A Tourist in a Troubled Land

[Uyghurtilek]

A Tourist in a Troubled Land
<img src="http://www.asiasentinel.com/images/stories/smoothgallery/JAN2008/uighurs-xj 8.jpg" width="320" height="240" style="float: right;" hspace="6" alt="Image" title="Image" border="0" />
     
Tag it:Written by Paul Mozur    
Wednesday, 14 October 2009  
Our correspondent travels through Xinjiang in the wake of July riots

Earlier this week, courts in Xinjiang sentenced six men to death and a seventh to life imprisonment  for murder, arson and robbery during riots that swept the region in early July, leaving nearly 200 persons dead. Paul Mozur, a Taiwan-based correspondent, traveled through the area shortly after the riots.  This is the first of a three-part report.

See also:
Han Chinese Uproot Uighur Culture
Xinjiang's Bleached Bones and Turquoise Tombs

Xinjiang has become one of the worst parts of the world to have your bank account frozen. The Autonomous Region of China is now in its fourth month without text messages, internet and international calls, and I found myself in Kashgar with a security hold on my American bank account. At first I thought there must be some recourse, the Uighurs have dealt with brutal competition for their land from Mongols, Kyrgyz, Chinese and Russians for more than 1,000 years. Surely they could get around the communication shadow the government has cast over the province since the July fifth riots left 197, mostly Han Chinese, dead.

Within 45 minutes I found a contact who "knew a friend who might be able to help." Another half-hour later and I was in brightly lit office adorned with a large map of Xinjiang with a tour guide who knew a number in Guangdong through which he had been able to connect to the internet two weeks before. He began the connection, but after two cigarettes and a call to his wife about dinner, he turned and shrugged his shoulders. "I'm sorry, I don't know if this is legal or not, I tried once and it worked two weeks ago, but maybe they have shut it down. I don't want to try again."

Unlike the United States these days, my credit was satisfactory enough for a cash advance from Bank of China and I was able to go on my way. But Xinjiang's communication breakdown has affected the fabric of business in the region, crippled the tourist industry and changed the way information and rumors make their way across the province. Between cigarette one and two the helpful tourist agent complained of the bitter reality for Xinjiang's tourist season in the past two years.

"Last year was bad, you know, because of the Olympics, but we thought this year would be better and now, who would want to come to a place where we have to live like this," he motioned resignedly to his laptop. "The people in the old markets don't mind, but how am I supposed to run a business without internet?"

By all observations small businesses ran surprisingly smooth in this historically entrepot land, but the steady stream of tourists, both Han Chinese and foreign, that annually make it to this horizon of the Middle Kingdom had no doubt slowed to a trickle. Bargaining harder than ever, the many Han hotel owners across the province all admitted it had been a summer of vacancy. From Hami and Urumqi to Hotan and Yarkand, the bikes at guest houses collected cobwebs, the Western bars were silent and the karaokes loud and empty. And due to China's restrictions on journalism in Xinjiang, too few press cameras were around to snap these tumbleweeds of the Taklamakan.

Although there's no indication yet just what toll the blackout will have on the region's economy as a whole, the sad reality is it means a desperate financial situation could still get worse for many Uighurs who, due to discrimination or lack of opportunity are unemployed. Over the past six decades a large influx of Han immigrants - in 1949 about 6 percent of Xinjiang's population was Han Chinese compared with over 40 percent today - enticed with incentives such as easy access to land, better education for their children and subsidized housing have driven many Uighurs from jobs. In mid-afternoon a laghman vendor in Hami's market motioned to a group of Uighurs whispering around four sweaty beers, "they are all unemployed, so they stay around the market and try to make some money as middlemen." Clearly on this day spending eclipsed earning. Tellingly the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps or Bingtuan, a government-run organization used to first establish infrastructure in the region in the 1950s, counts 88.1 percent of its more than 2,500,000 workers as Han Chinese.

