The night before we set out for the west we went to see a Xinjiang band play at the capital’s first live music venue, Poachers. Bruce Doar had told us that if we really wanted to get a feel for modern Xinjiang culture we had to see Grey Wolf. They were led, as it turned out, by a guy called Askar, the younger brother of the artist Aniwar, who I had recently met for the first time.
And so on the eve of our journey we found ourselves jammed against a stage, mesmerised by this charismatic rocker, who serenaded us with songs of deserts and mountains, wolves and wild spaces and beautiful Russian girls who broke your heart. They were playing ordinary rock instruments but you could hear the ancient rhythms of the Silk Road and all its way stations from Persia to Spain.
And in the crowd, among the rest of us bopping and vogueing, were the Xinjiang-born dancers, the men straight-backed and courtly, spinning and bowing to their partners, the women’s arms gracefully, sinuously held aloft. It was exhilarating to feel in the crowd the power of China’s multi-layered culture, especially in the band with its mixed line-up of Uighurs and Han Chinese. It was the Silk Road brought to life, a highway that connected east to west.
Arriving in Xinjiang’s capital Urumqi a few days later was a jolt. By comparison to today, the military presence was mild, but it was still a shock to come upon soldiers holding mock target practice in the main city square. The message from the local governor, on the other hand, was pacific. We worked hard to get him to admit that there were any problems at all. In the end he did refer to an ‘extremely tiny number’ of people who wanted to ‘divide and destroy’. The contrast with the official line today is stark, with the government talking up every sign of trouble to support its narrative of an existential threat.
The ABC crew and I headed for Kashgar by plane. Bruce Doar likes to tell the story of Xinjiang air travel in the old days, when flight security was a smiling cabin attendant who would make her way down the aisle before take-off, collecting knives and ceremonial daggers on a tray for return to their owners after landing. Sadly, security on our flight was less colourful and more tense—a sign of the times in 1994.
The plane was an ancient Tupolev that came with its own gloomy Russian aircrew. Once we had groaned our way to cruising altitude, I tried to take my mind off the rattles filling the cabin by admiring the snow-capped Tian Shan mountains below, and listening to ‘Lara’s Theme’, which played over the cabin speakers all the way to Kashgar.
Kashgar was a beautiful town then, at its heart the adobe Old City moulded from the earth on which it was built, a maze of streets that dated to the time of Marco Polo. To the Uighurs, it was Kashgar, and not the army-dominated ‘new’ town of Urumqi, that was their true capital.
The Sunday market teemed with traders, selling everything from bolts of local hand-loomed silk and camel-hair rugs to fat-tailed lambs and sturdy Mongolian ponies. In its alleys smelling sweetly of Iranian saffron and cloves were stalls selling consumer goods from the factories of inland China, too. The border had reopened with Pakistan in 1987 and there was now a cracking trade across the Karakoram Mountains.
As in the rest of China, the 1980s in Xinjiang had seen not just an economic transformation but a cultural resurgence, too. Private trading, long banned under Mao, had returned along with the traditional crafts, music, dancing and other arts that had been banned during the Cultural Revolution. Religious observance was no longer outlawed, and in those years even Communist Party cadres were allowed to follow Islam. More genuine autonomy was also proposed for Xinjiang, with the promotion of more Uighurs into government.
But as with the rest of China the events of 1989 were a watershed. From 1990 the laissez-faire attitude to religion was wound back and a fear of Uighur nationalism grew. When the Soviet Union broke up in the early 1990s it created independent Turkic-speaking nations—Uzbekistan, Kirghizstan, and Kazakhstan—just beyond Xinjiang’s borders. The government moved to increase Han Chinese migration to Xinjiang and to draw its economy into closer integration with the rest of the country.
Despite this, Kashgar’s sense of itself as something distinct was palpable to us. Wandering through the back alleys of the Old City near the Id Kah Mosque we met a carpet trader, heavily bearded and of venerable age, who invited us into his home to talk. As we sat down with him on a brightly coloured rug, he and his wife piled up food around us, plates of freshly baked nan bread, slices of watermelon, sun-dried raisins, jewel-like sweets, and tea sweetened with pieces of sparkling rock sugar.
This old man saw the story of Kashgar in terms of millennia, during which 200 years of Chinese rule didn’t seem especially significant. His house had stood unchanged for twice as long as that, he remarked. Overarching everything for him was his faith. Kashgar was among the first of Xinjiang’s cities to convert to Islam, an event dated to 960, a thousand years before we sat down to talk. The coming of the Chinese had made no difference to that basic fact. He suggested there would be a continuing accommodation: ‘We do what we do and the Chinese do what they do, and that’s the way it’s always been.’
But elsewhere in Kashgar there were signs that others were not so philosophical. Not far from where we were staying was a burnt-out government building, still not repaired after a firebomb attack some months before. It was said to be one of a series of such attacks in retaliation for the bloody suppression of an incident in a neighbouring town in the spring of 1990.
