The Emperor Far Away

by David Eimer

  The 2009 protests were triggered by the murder of two Uighurs working in a factory in southern Guangdong Province, near Hong Kong. They had been falsely accused of raping a Han woman, and her co-workers had set upon them. The news of the killings reached Xinjiang quickly via text messages. Along with the internet, mobile phones have made it far harder for the CCP to censor unwelcome news. The only way to do so is by severing all access. Within hours of the riots breaking out, it was impossible to make a call to Xinjiang, or send or receive a text.

  Beijing, though, blamed the disturbances on its usual Uighur suspect, Rebiya Kadeer. Once a highly successful businesswoman and a member of the National People’s Congress, China’s rubber-stamp version of parliament, she was held up by the Han as a role model to other Uighurs. But Kadeer fell foul of the authorities after criticising the CCP’s policies in Xinjiang. She was imprisoned for six years before being allowed to go into exile in Washington DC, where there is a large expatriate Uighur community.

  Since then, Kadeer has become the president of the World Uighur Congress. A Munich-based coalition of exiled groups agitating for an independent Uighur state, the Congress is the most visible face of opposition to Chinese rule in Xinjiang. In response, Beijing has consistently pilloried Kadeer as a separatist and terrorist, and was quick to accuse her and the Congress of orchestrating the riots. Kadeer insists she wants to establish an independent East Turkestan through a peaceful, non-violent and democratic process.

  For the CCP there is no greater crime than separatism. The crowning achievement of Mao and the party was to unite China; to advocate dividing it is heresy. Ever since the start of the twentieth century, Chinese intellectuals had argued that a lack of nationalist sentiment was the reason why China had been bullied and exploited by the former colonial powers throughout the previous century.

  By the time Sun Yat-sen became the first president of China in 1912 after the Qing dynasty had been overthrown, that argument was enshrined in the theory of minzuzhuyi, or nationalism. Sun described the Manchu, Mongols, Uighurs, Tibetans and other minorities as ‘alien’ races, whereas the Han were descended from Huang Di, the great Yellow Emperor and the father of Chinese civilisation. Only by standing together at all times could the Han maintain their supremacy.

  It is a doctrine which, by claiming that the Han are all one big family, automatically excludes the minorities from being considered wholly Chinese. But rather than admit that, or recognise why the Uighurs regard the Han as invaders, it is far easier for Beijing to make scapegoats out of Kadeer and the World Uighur Congress. Blaming external forces has become the way the CCP deals with internal unrest, a convenient means of both stoking Han nationalism and avoiding acknowledging that some minorities would rather not be Chinese. To do anything else would be a tacit admission of how their policies towards them have failed.

  After meeting Mardan, I had my first and only Uighur language lesson. I was hesitant about travelling through the Uighur-dominated countryside of Xinjiang speaking my bad Mandarin. If nothing else, I thought uttering a few phrases in Uighur would make the locals laugh and so be better disposed towards me. But as soon as I met my tutor, whose English name was Jenny, I realised that humour wasn’t on her agenda.

  Short and stout with thick black eyebrows, Jenny taught Uighur at a local university. She was a hard taskmaster. In China, teachers are used to being obeyed, and students at both schools and colleges are much more respectful than they are in the West. As she rattled through a basic primer of Uighur words, phrases and numbers so quickly I didn’t have time to write them down, my constant interruptions to get her to repeat what I had missed made her both cross and scornful.

  ‘You’re not concentrating. I thought you wanted to learn,’ she admonished me. I asked her not to speak so fast. Jenny responded by enunciating the strange sounds so slowly that I felt like the stupid boy in class again. Unsure of the spelling of some of the words, I asked her to write them for me. She did so, but in Arabic script. I told her I had enough trouble with Chinese characters, so she could forget me learning Arabic.

  I was as keen to hear about her life as I was to study her language. Uighur society is far less strict than the Middle East, but it is still a Muslim culture and most women don’t speak to men they don’t know. Nor are Uighur males happy with foreigners talking to them. Jenny, though, didn’t wear a headscarf and was used to dealing with overseas students, so I thought it was a good opportunity to hear a Uighur woman’s point of view.

