Chinese strategy in reducing minorities
is pretty simple. Dump in overwhelming numbers
of Han to outnumber the locals and thus make them a disadvantaged
minority. It is certainly an invitation
for resistance unless the locals see equality and economic growth. Again it appears to have not happened yet
hich is thje only good that comes out of this picture.
In fairness, this scheme will last only
as long as the communist party. Then it
will dissolve away. It will be seen as
propped up colonization and even passive resistance can drive out the Han once
support and will evaporates.
China must make accommodation with its
minorities as a matter of State policy.
Instead we continue to see second class citizen status imposed or at
least unremedied. Of course, we are all
coming to grips with issues of human rights and general equality.
Phantom enemies
/ AUGUST 25, 2013 /
China’s leaders are creating what they seek to
avoid—a coordinated resistance
Mark
Kitto and his family camp in Moyu County, Xinjiang. (© Mark Kitto)
After prayers on Friday
28th June, in the village of Hanerik , Hetian Prefecture, in the southern half
of the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region of China, there was a civil
disturbance. Due to the absence of independent witnesses, it is difficult to
know what caused the disturbance and how it developed, but as it happened
immediately after prayers it is likely that resentment of official interference
in local religious affairs caused a number of young men to express their anger
in public.
The native ethnic
population of Xinjiang, who make up 40 per cent of the total, are Uighurs; a
Turkic, Muslim people. They live mostly in the Tarim Basin, in the southern
half of the region, and in the capital, Ürümqi. Since the 19th century, but
particularly over recent decades, the Chinese government has encouraged mass
migration to Xinjiang of ethnic Han Chinese from the northeast of the country.
Han migrants are given free housing, incentives to start businesses, jobs in
lucrative industries such as oil and energy, and access to good schools, among
other benefits.
The influx of Han, and
the perceived smothering of Uighur traditional society, has caused resentment
among the Uighurs, which sometimes manifests itself in violence and attracts
international attention. The worst case to date was in July 2009, when Uighurs
went on the rampage in Ürümqi and killed approximately 200 Han Chinese
residents. This year there were incidents in Bachu on 24th April, Turfan on 26th
June and Hetian on 28th June.
Uighur
mud-walled towns have been replaced with tower blocks.
Every urban centre has a Han zone on its edge, many of which are growing so
fast they dominate the original. Han Chinese refuse to enter Ürümqi’s “Uighur
Quarter” after dark. Here, at all hours, you find phalanxes of young Han
Chinese soldiers, armed with batons and shields, protecting a couple more with
automatic weapons in the middle. They look like Roman Legionaries in anAsterix comic, and appear
just as nervous. As with Tibet, the party line is that it is making life better
for the locals. Besides, the propaganda says, all the Uighurs like to do is
sing and dance.
Uighur society and
culture, in particular Islamic religious practice, is closely monitored and tightly
controlled. CCTV cameras cover the entrance to every mosque and all public
spaces. Imams have their sermons censored. Beards and veils are discouraged.
Service in the government requires a degree of renunciation.
The Uighurs have no
high-profile figurehead like the Dalai Lama. There is a peripatetic, exiled
World Uighur Congress, which does its best to raise awareness of the plight of
their people, but the only time it gets a mention in the press is when it
attempts to verify the truth about the latest “incident.” The Chinese
government accuses it of being a front for the “East Turkestan Independence
Movement”—or “Dong Tu” for short in Chinese.
I have visited Xinjiang
five times. It was the launch pad for my China career. In 1993 I was a member
of the Anglo-Chinese Taklamakan Desert Crossing Expedition, which made the
first ever complete traverse of that desert, also known as “you go in but don’t
come out.” It took two months, with 30 camels and half a dozen Uighur camel
handlers. We were accompanied by Chinese journalists who ambled along behind
us, but sprinted to the front when the TV cameras appeared. One of the
expedition’s sponsors offered me a job in Beijing.