The official story was of a planned armed uprising by members of an ‘East Turkestan Islamic Party’ in which hundreds of rioters surrounded government buildings in the town, eventually killing six police officers. The army then moved in, killing the ringleader and sixteen other rebels. An alternative account was of a peaceful demonstration that only turned violent as a standoff developed. Whatever the truth, a subsequent Amnesty International report suggested as many as 50 rioters were killed in the incident, but the true figure may never be known.
Despite this dark undertone to our visit in 1994, I had fallen in love with Xinjiang. When I returned to China in 2004 I resolved to visit the region every summer and I did so for three years. On each trip I would return to Kashgar, and from there set off to explore the other oasis towns that hugged the southern rim of the Taklimakan Desert.
There was Karghilik on the back road into Tibet, a town of adobe houses with vine-shaded courtyards, home to an exquisite, decoratively bricked mosque and a wild public park filled with hollyhocks and vegetable allotments, where the local teenagers roller-skated around a homemade rink to the sounds of Boney M, yelling ‘Ra! Ra! Rasputin!’ 4000 kilometres from Moscow. It was in the park at Karghilik that a group of old men got talking to me and I realised I had forgotten to pack two essentials for Silk Road travel: pictures of my family, and a range of foreign banknotes—both a source of fascination in Xinjiang. As it was, my collection of Chinese currency became a wry conversation piece.
As we examined the 100-yuan bill one of the men touched the placid features of the Great Helmsman with a wrinkled finger. ‘There’s Mao,’ he said, expressionlessly. ‘Fifty yuan,’ he suggested, and when I proffered it he looked at it with a hint of a smile: ‘There he is again.’
Twenty yuan, ten, five, one: I brought them out in turn—‘Mao, Mao, Mao and Mao,’ they murmured.
Finally, I produced one of those grimy scraps of paper that denote ten Chinese cents. No portrait of Chairman Mao this time, just two men in profile drawn to represent China’s ethnic minorities. ‘Oh yes,’ my companions said, ‘here’s us!’ and fell about laughing.
Further along the South Silk Road was Yarkand, once home to traders from India, Bukhara and beyond, its back streets still filled with craftsmen hand-turning poplar wood into decorative banisters and columns for its graceful terraced buildings with their shaded verandahs.
In the summer the faithful prayed beneath a grape arbour, and when a young girl spied me lingering at the carved open gates she picked some of the mosque’s grapes for me to eat. In this town the grandest monument was for Amannisa Kha
n (1526–1560), the Queen of the Yarkand Khanate, a composer and musician who collected and preserved the twelve muqam, the great song cycle of the Uighur people. Around her tomb children played and families picnicked among the graves of their ancestors. In the orchards heavy with apricots, pomegranates and pears, and in fields full of corn, women worked in bright silk dresses and high-heeled shoes, wearing only a light scarf on their hair.
In 2006 I spent a whole summer in Kashgar, passing my days gossiping with the women who worked in my hotel as they laid out plump apricots to dry in the sun. In the cool of the late afternoon I would walk the streets of the town, drawn by the sound of the call to prayer from the Id Kah Mosque, watching goldsmiths fashioning dowry jewellery in the crowded side streets, listening at the door as instrument makers tried their inlaid long-necked lutes and taut hide-covered drums. Wedding parties would parade the main streets, announced by an open truck full of trumpeting musicians, while women zipped past on scooters, resplendent in brightly coloured skirts and high-heeled sandals. I ate all my meals off the street: dinners of fat chunks of lamb skewered over an open brazier, breakfasts of rich Kashgar pilaf and rose petal tea.
By the time I returned to Xinjiang again in the summer of 2009 everything had changed.
Askar and his band were heading for Australia to play the Darwin Festival in August of that year and I had arranged to profile them for The Australian newspaper. My idea was to interview Askar in Urumqi, where he was spending the summer with his family, and then head on to Kashgar.
He and his band had become stars in China. With five Uighur and three Han members, they had worked traditional Uighur instruments into their standard rock line up: two lutes—one bowed and the other plucked—and a cymballed hand drum called a dap. Playing with fiendish, genre-busting intensity, Grey Wolf could bring a room full of stone lions to their feet, especially when Askar’s wife, an acclaimed traditional dancer, came whirling onto the stage. By 2001 they had a top-ten hit and were chosen to support the Three Tenors in their concert at the Forbidden City. By the time they were picked for the Darwin Festival they had toured countries from the Philippines to France.
On July 5 2009 bloody riots broke out in Urumqi. Trouble started with a demonstration by over 1000 Uighurs in the People’s Square. The spark for the demonstration was a report of an ugly incident of Han xenophobia among factory workers in far-off Guangzhou that had flared into anti-Uighur riots, leaving a reported two Xinjiang workers dead and dozens injured. Video of the incident that circulated online, however, suggested a heavier toll. The crowd were demanding an inquiry, and their anger was swelled by deeper currents of resentment.
Uighurs felt that, for some years, Han migration to Xinjiang had been closing off job opportunities and forcing young Uighurs onto the road in search of work. So in Uighur eyes the Guangzhou riot casualties were not just victims, but unwilling exiles from their homeland.
