The Emperor Far Away (2 page)

Shaking off the perspective that equates China solely with the Han Chinese is difficult. The Han-dominated CCP assiduously encourages a view of the country that relegates the other ethnic groups to the fringes. Just as they exist at the geographical edges of China, so they occupy an uneasy space at the margins of society. The Chinese like to think of themselves as one vast family with their unelected leaders, whether the emperors of the past or the CCP, as its patriarchs. China’s minorities are at best distant cousins, linked to their relations by forced marriages rather than blood.

As such, they are present in small numbers at important family events. They march in the parades through Tiananmen Square which mark the anniversaries of the CCP’s time in power. When China’s version of parliament meets for its annual session each March, a photo of the token minority delegates in their colourful headgear and traditional costumes is always splashed across the front pages of the state-controlled newspapers. One old Tibetan joke says their official representatives have only three responsibilities: to shake hands when they enter, clap hands during speeches and raise hands to vote yes.

I returned occasionally to China after 1988. But only when I moved there in early 2005 to work as a journalist did I decide it was time to revisit Xinjiang. That prompted a more ambitious plan: to travel through the most contentious borderlands and examine the relationships between the different minorities and the Han. I wanted to find out why many still view the Chinese as representatives of a colonising power. Giving the different ethnic groups a voice – something mostly denied them in China itself – while journeying to some of the least-known corners of the world to do so is the principal motivation for this book.

Challenging the notion that China is a nation largely insulated from outside influences is another reason why I felt the need to go to the ends of China. Far from being cut off, the Middle Kingdom is inexorably bound to its neighbours. China’s land border stretches for 22,117 kilometres, the longest such frontier on earth. Along with Russia, China borders more countries, fourteen, than any other nation in the world. In the north-east, south-west and west, China is surrounded by the most isolated countries of South-east Asia, the ’stans of central Asia, Afghanistan, Bhutan, India and Pakistan, Mongolia, Nepal, North Korea and Russia.

They are some of the most unpredictable states on the planet, and the conflicts that rage within them inevitably spill across the frontiers. To explore the border regions is to enter a very different China from the glittering mega-cities of Beijing and Shanghai, one that is often lawless and prone to violence. Now they are areas where some of the world’s most pressing problems confront China directly. The war against terrorism and on drugs, people smuggling and the exploitation of the environment all have their own unique Chinese aspect.

Twisting history, the CCP does its best to insist that the borderlands have long been part of China. The party ignores how it, and the emperors who came before, took some of those regions by force as little as sixty-odd years ago. It maintains, too, that the minorities enjoy far more prosperous lives under its rule and are content to be part of China, even as its grip on the most restive areas, such as Tibet and Xinjiang, is dependent entirely on the presence of huge numbers of soldiers.

Part of the process of attempting to expunge China’s colonial past, while simultaneously reinforcing Beijing’s dominion, involves erasing physical memories of it. In Jiayuguan, only the heavily restored fort and a few crumbling sections of the Great Wall stand as a reminder of the time when it was a border town. The arrival of the fort, built in 1372 during the early days of the Ming dynasty, and the Wall was an acknowledgment that the emperor’s influence stopped here.

Now, as in most Chinese cities, Jiayuguan’s architecture is designed to impose a uniformity – one that, consciously or not, diminishes the role of the minorities in its history. Lined with the same bland white office blocks and apartment buildings that can be found all over the country, the streets are named after provinces and cities from the distant east, a none too subtle declaration of where power in China resides.

But many of the people who walk those streets are not Han. Jiayuguan has a significant population of Hui, a Muslim minority descended from the Arab and Persian traders who came down the Silk Road thirteen centuries ago. They are perhaps the strangest of all China’s minorities. After hundreds of years of intermarriage with the Han, they are indistinguishable from them physically. Nor do they have a language of their own. They have spread all across China too, unlike most of the minorities who remain clustered in their traditional homelands.

Just their faith in Islam marks them out and the ten million Hui are the sole people classified as a minority because of their religion. Yet, despite their closeness to the Han – the Mandarins of the Qing dynasty distinguished them from more troublesome minorities by dubbing them HanHui – their presence is still an inconvenient hangover from the past. They are the most tangible evidence that Jiayuguan was once both a crucial junction on the Silk Road and China’s far western edge, a place Marco Polo claimed to have passed through, the gateway to and from Muslim lands where Beijing had no remit.

Until the eighteenth century, the Chinese were content to stay put in Jiayuguan’s fort. Only after the Ming dynasty was overthrown by the Manchus, who swept down from north-east China to take Beijing and establish the Qing dynasty, did China turn its attention towards the territories beyond Jiayuguan. Under Emperor Qianlong, the Qing decided they needed to put more space between them and the central Asian tribes they feared would invade.

Armies of Manchu Bannermen started moving west. By 1759, they had massacred around one million people and terrified everyone else into submission. But the Qing’s control over the region the Chinese now call Xinjiang, which means ‘New Frontier’, was always unconvincing, as a series of revolts in the nineteenth century confirmed. Uprisings continue to this day.

Jiayuguan remains a place where China is still seeking to expand its frontiers further. Near by is Jiuquan, China’s space city, from where an increasing number of rockets carrying satellites and the country’s
taikonauts
blast off. In Jiayuguan, you can watch the Long March rockets blazing across the clear desert sky towards the stars, as wondrous a sight for the locals as the camel caravans with their cargoes of unknown treasures that passed through in the days of the Silk Road must have been.