This summer, before
leaving China, where I have lived for 18 years, I took my wife and two children
to Xinjiang. We traveled by car, a Great Wall “Chelsea Tractor,” from our home
in Zhejiang Province. Our aims were to revisit the desert, find the camel
handlers, show the children China along the way, and “home school” them in
preparation to begin UK school this autumn. We covered over 10,000 kilometres,
King Alfred to Henry VIII, and spent happy days camped in stunning, remote
mountain valleys in north Xinjiang with a picnic table and a tree for a
classroom.
When we moved south to
the Tarim Basin we also witnessed and got caught up in the aftermath of the
Hetian incident. We missed the demonstration itself by a couple of hours. What
followed was fascinating and farcical and, as an example of the Chinese
government’s policy towards Xinjiang, demonstrates how one day the
government will create the very thing it claims it is trying to stop—and which
does not exist as yet—namely a coordinated movement dedicated to resisting
Chinese rule.
Two days before we
arrived in Hetian we were in a small town called Makit, on the western edge of
the Taklamakan desert. It was from here, amid fanfare and a public holiday,
that our expedition set off in September 1993. I dropped in unannounced to the
government office and was warmly received. The tourism bureau chief helped me
find our camel handlers, took us all to the spot where we stepped into the
desert, now marked by a large blue plaque, and treated us to a slap-up banquet.
In the evening I
wandered the town, hoping to find familiar sites, such as the sports ground
where we’d danced and the parade ground where the imams had blessed our camels.
Of course everything had changed. I would like to say it had “developed.” But
development in China means razing and rebuilding.
There was no trace of
the original Uighur architecture. The Han Chinese template for a modern town
had been imposed on the flattened mud-brick houses: a large square dominated by
an “artistic” sculpture, white-tiled government offices, broad streets laid out
in a grid, all signage in the same colour and font, residential areas of
apartment blocks behind gates and walls, an “industrial development zone” on
one edge of town, empty, unused.
Even the outlying
villages had been unified, or “harmonised,” to use the phrase of Chinese
internet users mocking the government’s jargon. On the road we had passed brand
new hamlets of identikit one-storey brick buildings with yards, and beside them
large posters explaining which Chinese city, county or state had donated the
funds for construction. The Makit officials told me that every Uighur rural
household was given about 24,000 yuan (£2,500) with which to build a new house.
Of the compounds we saw, perhaps half were inhabited.
At about 10pm that
evening, as I was wandering through Makit, police cars with flashing lights and
sirens wailing sped past me. They were pulling up at junctions, the officers
getting out and clearing traffic. At first I thought I was about to witness a
demonstration. Sure enough, behind me there was a large mass of people walking
down the street. But these were not unhappy Uighurs. They were all in uniform.
They were Han students, hundreds of them, marching home from school after their
late evening revision period. Han families in neighbouring provinces can
purchase an official “residence” for their children in Xinjiang for 200,000
yuan. The notoriously demanding entry requirements for national universities
are lower for Xinjiang residents than elsewhere in China, to make up for what
was once a lower standard of education.
I obtained that titbit
of information from a group of young Uighurs who were eating and drinking beer
at a roadside barbecue. Abdullah was a “People’s Policeman.” He was still in
uniform. Another, Siddi Mohammed, was a full time policeman who supervised the
internet. The others were local businessmen. I asked them how they saw the
situation in Xinjiang.
“Ninety-nine per cent of
people are happy,” Siddi Mohammed said. He seemed to be the leader of the
group. “It is just one per cent who are causing trouble.”
Once he had explained
the loophole the Han Chinese students were exploiting I asked whether that
upset them. “Surely those students are taking places meant for Uighurs?”
They all shrugged. “We
just want a peaceful life,” he said. “No one wants trouble.”
The young man in uniform,
Abdullah, offered to run me back to my hotel on his moped. He’d had a fair bit
to drink, which made his offer more enthusiastic. I would have preferred to
walk. I was given no choice. We set off, in the opposite direction to the
hotel.
“I want to show you the
town,” Abdullah said, although there was no commentary forthcoming while he
turned a corner and the moped swerved across the road. I gripped his shoulders.