  First, I asked why she didn’t cover her head. ‘I am a member of the CCP, so I don’t follow Islam,’ she said. The eighty-two million-odd members of the CCP are a self-electing elite; you are invited to join. Jenny had been recruited while she was a student. She was the first Uighur in the party I had met and a rarity, because only 6 per cent of the CCP are from ethnic minorities. ‘I was asked to join when I was nineteen. You can’t really say no. It’s helped me get tenure at my university. I wouldn’t have got that if I wasn’t a member.’

  Tenure for Chinese academics means the chance to buy a cheap apartment on campus, subsidised healthcare and a guaranteed salary whether you are teaching or not. In China, those are coveted benefits. Despite its professed socialist policies, the CCP does not provide its citizens with free education or healthcare, while the cost of buying a flat has spiralled in recent years as China’s economy has boomed. School fees, medical bills and mortgages swallow up a large part of people’s incomes.

  Jenny had paid a high price for her relatively comfortable life too, even if she claimed it didn’t matter to her that the party’s rules meant she wasn’t allowed to wear a headscarf or pray in the mosque with her family. ‘It’s not a problem. Maybe it would be if I came from the countryside, where people don’t have much education and believe in Islam much more,’ she said.

  She was still single at twenty-eight, an age when most women in Xinjiang are married. I wondered if her adoption of a more liberal lifestyle made it harder for her to find a partner. ‘I had a boyfriend, but we split up,’ said Jenny with a fierce glare. ‘Was he Uighur?’ I asked. ‘Of course, I wouldn’t go out with or marry a Chinese guy. It’s not that I think they’re worse than Uighur guys – I think all men are quite similar. It’s because I come from a different culture.’

  We had wandered far from the reason for our meeting, and Jenny was growing more disaffected by the minute. I had jotted down a few notes of our conversation. Jenny snatched my notebook from me, ripped out the page where they were written and tore it into little pieces which she tossed into an ashtray. Not content with that, she took my lighter and set fire to the scraps. ‘We’re here to study Uighur,’ she told me. ‘Not to get me into trouble.’

  Ever polite, Billy smiled when I told him about my combative lesson and resisted interrupting as I attempted to order dinner in Uighur. But he was also single. He had a different problem to Jenny: his lack of regular work and cash didn’t make him a great catch. It was a rare night out for us, as Billy preferred to be with his family after dark. I was leaving Urumqi soon, though, and had offered to take him to his favourite restaurant as a farewell.

  Joining us was Murat, Billy’s younger brother. His thinning, receding hair made him look older than Billy, but he had the same skinny frame and narrow face. Instead of English, his foreign language was Russian. It was a sensible choice because Russian remains the lingua franca of central Asia. While Billy watched Chelsea on the internet and dreamed of emigrating to London or Washington, Murat worked as a translator and fixer for the increasing numbers of people from the countries surrounding Xinjiang who come to Urumqi to shop.

  ‘Most of my customers are Russians who live in Kazakhstan, as well as Kazakhs and Uzbeks. They buy everything from construction machinery to clothes and electronics. I negotiate with the sellers, arrange the transportation and get a percentage of each deal,’ he explained. With prices for almost everything at least 50 per cent lower in China, and rapidly expanding road, train and flight links with the surr
ounding region, Murat had no shortage of clients and made more money than anyone else in his family.

  Much of his work takes place at the Hualing Wholesale Mall, Urumqi’s modern-day equivalent of the bazaars that once lined the route of the Silk Road. It is the biggest market in Xinjiang: two vast buildings, each one 800,000 square metres, side by side in the north of Urumqi. Billy, Murat and I arrived to find Uighur beggars sidling up to the approaching shoppers, who were mostly Russians and Kazakhs, interspersed with the odd Pakistani or Indian.

  Inside, a dazzling variety of merchandise was spread across four floors. Whether you want a duvet or a dishwasher, a sofa or a stereo system, Hualing has one, and at prices that make shopping in bulk attractive. Most of the customers were dragging around wheeled suitcases and bags stuffed with their purchases. Others needed the trucks parked around the back to take away all they had bought.