Though the Bingtuan is part of a long-term Sinicization campaign to drown out Uighur culture and by extension in CCP-think "separatism," very little actual integration has occurred. One Han proprietor of a Kashgar liquor shop and a tangle of underground rooms where both Uighurs and Han alike drank could not name one Uighur artist in the box of VCDs he regularly gave his Uighur patrons to play on his shop's televisions. "I don't actually know anything about the music, I can't even understand the language," he shrugged.

As senior Asia researcher for Human Rights Watch Nicholas Bequelin explains, Han migrants in Xinjiang today are more clueless than ever. "Whereas Han settlers previously had a strong sense that they were newcomers in an indigenous territory, many Han people who have moved to urban centers in Xinjiang over the past 10 years are oblivious to the recent character of Chinese migration into the region. This makes it very difficult for them to understand why Uighurs may feel disenfranchised and aggrieved."
It's this cultural ignorance in potent combination with joblessness and draconian restrictions on Uighur cultural practices that has stoked tensions in Xinjiang for so long. And now in the critical months after July's riots Chinese policies are unsurprisingly errant anew, unnerving and aggravating both Uighur and Han alike.

Just as many small businesses in Xinjiang seemed to have grudgingly but easily retreated to telephone and post, the spread of information also reverted to this surprisingly antiquated early-1990's way of life. The proudly Sichuan owner of a computer store in Yarkand, a city inhabited primarily by Uighurs, updated me about the "situation" in Urumqi affirming Han protests were still going on and that "the Uighurs are stabbing people with needles infected with HIV." With no texting, let alone Twitter, he relied on his distributors in Urumqi for information. "If my orders come late I call Urumqi, they tell me what's going on." More shipments than usual had been delayed recently so he was a well-informed man.

As he shuffled to a cluttered backroom where he had been watching a movie with three friends also from Sichuan, he warned me, "be careful, if you're going to the Uighur part of town." On September third, Han Chinese had protested over reports that Uighurs had been stabbing Han Chinese with needles. The protests, which left several Han Chinese dead, resulted in the sacking of Urumqi party secretary Li Zhi and Xinjiang regional chief of police Liu Yaohua.

Though it took a day or two for the news to fully spread around Kashgar and southern Xinjiang, those words, "be careful," became as common a farewell from the Han Chinese as the traditional "go slowly." Since then the Chinese government has announced that none of the reported 400 plus cases of needle stabbings resulted in poisoning or illness and have already rounded up 75 suspects and efficiently sentenced seven to 7 to 15 years for involvement. Two other suspects also admitted they had been trying "to create panic in society." Given China's history of forced confessions, this should be taken with a grain of salt, but it should also be noted that if the accused were attempting to create panic, it was an exercise in restraint given most Uighurs carry knives.

Notwithstanding the tale of a British kitchen hand who used a needle filled with acid to defend her consulate during an outbreak of assassinations in Kashgar in 1912, the Chinese have maintained a paranoia about needle stabbings since 2002 incidents in Beijing and Tianjin. Gruesome rumors of AIDs-stricken Uighurs pouring blood into food at Uighur restaurants in Beijing have also been reported as far back as 2005. Still the response, in which residents of Urumqi called for the notoriously ruthless party regional secretary Wang Lequan to step down because he has not been punitive enough, has been paranoid at best. Tensions that have simmered for years have come to a full boil, and for Han settlers in Xinjiang the government's response has not brought any relief, in fact it has made things worse.

Living in the darkness of a communication black hole where cherubic PLA soldiers leer and grunt on every corner, it's no wonder the Han so protested so radically in early September. Though there is word that the internet may come back online soon, the damage done to the economy will not be so easy to redress. Combine this with recent threats from Al Qaeda regarding China's treatment of the Uighurs and the hopelessly tense situation in Xinjiang looks set to continue well into the future.


See also:
Han Chinese Uproot Uighur Culture
Xinjiang's Bleached Bones and Turquoise Tombs


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