He was drunk. But then I felt his shoulders heave. He was crying, sobbing. We
pulled over.
“It is so hard, so hard
for us, so hard.”
“What is?”
“Life,” he thumped his
chest, “for us Uighurs.” He pulled at his uniform. “I have to wear this, but I
am an Uighur. They make our life so hard.”
I asked him what made
his life so hard. He was so upset he couldn’t speak. The alcohol didn’t help. I
agreed to let him drive me round some more, hoping we’d find a place to sit and
I’d get more out of him if he sobered up. But he’d said all he wanted. He drove
to my hotel. I gripped him by the shoulder one last time, face to face. “Tell
me in one word, what it is you want?” I asked.
Abdullah gave me that
drunk, glazed, “do I have to?” look, shrugged and said, very precisely: “Equality.”
***
Two days later I was in
the middle of the Taklamakan desert. I had driven there, along a new road that
cuts past a major landmark, the low lying ridge of the Mazartag mountains that
come to an abrupt end at the Hetian river. There’s a ruined Tibetan fort on the
top of the mountains’ end, overlooking the river. It dates from the 18th
century when the Tibetan empire stretched northwards to the Tianshan mountains.
Below the fort was the site of a resupply point from the expedition. I wanted
to show my children.
My wife Joanna, who is
Han Chinese, had stayed in the town of Hetian (also known as Hotan or Khotan.
All maps in China only give the Chinese versions of Uighur place names, many of
which bear no relation to the original.) Joanna doesn’t do deserts. But I had a
companion in my old friend Robert Jones, who had flown out from Shanghai with
his son to join us for some of our trip.
We had an eventful drive
through a blinding sandstorm, a couple of police checkpoints, and then along a
sandy track off the main road that was too much for the car. We dug it out.
Then the rain began—rain, in the desert. We set up camp and cooked supper. The
wind had died to nothing. It was a beautiful evening. In the west the Mazartag
ridge glowed red in the setting sun.
As we ate I joked with
Robert about spending two months in the desert in 1993 and never having a day
as eventful as this. Then his mobile rang. It was his wife calling from
Shanghai to say there was a riot in Hetian. Details were sketchy but it seemed
the violence was severe. I picked up my mobile to call Joanna. The service had
been shut down. It was impossible to send texts. Robert used a different
service, and a better phone. He could receive texts and calls. His friends in
Shanghai began contacting him to make sure he was all right and tell him to get
out of Xinjiang immediately.
We put the children to
bed and opened a bottle of whisky. The texts to Robert’s phone relayed reports
from Chinese online forums that spoke of armed Uighurs on the rampage,
casualties, shooting. I got through to Joanna at last. She told me the Han
staff at her hotel were lining the front gates, armed with pick staves and
knives. She was staying put. I asked if she had heard gunshots. She had not.
“But there were some fireworks earlier…”
The Hetian Hotel, where
we had left Joanna, has a large compound at the back, which is home to a couple
of smart new apartment blocks. The residents were male, middle-aged Han
Chinese. They exercised every evening by walking circuits of the hotel
building, under fine timber frames covered in vines—a traditional Uighur
feature—like prisoners in the yard. They were teachers, doctors, lawyers and
other professionals, come to Xinjiang to serve as advisers and volunteers. They
stayed for a few months and then went home to their provinces, duty done. I’d
sat next to a Uighur doctor one evening in a crowded restaurant who explained
how the system worked, the Han coming and going. I asked what they got in
return. “Profit,” the doctor said. “From a hospital?” I asked. “No, the oil.”
(The reason there are now roads through the Taklamakan desert is oil
exploration; there are some major deposits.)
On the Saturday, Robert
and I drove back to Hetian in search of burnt-out police stations, looted shops
and bloodstained pavements. We found none. The streets were empty of Han
Chinese, apart from the People’s Armed Police (PAP). Equipped and dressed as
soldiers, the PAP are still referred to as police. They maintain “internal
security.” They are the party’s private army.