  On the third floor, we found one of Murat’s regular contacts, a television retailer named Wang Guanghui. Han, but born in Urumqi, Wang sat in his shop drinking green tea, surrounded by TVs playing a mixture of movies and Chinese soap operas at different volumes. ‘In Kazakhstan, TVs are double the price they are here. Most of my customers will buy ten at a time. But some are just ordinary people. They come and buy a TV and then take it back on the bus,’ he said.

  Many of the Han working at Hualing come from inland China’s major manufacturing centres, such as Wenzhou, Yiwu and Dongguan. They are cities that are now as famous to traders in Asia as Kashgar and Xi’an were during the heyday of the Silk Road – the places where the merchandise Wang and the other traders sell originates. ‘Ninety per cent of the people who run the stores here are Chinese. The Uighurs don’t know how to run a business like this. They don’t have the connections in the east to get the goods,’ said Wang.

  Murat was one of the lucky few Uighurs whose language skills enabled him to work as a middleman at Hualing. But most of his compatriots never set foot in the place. To them, it is as remote as the Forbidden City in Beijing – just another example of how the Uighurs are being excluded from economic life in their homeland. Outside, the beggars were still lurking in hope as we walked to the back of the market where trucks with licence plates from as far off as Germany waited to be loaded with goods bound for the West. It was a new Silk Road all right, but not one the Uighurs would be travelling down.

  3

  Exiles

  The Uighurs might not be profiting from the new Silk Road, but a few are using it to escape China. I wanted to follow them and investigate the Uighur diaspora in central Asia. My timing was off, though, when I visited Yining, a city close to Kazakhstan thriving on cross-border trade. After arriving on the overnight train from Urumqi, I hopped in a taxi to a hotel, only to find my way in blocked by the Wu Jing, who sent me packing before I was out of the car. It transpired that my first choice of lodging had been taken over by a high-ranking member of China’s politburo.

  For the officials of Yining, a tiny city by Chinese standards of just 250,000 people, the presence of the fourth most senior politician in the country was the equivalent of the pope, the Queen of England and the president of the USA all arriving at the same time. Over the next few days, crossing roads became a tedious process as the police held up both pedestrians and cars while he moved around Yining in a convoy of police vehicles and black SUVs, all travelling at speeds that contravened even China’s lax traffic laws.

  Trailing around town, it took me two hours to find a place to stay. Some hotels were booked out by the officials and media accompanying the special guest from Beijing. Others weren’t licensed to take foreigners, and wouldn’t bend the rules with so many police on duty for the visit. Eventually, I found a home on a road named after Stalin, a legacy of the time when China and the Soviet Union had been allies and Yining sat near the frontier between their respective empires.

  Ninety-five kilometres from the border with Kazakhstan, Yining has been fought over for centuries by Russia, China and Mongolia. As late as 1962, Soviet and Chinese soldiers were exchanging fire across the frontier. That history has left it with a muddled identity. To the Chinese it is Yining, but the Uighurs call it Ili, the name of the river that runs through the south of the city. The Russians and Kazakhs refer to it as Gulja, a name it acquired when the tsar’s forces briefly occupied it in the late nineteenth century.

  Normally tranquil, with a smattering of faux-Russian architecture and tree-lined streets which provide much-needed shelter from the ferocious summer sun, Yining sits in the Ili Valley. The river that gives the valley its name ensures it is the most fertile part of Xinjiang. Yining’s suburbs are expanding fast, but they give way to fields of wheat, corn, lavender and green pastures full of grazing sheep that stretch all the way to the frontier with Kazakhstan. Looming over them are the snow-tipped Tian Shan Mountains, which divide China from central Asia.

  Like many small cities in China, Yining is really just an overgrown country town, the donkey carts that act as taxis in the older districts only adding to the rustic feel. But Yining’s proximity to the border means it and the surrounding area are home to the greatest concentration of the 1.25 million ethnic Kazakhs in Xinjiang. As such, it is the capital of the province’s Kazakh Autonomous Prefecture. It is a title that dates back to the 1950s, when Xinjiang was carved into autonomous areas. Each of the region’s minorities was given a prefecture or county ostensibly run by a local authority staffed by their own people.

