men wore a stiffened hat with intricately patterned embroidery (known as a doppa in Uyghur).

The trip was a bewildering experience that challenged many of my ideas about life in China. Most surprising was the obvious centrality of Islam to Uyghur communities – most people don’t expect religion to be prominent in communist societies, given the history of Marxist opposition to it. The most quotidian signs of piety are mosques, cemeteries and stalls selling religious publications in markets. The first of these range in size from small prayer rooms that can accommodate 50 people to those that can hold several thousand, with the largest being the Id Kah mosque in Kashgar.

A less conspicuous expression of faith is the shrines (in Uyghur, mazar) based around the tombs of local saints. These are found throughout Xinjiang, though mostly in the south. People make pilgrimages to mazar throughout the year, both at religious festivals and when they want to ask for the saint’s intercession with a personal problem (a spiritual, physical or mental ailment) or one that affects their community, such as a drought. Mazar take a variety of forms. The simplest are branches planted in the ground with strips of cloth threaded in between; the most elaborate involve an actual tomb around which hundreds of poles with coloured flags sprout from the desert (the flags derive from Buddhist customs). There are also mazar based around a natural feature, often a tree. In Yining there used to be a tree in the centre of a main road whose branches were covered with small red strips of cloth that had been tied by women hoping to conceive.

Such shrines have been associated more with Shi‘a than Sunni Islam, especially with Sufi practices. Mazar also show the influence of shamanism: shrines are often surrounded by ritual offerings that range from goat horns and horses’ tails to metal crescents and bricks. There are also small handmade dolls made from cloth, or miniature cribs, left by women to petition the saint to help them conceive. The influence of these other belief systems is opposed by some Muslims, who argue that they encourage the worship of beings other than Allah.

In press reports and articles that feature Uyghurs the main fact supplied about them is that they are Sunni Muslims. Though accurate, this statement needs to be qualified. Both the degree of religious belief and participation vary greatly among Uyghurs, to the point that for some Uyghurs the notion of being ‘Muslim’ is more a cultural marker than a description of faith. This is not to downplay the importance of Islam to many Uyghurs’ sense of identity, but just to acknowledge the diverse ways in which this is expressed. Some Uyghurs’ religious observance is limited to eating only halal food, while others go to Friday prayers and fast during Ramadan. Some attend prayers at the mosque five times a day, never smoke or drink, go on the hadj and donate money to Islamic charities. All of them would consider themselves Muslims (if not necessarily approve of each other).

One might even argue that to say that Uyghurs are ‘Muslim’ isn’t to say much. It certainly isn’t very revealing about their actual religious beliefs and practices. Most Uyghurs follow the Hanafi school of Islamic jurisprudence (which permits prayer in a non-Arabic language), but the complex interplay of spiritual influences that have passed through Xinjiang during its history means that many Uyghur beliefs and customs (such as mazar) are leavened with influences from Sufism, Zoroastrianism, Buddhism and shamanism. The relative importance of these for different Uyghur communities tends to vary between regions – in the west of Xinjiang, shamanic influences from Central Asia have been stronger, while in the south Buddhist practices from India have had more of an influence. Though the pre-Islamic influences came first, actual spiritual practice for many Uyghurs, especially in the countryside, is a hybrid of orthodox Islamic customs and these older traditions.

Considering the widespread adherence to Islam among Uyghurs in Xinjiang, the linguistic similarity of Uyghur to many Central Asian tongues and the considerable overlap in diet, social customs and culture between the region and the neighbouring post-Soviet republics, the question many visitors end up asking (as did I) was how a place with such different traditions came to be part of the People’s Republic of China.

The cultural distinctiveness of Xinjiang is also reinforced by its physical location. The region is so far to the west that it’s in a different time zone from the rest of the country. ‘Xinjiang time’ is two hours behind the time used elsewhere in China (known as ‘Beijing time’). In Xinjiang the latter is displayed in most public places, and is used for train times, for flight departures and in all schools, hospitals and government offices. Most Uyghurs follow Xinjiang time, while most Han follow Beijing time. There is, however, some allowance made for the time difference. Elsewhere in China, lessons in colleges and schools usually begin at 8 a.m., but in Xinjiang they usually don’t start until 10 a.m. (8 a.m. Xinjiang time).

The huge size of Xinjiang alone can make it seem like a separate region stuck onto the rest of China. It’s about the size of Western Europe, and China’s largest administrative region by a considerable margin. Mountains define most of Xinjiang’s boundaries. To the north-east, the Altai Mountains separate it from Russia and Mongolia, while in the north-west the Tian Shan (‘Heavenly Mountains’) mark the boundary with Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. The Tian Shan also bisect the region horizontally, dividing it into north and south.