The main public space,
Tuanjie Guangchang, Unity Square, had been cordoned off and armoured vehicles
mounted with heavy machine guns parked in its centre. We stopped beside it to
buy kebabs. All young men who approached the square were stopped and searched.
Unmarked police cars were circling the square. The occupants stared hard at the
few people on the street, including us, looking for suspects.
I began to take photos.
Within seconds blue uniformed police accosted us. “Don’t take photographs,”
they shouted at Robert.
The kebab seller, whom
we’d befriended when we were in Hetian before, told us hundreds of people had
been arrested. “We have no guns,” was his repeated complaint, and he mimed the
action of shooting. “They have. Many people were killed. Hundreds.”
From the state of Unity
Square, it was clear there had been no violent demonstration 12 hours ago.
There was no sign of damage. We still did not know where the riot had taken
place. The rumours were already getting wilder. Joanna told us she’d heard from
a taxi driver that five or six people had been killed. By Saturday evening the
number—coming from Robert’s friends in Shanghai—was a precise 46. On another
kebab run, our friend told us it was at least 100. He did the gun thing again,
and a tank driving over people. The hotel receptionist, a sensible Uighur lady,
said if that many people had been killed, no one would have been out on the
streets, and the hotel would have been locked down.
We were in an
information black hole—the closer to the incident, the stronger the vacuum.
Hetian’s internet was shut down, television too. We could now make calls on our
mobiles but texts—because of the ability to send pictures—were disabled. There
were no newspapers that we could find.
As if to deliberately
torment us—the only foreigners for miles around and, therefore, potentially
independent witnesses—the Hetian government, senior PAP and police officers
held their emergency meetings in our hotel, locked away in a back room. As much
as they were discussing how to deal with the incident, they would also be
working out the story they would present to the domestic media, and their
leaders in Ürümqi and Beijing.
Their brand new Land
Cruisers and large SUVs filled the car park. I pretended to repack our own car
and tried to befriend the drivers, who were polishing their bonnets and
smoking. They were not forthcoming. In exasperation I asked directly.
“For God’s sake, did
anyone get killed yesterday?”
They all turned away,
apart from one, who had been the chattiest earlier. With a look that I can only
describe as genuinely reassuring, he said, quietly, “Nah,” and shook his head.
That evening a column of
armoured personnel carriers, surveillance vehicles and open trucks full of
soldiers, approximately 360 by my count, paraded through the town. One vehicle
was mounted with loudspeakers that broadcast a warning, in Chinese, to stay off
the streets, and proclaimed: “We only want you to live in peace and harmony.”
Policemen on foot screamed at anyone who held up a camera or mobile phone. “No
photographs!” A second echelon’s broadcast was in Uighur.
Eventually,
some days later, I found some newspapers that mentioned the incident. The day
after the incident, the Chinese-language Hetian
Daily had run a simple report. “On 28th June, at 15.30 hours, there
was a disturbance by a group of armed people in Hanerik township of Hetian
Prefecture. Security organisations responded promptly, and in accordance with
the law detained those responsible. The disturbance was quickly calmed. In the
course of dealing with the disturbance, there were no injuries.”
By
4th July, the fuller official story had been decided. A front-page article,
continued inside the Hetian Daily,
first of all instructed readers, in no uncertain terms, to stop spreading
rumours, which “confuse and poison people’s minds, mislead the masses in their
understanding of the problem, and create an odious impression on society.” The
articles immediately following set the record straight. The “6.28 incident” in
Hetian, along with the “7.5” in 2009 in Ürümqi and ‘“4.23” in Bachu, were all
“serious, violent, surprise attacks by terrorists” that had been “pre-planned”
and supported by a foreign-based terrorist organisation, the East Turkestan
Independence Movement, under what the party labels a plan of “sangu shili,”
‘three strand evil influences’.