Late one afternoon, I boarded a train moving slowly west to Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang and China’s far west, following the route of the Silk Road through the Hexi Corridor. Once known as the ‘throat’ of China, the Corridor is a bleak, 1,000-kilometre-long sand and pebble plain which the locals call
huang liang
, a phrase that translates as ‘desolate’. A few small towns, former oases on the Silk Road, are dotted across it, but there are hardly any villages. Most of the land is too barren to be cultivated. It is scarred and fissured, as if it has been hacked at by an irritated giant wielding a monster hoe.

During the Silk Road’s heyday, the Hexi Corridor was the conduit for the caravans headed via Xinjiang to far-off India and the Middle East with exotic new inventions like paper and gunpowder. Coming in the opposite direction, the spice merchants and monks and Muslims spreading the new religions of Buddhism and Islam knew that the Corridor was the final hurdle to be navigated before reaching the safe haven of Jiayuguan.

Centuries later, Emperor Qianlong’s armies travelled through the Corridor on their way to claim Xinjiang for China. Now, it is ordinary Chinese who cross it. The train I was on had originated in Shandong Province, a thirty-one-hour ride away in eastern China, and few of the passengers were Uighurs, the people native to Xinjiang. Instead, Han men with bare chests and pyjama-clad women occupied every bunk, sat on the fold-down seats in the corridor or just stood staring out of the windows, while their children ran around playing.

Chatting, and sometimes singing, at all hours, they played cards, drank tea out of plastic containers which they topped up with hot water from thermos flasks and munched Chinese train food – instant noodles, processed sausages and sunflower seeds. Ignoring the no-smoking signs, they scratched, yawned and fingered their mobile phones constantly. They were the Han masses, heading west.

Part I

XINJIANG – THE NEW FRONTIER

We say China is a country vast in territory, rich in resources and large in population; as a matter of fact it is the Han nationality whose population is large and the minority nationalities whose territory is vast and whose resources are rich .
.
.

Mao Zedong speech, 25 April 1956, subsequently published

in the
Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung
, vol. V (1977)

1

‘Uighurs Are Like Pandas’

My friend Billy was always happy to explain why the Uighurs regard the Han as interlopers in Xinjiang. ‘We don’t have any connection with the Chinese,’ he would tell me. ‘We don’t look Chinese, we don’t speak the same language and we don’t eat the same food. And we are Muslims, we believe in Allah. The Chinese believe only in money.’ It was hard to disagree with him. With their thick hair, big eyes and prominent noses, no one would pick the Uighurs as citizens of the same country as the Han.

Soon after I arrived in Urumqi, I stood waiting for Billy outside a popular department store near the city centre. As usual, he was late. Meeting a Uighur often involves hanging around, because they run on different clocks to the Han. Billy set his watch to unofficial Xinjiang time, which is two hours behind Beijing. It isn’t just a case of the Uighurs thumbing their noses at the Chinese, but practical too. Beijing insists on one time zone for all China, another attempt at asserting its mastery over the borderlands. In Urumqi, a 3,000-kilometre journey by car from China’s capital, it means it is still light at nine at night and dark at eight in the morning.

The department store’s workers were lined up outside the entrance like soldiers, while their managers barked instructions at them. Such parades are a common sight in China, whether in factories or outside hairdressers and restaurants. The daily drills are not so much about improving performance or customer service, which remains a vague concept outside of Beijing and Shanghai. Instead, they reaffirm the Chinese devotion to the Confucian order, where everyone has their place.

Teenage and twentysomething Han women made up the vast majority of the store’s staff, confirmation perhaps that the Uighurs sit right at the bottom of Urumqi’s hierarchy. Here in the capital of Xinjiang, where the 9.6 million Uighurs are the largest single ethnic group, the influx of Chinese immigrants in recent years has been such that the Uighurs now account for only 10 per cent of Urumqi’s population.

Small-scale Han migration to Xinjiang began even before the formal incorporation of the region as a full province of China in 1884, prompted by the acute shortage of land in China’s interior as the population multiplied. Parts of the territory were occasionally subject to Chinese rule during the previous 2,500 years. But only Emperor Qianlong had been able to control both the Dzungaria and Tarim basins that make up most of what is Xinjiang.

About the size of western Europe, it is a massive area which borders eight countries and accounts for over one-sixth of China’s total landmass. Much of it is uninhabitable. The Tian Shan Mountains run along the northern frontiers with Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, and divide the dry steppe of the Dzungaria Basin from the Taklamakan Desert which covers most of the Tarim Basin in the south. In the far north the Altai Mountains separate Russia and Mongolia from China. To the west and south, the Pamir, Karakoram and Kunlun ranges mark the frontiers with Afghanistan, Pakistan, Tajikistan, India and Tibet.

Until the Qing dubbed it Xinjiang, it had gone by a variety of names. The Han referred to it first as Xiyu, literally ‘western region’, and later as Huijiang, or ‘Muslim territory’. To the West, it was Chinese Turkestan, a nod to the indigenous population whose roots lie far away in what are now Turkey and the former Russian Caucasus. The sand of the Taklamakan has preserved the bodies of a few of the earliest inhabitants of Xinjiang, who arrived during the Bronze Age. Those mummies have European features, red or brown hair and light-coloured eyes.

Their descendants are the Uighurs, who went on to intermarry with Persians as well as their central Asian neighbours. Xinjiang is home to at least fourteen different ethnic minorities, including Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Mongols, Russians, Tajiks, Tatars and Uzbeks, but only the Uighurs regard it as their country. For them, Xinjiang is a Chinese-imposed name. The unknown numbers who want independence call it East Turkestan.