The result of this natural boundary is that the region has been treated as at least two separate parts, both historically and in modern times. The northern part, the Zhungar Basin, is steppe and semi-desert, and in the past was used mostly as pastureland and for growing cereal crops. At present it’s where most of Xinjiang’s manufacturing is located, as well as the capital, Urumqi. In the north of Xinjiang the Han Chinese form a clear majority, though only due to massive migration from inner China since 1949.

The region south of the Tian Shan, the Tarim Basin, is dominated by the Taklamakan Desert. This vast area is the result of the ‘rain shadow’ cast by the Himalayas and Pamirs, which form the southern extent of Xinjiang and steal the moisture out of the tropical air from the Indian Ocean. Only a series of scattered oases, fed by snowmelt from the mountains, makes agriculture (and settlement) possible in the region. This is where at least 80 per cent of the Uyghur population live.

Two smaller areas are also significant, both partitioned by mountains from the rest of Xinjiang. In the east, the Turpan Depression is one of the hottest, driest places in China. Its few oases specialise in high-quality, intensely sweet fruit, especially melons and grapes. On the far western side of Xinjiang, the Ili valley is separated from the Zhungar Basin by the Borohoro Mountains, and from the Tarim Basin by the main range of the Tian Shan. The largest city in the region is Yining (known in Uyghur as Ghulja).

Xinjiang’s geography has thus divided it into four separate areas, while also presenting a major natural barrier between the region (or rather, regions) and other Turkic peoples to the west. However, these physical barriers are not impermeable. Goods, ideas and peoples have been crossing these mountains for thousands of years, sometimes in large migrations: in the 1920s and 1930s many entered the region to escape Soviet collectivisation; in 1962, 60,000 fled from the Ili region to escape famine. As a result there’s a sizeable Uyghur diaspora throughout Central Asia, primarily in Kazakhstan (220,000), Uzbekistan (55,000) and Kyrgyzstan (49,000).

The question of how Uyghurs came to be part of China isn’t just an academic matter, but one that’s crucial to understanding some of the explanations for why those masked figures killed 29 people in Kunming, or why three Uyghurs blew up their vehicle in Tiananmen Square in 2013. Ultimately, it’s an issue of legitimacy. This book will go on to chronicle the many shifts in Chinese government policy and their effects on the people of Xinjiang, but the issue of whether Uyghurs should be part of China, instead of having their own country (or at least a greater say in their own affairs) is at the heart of the conflict. There are numerous present-day causes of Uyghur resentment of the Chinese state – religious and cultural repression, economic discrimination, the imposition of family-planning regulations – but behind all of them is a question that everyone should ask of their government: by what right does it claim to represent them? Even authoritarian, non-elected regimes like the Chinese Communist Party need to justify their use of power. The Chinese government’s general strategy is to appeal to a sense of nationalism and common ‘Chinese’ culture and history stretching back thousands of years (in Chinese, Zhonghua minzu). In other words, China tells the same kind of story to its citizens as most other nations do.

This kind of unifying nationalism is especially important in states that have a high degree of ethnic diversity, like the United States and China (which has 55 other ethnic groups besides the Han). Coupled with this is a promise that the state is concerned with ensuring the common welfare of all its citizens, whatever their ethnicity. For the Chinese government, the reason why Xinjiang and, by extension, the Uyghurs are part of China is that this has always been the case. According to this narrative, the Communist Party is just the latest Chinese regime to exercise its rightful authority over the territory, the goal of which is the betterment of the lives of all the peoples of Xinjiang.

But many Uyghurs today have a very different sense of who they are, and where they came from. They don’t feel ‘Chinese’. This means that any unpopular decision by the Chinese state or its representatives has the potential to be seen as the oppressive act of an alien, occupying power. It’s impossible to understand why some Uyghurs feel this way without knowing something of the historical forces that have shaped both the boundaries of present-day Xinjiang and the Uyghur identity. The opposing stories told about the history of Xinjiang and the Uyghurs are crucial to the ongoing struggle to define not only the status of Xinjiang, but also the position of Uyghurs in China.

It’s also important to realise that the current borders of the region, as well as the idea of its being a single entity, are both recent developments. ‘Xinjiang’, which means ‘new territory’ in Chinese, is a name that only dates back to 1884. It wasn’t until the mid-eighteenth century, during the rule of the Qing dynasty, that the region became one administrative unit. Before then the distribution of peoples and powers in the region was heavily influenced by the north–south divide created by the Tian Shan mountains, and within these regions there were a...

Table of contents

• A Note on Place Names
• Introduction
• 1 • Drawing Boundaries
• 2 • ‘Liberation’: The Communist Era Begins
• 3 • ‘Opening Up’
• 4 • Striking Hard: The 1990s
• 5 • Exiles
• 6 • The Peacock Flies West
• 7 • Urumqi and After: Learning the Wrong Lessons
• 8 • ‘A Perfect Bomb’