No Han Chinese or Uighurs
I spoke to could tell me what the three strands were. (One of them is bound to
be “trying to influence the splitting of the Motherland.”) Likewise none of the
Uighurs I asked believed in the existence of the independence movement. But its
shortened name in Chinese, “Dong Tu,” was on the lips of every Han when the
subject of the disturbances came up.
***
This being a family
trip, we did not linger in Hetian. We did not entirely leave it, however.
Before we moved onto the next town we camped out in the hills to the south,
without realising it, in the same county, Moyu, as Hanerik. We didn’t mean to
be there but we had been stopped by a police checkpoint from reaching our first
choice of mountain camp. They told us the road led to the border with Indian-controlled
Kashmir. The area was full of terrorists who were escaping from Hanerik. Our
second choice scenic spot further along the mountain range was shut down: “for
repairs.”
We found a beautiful
spot in a meadow by a river, and enjoyed it for a whole day before the police
arrived in force to tell us to leave “for our own safety.” We refused,
politely. They said there were “bad people” in the area. We said the locals had
been most hospitable. They mentioned the disturbance in Hanerik. I asked, once
again, “was anyone killed?”
“That is a state
secret.”
They insisted that now
was a bad time to visit and it would be better all round if we left Xinjiang
altogether. (Our local police back home in Zhejiang had also been in touch by
phone, to urge us to do the same thing. They also asked Joanna “to tell Mark
not to get involved.”) We came to an agreement. We promised to leave in a few
days, as we planned anyway, and that we’d call the police if any terrorists
came by. The police left. They had fulfilled their task. Or so we thought until
2am, when they returned again and we were dragged bleary-eyed from our tents.
“I am sorry,” the most
senior of the officers who had been before said, “but my chief wants to see
evidence that we have spoken. Do you mind if I make a video?”
By 4th July, the eve of
the anniversary of the 2009 Ürümqi riots, Robert and his son had returned to
Shanghai and my family was in Yutian, the next major town along the southern
edge of the Taklamakan to the east of Hetian. There were rumours about a curfew
and that all Han Chinese shops were to be shut, by official order, as was the
thriving local night market.
While we were checking
into our hotel, a convoy of military trucks pulled up across the street. An
officer leapt out of the jeep in front and ran to let down the tailgates.
Soldiers, or rather PAP, poured out and formed up into squads. There were about
200 of them. One squad formed a cordon across the street while the rest double
marched to a public park opposite the main mosque, 100 metres down the road.
Most of the soldiers—they really do not look like police in the slightest—were
equipped with riot shields, helmets and batons, but each squad also included
automatic weapons, one sniper rifle, and a dedicated photographer. Through the
trees I watched them demonstrating their riot control drills. They were
aggressive. The exercise was more like an attack on dug-in defensive position
than riot control. Fire support groups covered baton charges to the sound of
whistles and a set chorus of battle cries. Despite the heat the men ran at full
pelt from place to place. After 10 minutes of intense activity, the soldiers
regrouped and double marched, still shouting in unison, back to the trucks.
The next day I walked
the quiet streets of the town. There were very few Han Chinese about. The full
garrison was out again, but stayed on the trucks, which were driving slowly
round the town, loudspeakers blaring warnings. Official shops such as the Post
Office and the Xinhua Bookstore, with its copies of the officially-sanctioned
Koran on prominent display beside a biography of Deng Xiaoping, were shut.
Smaller Han-owned shops and restaurants were mostly open but deserted. I
stopped off for a haircut in the old town, the best-preserved original Uighur
quarter I saw in Xinjiang. The barber’s television was tuned to the main
Xinjiang news channel, in Uighur. It was showing old images of terrorist
training camps in Afghanistan, news clips from what looked like a genuine
attack somewhere in the world (I guessed it was the Algerian oil camp that was
attacked in 2012) interspersed with images of the World Uighur Congress meeting
in the west. The flags of Germany, France, the US and UK flashed onto the
screen. The congress looked like a United Nations meeting, of senior citizen
Uighurs, all in traditional caps. Rebiya Kadeer, the chairperson, featured
prominently. Then it was back to hazy images of terrorists in training or
action and, for the finale, a staged-for-the-cameras attack by Chinese armoured
vehicles charging across a plain, guns blazing, soldiers grinning from the
hatches. I had been chatting in Chinese to a Uighur businessman while we waited
our turn.
