Personal and Political, Though Only As A Tourist (Anna)

A photo I took of some Uighur men, at their request, on the Southern Silk Road in Summer 2006. More photos here. Some ruminations after the break.

I have been sickened over the past few days by the deteriorating conditions in Xinjiang, in Western China. Though incredibly busy at work, I checked in tonight to the New York times and was also appalled at the, to my mind, pro-Chinese Communist Party (CCP) bias of the coverage of those events, which provide accounts from the perspective of the Han Chinese with whom the CCP have ardently colonized the region, but zero countervailing perspective from a similar local Uighur. It's hard for me not to agree with Andrew Sullivan (whoever thought I'd have said that, and over an issue like this), that we apparently care little about a news story except what narrative allows us to maintain the right to torture Muslims.

In 2006 my sister and I spent a week or more in Xinjiang with a Uigher guide, as part of a longer trip to China, where we visited a childhood friend living for the past decade as a news reporter in Beijing, and also spent time living the Vegas-style luxe life in Shanghai. Both of us found the ancient silk road, and the people we met there, the most compelling part of our visit.

It's late, I don't have much time to write (work is off the hook), and I have much to much to say, badly formed in my head, so I'm just going to repost here, for the time being, some impressions I sent to a friend, roughly contemporaneously with my 2006 visit, of the Uighurs and the situation in Xinjiang, as well as some photographs I took at that time.

I have edited the following email extracts to take out identifying information.

When my sister and I said we were headed to Xinjiang, to see the Silk Road and travel among the Uighurs, the almost univeral reaction was, Shin-what? Wee-who?

A friend who is half-Chinese and spent a year abroad in Beijing, was one exception. She responded, as most Chinese would, with the dismissive comment that the words "Xinjiang" and "Uighur" evoke the quarter near Beijing University where smoke hovers over lamb kebab stalls, and ragged men follow young people around repeating, "hashish? hashish? hashish?"

I've noticed a number of articles about Xinjiang in the past year. See, e.g. I can't tell if the stories are getting more numerous, or if it's just the tendency of my human mind to look for patterns and coincidence. Probably a little of both. No doubt interest in Central Asia has increased interest in Xinjiang, since it borders Afghanistan and Pakistan, and is probably the safest similar culture one can currently visit. Our Uighur guide, told us that travel to the region has run in cycles: a large peak of hippie sojourners in the 60s, a trough post-Tiananmen, a smaller peak during the economic boom of the late 90s, a trough post-9/11. He also noted that the CCP has made a recent, aggressive push to promote tourist development in the area as a political tactic, such as by leasing historic sites (mosques, Buddist monastic ruins, natural canyons) to private Han Chinese contractors. Though my mind generally rebels at "secret forces" explanations, it doesn't seem wholly conspiracy-minded to see some connection between the CCP's push to develop the region and the increased travel and attention.

I hadn't seen the travel report in Slate. Thanks for the link. Biking the Silk Road is extremely crazy– when facing the possibility of a run-in with an Uzbek warlord, I prefer to be in something a little more protected, like, say, a tank, or at least a car with a well-connected local Uzbek talented in negotiating bribes. As an un-exercised travel itinerary for the imagination, however, it's right up my alley. Turks, and that part of the world, fascinate me. In a related vein, if politics would only cooperate, I'd love to make a follow-up trip, "Silk Road II: Tamerlane," from Samarkand South to New Delhi. That politics in that part of the world will not cooperate is, unfortunately, the understatement of the year.

Speaking of politics, this sentence (and paragraph) from the Slate article is a doozy:

"Throughout history, or at least since the ninth century, the area has been more commonly known as East Turkistan, due to the Uighur Turks who settled the oasis on the rim of the Takalamaken Desert."

This is like throwing casually into a travel article about Arizona, "the area is more commonly known as Aztlan, due to the Aztec indians who settled…" or an article about Jerusalem, "the area is more commonly known as Palestine," etc.

I mean I'm extremely sympathetic to the Uighurs. I would even say that in my extensive travels, I have met few people so lovely and hospitable as many of the Uighurs I met. And the images of pervasive, unavoidable oppression left by our visit have stuck with an almost PTSD resiliency: soldier blockades everywhere; being forced to hire a very ignorant Han Chinese government guide at Turpan, because our guide, who had done doctoral studies in the history of the region, was not allowed, as a Uighur, to guide us alone; in the middle of the desert, a giant ghost city under development, where water from a necklace of ancient oasis towns had been diverted into a lake that would soon serve demobilized Han Chinese peasant-soldiers, sent to divide and conquer the towns through settlement; that our guide couldn't join us in an internet cafe because Uighurs have to submit their passport to use the internet, and his passport had been suspended (a punishment following two days of interrogation in jail) after he spoke to an English journalist; the old fountain and souk surrounding the mosque recently had been replaced with an ugly concrete plaza and Han Chinese shopkeepers, while the Uighur residents were paid in vouchers to resettle in new developments they could not afford, and were thus forced either to become indebted to the Han Chinese developers, or to move into ever smaller Uighur quarters of the city; and on and on.

In a teeming oasis town in the shadow of the desert ghost city, the local Uighurs sold scythes, boiled sheep lung, and embroidered rugs outside mud-straw brick houses, much as they have no doubt done for centuries, and followed my sister and me around ("American girls are so pretty"), laughing uproariously at the novelty of the images taken with our digital cameras, asking to have their pictures taken. Chinese soldiers guarded frequent checkpoints and roadblocks. For an American to muse "I had never experienced freedom and independence like this" seems rather ironic, under the circumstances.

But, most of the Uighurs I met just used the name, "Xinjiang," and even our fiercely nationlist guide, when asked if he prefered, "Xinjiang," "Uighur Autonomous Region" (the other Chinese name), or Eastern Turkistan, just shrugged off the last, saying, "that's just politics" (he added some long explanation about the 20th C. origin of the term, which I've forgotten).

Sorry for the rambling, it just comes back, y'know…like 'Nam…only I wasn't expected to kill anyone…and stayed in fancy if crappy hotels that included condoms in the mini-bars (because poverty makes prostitution, in addition to drugs, the major employer of Uighurs), and was stuffed daily with as much yogurt, apricots, and lamb as I could eat…

Doubling down on the disjointed nature of this post, I'll link to another of my favorites among my photographs from Xinjiang, of which I have many in addition to the ones on the Flickr site: a boy cradling his pet chicken, at the Kashgar market. Something about the freckles, and the poignancy of a pet chicken in a marketplace full of butchers.

2 responses to “Personal and Political, Though Only As A Tourist (Anna)”

Ruchira

July 9, 2009

Thanks Anna, for writing about your experience in Xinjiang, the snippets of which (and the Flickr photos) you had shared with me after your trip. It is interesting that the current political unrest in the region managed to do what my nagging could not – extract an excellent post from you for our readers.

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Ankit

September 26, 2009

You Amiracans should stop slumming around the world and be uppity at the same time. China has a right to protect its interests just as you are doing far away from your mainland in Afghanistan and Iran. And yes, I am Indian not Chinese, though an admirer of the CCP which I wish was there to uplift the caste afflicted poor of my country.

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