  Predictably, the Uighurs are not part of this scheme. None of the areas of Xinjiang where they are a majority are designated as Uighur autonomous districts, although the entire province was renamed the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region in 1955. This glaringly obvious ruse to restrict Uighur influence verges on the ridiculous in many places. In the vast Mongolian prefecture that extends south from the centre of Xinjiang to the border with neighbouring Qinghai Province, the Uighurs outnumber the Mongols seven to one.

  With every senior ethnic minority official shadowed by a Han CCP cadre who holds the real power, the prefectures and counties are merely for show. They are a classic example of divide and rule, a way of separating the Uighurs from the other ethnic groups and preventing any joint rebellion. It has been an effective tactic in Xinjiang, because the Uighurs’ antipathy towards other minorities, even their fellow Muslims, is notable. Whenever I asked why that was I got vague answers blaming their different lifestyles. ‘We are traditionally farmers, while the Kazakhs and Kyrgyz are nomadic people,’ one Uighur told me.

  Angelina, a Uighur woman I got to know in Yining, was more honest. ‘A lot of Uighurs are jealous of the Kazakhs and other minorities because they all have their own autonomous areas. They think the other minorities get treated better than we do.’ She said it with a shrug which could have been her way of expressing a view on the boundless capacity of the Uighurs to feel sorry for themselves, or her agreeing with their sentiments. It was hard to tell.

  Introduced by a mutual friend, a Uighur living in exile in Australia, we met for the first time outside Yining’s most fashionable department store. The advertising billboards which covered its façade were all of smiling Han faces, something which can’t have been lost on the Uighur and ethnic Kazakh shoppers. Unlike the perpetually late Billy, Angelina was dead on time. She strode confidently up to me, her long hair in a ponytail and slim and elegant in a white dress that showed off her brown legs. She shook my hand and suggested we go to a nearby park to talk.

  Despite being born and raised in Yining, Angelina was not your typical small-town girl. At twenty-six, she seemed much older than her years. As we strolled through the park, passing middle-aged Han women pushing their grandchildren in buggies and groups of teenagers in the baggy tracksuits that are school uniforms in China, it became apparent that her experiences were far removed from those of most Uighurs.

  Angelina’s divergence from the path of provincial life began when she was fourteen. Her excellent exam results meant she was one of eighty Uighurs selected from across
all Xinjiang to attend high school in a big city in the east of China. It was a chance to gain a far better education than she could expect in Yining; the catch was she had to leave her parents and travel more than 3,000 kilometres from home to obtain it.

  It had been akin to going to boarding school in a foreign country. ‘I remember when we arrived and one girl from Kashgar started crying immediately. Then we saw the food and we were all unhappy. I really missed Uighur food and I missed not being at home for the Muslim festivals too,’ said Angelina. From the time she arrived at the school, she hardly saw her mother and father. ‘I got to go back home once a year, but my parents weren’t able to come and visit me. It was too far.’

  Adapting to her new Chinese classmates was no easier. ‘The Han kids thought we were foreigners when we first arrived. They came and said “Hello” to us in English. They didn’t know anything about Xinjiang except that it was very poor. They would ask us if we went to school on camels and if we had television.’ Nor were there many opportunities to dispel the stereotypes held by their Han counterparts. ‘We didn’t have much contact with the Chinese kids. We were taught on our own, we ate different food because we were Muslims and we lived at the school while they went home each day,’ said Angelina.

  Her reward for four years of isolation in Han China was a place at one of the country’s top universities. After graduating, she had not been keen to return to Xinjiang. ‘I wanted to stay and find a job suited to my degree. But my parents didn’t agree. They wanted me to come home because I had been away for eight years and they missed me. So I did. I felt sad for the first few months I was back in Ili. I missed the east and the big cities. I suppose I had got used to the life there.’ Angelina said it in a rueful tone that made it obvious that she still chafed at living in a backwater like Yining.