“Dong Tu?” I’d asked.
“Who?” he said.
“Three strand evil
influence?”
“Three what?”
I pointed at the TV.
“Load of rubbish,” he
said.
Back at the hotel,
Joanna had received a call from the police. “Tell your husband to go back to
the hotel immediately. There is a disturbance in the town. He is in danger.
And,” the caller added, “tell him to stop taking photographs.”
She relayed the message.
She was nervous. The hotel staff had reinforced the police warning. Together
they made it sound as though civil war had broken out on the doorstep.
But on the streets there
was no sign of any unrest. By now I was at the gate of one of the major mosques
in Yutian. It was 1.30pm on a Friday and hundreds of worshippers were streaming
past. The streets around the mosque were a temporary bus park for the
worshippers from the surrounding countryside. The barber came by and stopped
for a chat. We agreed to meet for dinner. I wondered if the unmarked
surveillance car with the dome camera on its roof, right across the road from
us, picked up our conversation.
Once prayers had begun I
returned to the hotel. Again, there was no sign of any upset. But heading back
out to take the dog and children for a walk, we didn’t get far. As we passed a
police post a man in a plain T shirt ran out, shouting into his radio, “I’ve
got them! I’ve got them!” He motioned to us to stand still. My children looked perplexed.
“You must wait for my leader,” the man said.
“How long will that
take?”
“Five minutes.” He was
waving his hand in the air as if he wanted to be ready to react if I ran.
“I’ll give you two,” I
said. “Then we go.”
He bounced around us,
talking into his radio. I looked at my watch. “OK,” the police officer said.
“He says you can go, but you must go straight back to your hotel and stay
there. It is not safe.”
We walked the opposite
way to the hotel, along a street where a bustling Friday market was selling
watermelon, leather belts, sun hats and kebabs to the mosque crowd.
There are no terrorists
in Xinjiang. There is no equivalent of Eta or the IRA. I am sure there are
young men who wish there were. If I were stopped and searched on a regular
basis; were passed in the street every half hour by a pair of military vehicles
that drive around your town non-stop, day and night; and had heavily-armed
soldiers practising set attacks beside your card game in the park, let alone
having your religious practice monitored on CCTV; your imam censored; your
beard shaved off; while all the time being told by the authorities that you and
your friends are potential terrorists, I’d be reaching for the fertiliser and
sugar and watching for where those vehicles repeatedly go.
The heavy-handed,
intimidating style of control that the party is imposing on the Xinjiang
Uighurs is not producing the desired effect—a harmonious society with all
ethnicities co-existing contentedly. If there is any effect, it is the
opposite. If anyone is breeding discontent, and terrorists, it is the
authorities. News blackouts, communication shut downs, ridiculous state
propaganda—once it has decided its line—do not help. Nor do the rumours that
spread like wildfire, propagated by the Uighurs who are desperate for world
attention.
It was in Yutian that I
heard the most disturbing story, a full week after the Hanerik incident.
According to a Han Chinese shopkeeper some criminal Uighurs had come across a
party of outsiders—Han or who she did not specify—who were camping in the
hills. There were eight of them. The Uighurs slit their throats while they
slept.
I suppose that was us.
The only time in five
weeks in Xinjiang when I felt a fleeting sense of apprehension, was soon after
the police had tried to move us from that campsite. It was dark, Joanna and the
children were in the tents, and Robert and I were sitting by the fire. Two
young Uighurs drove up fast and hard on motorbikes, parked them under the
trees. They ran towards us, ducking under the branches like they were bullets.
They had their hands rammed in their pockets.
The men stood in front
us and pulled out handfuls of apricots. Without a word they passed them over,
smiled and turned to leave.
“Thank you,” we said, in
Uighur.
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