From early 2009 tensions had been rising as the government started bulldozing vast swathes of the historic Old City of Kashgar. The official pretext, laughable and maddening to Uighurs, was that these buildings that had stood for centuries were not earthquake-proof. In their place, characterless developments were going up and most of the former residents were being rehoused on the city fringes.
On July 5 when some demonstrators were arrested at the People’s Square in Urumqi, a standoff quickly developed in the streets near the Grand Bazaar. The Chinese government maintains that the subsequent riots were part of a plot by an international Uighur separatist group. Locals say the spark was police brutality. The violence was shocking: innocent Han Chinese were suddenly targets and it took the police a full day to regain control of the city. In the days that followed, armed Han civilians paraded through the streets in a show of force, while news of retaliatory attacks by Han on Uighurs spread.
The official toll was finally reported as 197 dead and 1721 injured, the majority being Han Chinese. There were allegations by Uighur advocacy groups that the official Uighur death toll was under-reported, but, even so, the way resentment had spilled over into anti-Han violence was sickening and undeniable. In the days after the riots thousands of Uighurs were arrested, with many remaining unaccounted for months later.
Two weeks after the riots I took the long flight across the plains of north China and the snow-capped Tian Shan range to Urumqi. Despite the trouble, I was determined to write the Askar article as planned. It seemed more vital than ever to write about a band whose very makeup spoke to a better possibility.
I arrived in a city that was effectively under martial law. My hotel near the old Uighur bazaar overlooked the barracks of the People’s Armed Police, China’s internal paramilitary security force. The courtyard was a parking lot for military lorries and white-painted personnel carriers decked with minatory slogans about ethnic harmony. I woke the next morning to the crash of boots and shouted orders.
In the streets near the Grand Bazaar truckloads of troops rolled by, staring into the streets through Perspex riot shields. At each corner of the main square stood police squads in groups of four, one armed with a semi-automatic weapon, the other three with meter-long wooden clubs. Camouflaged canvas umbrellas shaded them from the Central Asian sun.
I walked past two young Uighur girls kneeling in the main square, a picture of a young man—their missing brother?—displayed on the rug in front of them. The bazaar, usually alive with people bargaining over everything from dried apricots to reindeer horn, was almost empty. ‘Buy something! Buy something!’ a spice seller pleaded as I walked by.
I visited Askar at home, the apartment full of the children of his extended family watching a dubbed version of The Truman Show. The usual outdoor pursuits of summer had been abandoned: people felt safer inside. What I had planned as an enjoyable talk about his career proceeded uneasily.
We started to talk about how his songs had recently begun to explore the theme of environmental loss. I asked him about one he called ‘Tears of Kashgar’, a lament for the vanishing beauties of his home town. He told me that the song had originally been called ‘Rainbow’, inspired by the revelation that his Beijing-reared son had never seen this simple natural wonder.
‘It made me think of so many of the things that I could see easily when I was young,’ he said. ‘And also of how harmonious things were back then. It was never a question of people being Uighur or Han; everyone got on because everyone’s life was the same.’
Unspoken as we sat talking was the reality of modern Xinjiang, where economic development had sharpened divisions and the idyllic beauty of the old oasis towns was giving way to high rise and glitz. Unspoken also was the tragedy then unfolding in Kashgar as the Old City was bulldozed away.
I tried to probe these themes with him, but he gently cut me off. ‘I believe in peace,’ he said, and I could not ask him more.
In 2009 some hoped that the scale of the violence in Urumqi might lead the government to look for ways to deal with the underlying causes of the unrest. But instead the government chose to go harder, ‘doubling down’—as the long-time observer Nicholas Bequelin, now of Amnesty International, put it—‘on the economic policies that are creating political tensions . . . to even accelerate further things that alienate Uighurs such as rehousing and resettlement, [pursuing] even more invasive economic activities in the region’.
In the 21st century the situation in both Tibet and Xinjiang has got steadily worse, with both regions now under heightened security, enduring an ever more oppressive system of surveillance and militarised policing. In both places Han Chinese immigration has proceeded apace, while locals endure endless needle-pricks of religious and cultural control.
Since the Lhasa riots of March 2008, some 144 Tibetans living within China have set themselves on fire in protest against the regime. These desperate acts have proved an embarrassment and the Chinese government does what it can to ensure they go unreported.
The situation in Xinjiang is worse. Ever-tighter policies of surveillance and con
trol are creating what the government professes most to fear—radicalisation and terrorism.
In October 2013 a four-wheel drive vehicle crashed in Tiananmen Square, bursting into flames and killing its occupants and two tourists who were walking near Tiananmen Gate. Inside the car were three Uighurs from Xinjiang, a male driver accompanied by his wife and mother. Journalists tried in vain to learn why these three would have committed suicide in such a terrible way. There was talk that they were in despair over the destruction of their local mosque back home, but the Beijing authorities branded them as radical Islamist separatists.
A few months later, in March 2014, a deadlier attack took place at the main railway station in Kunming, the capital of Yunnan province. A group of eight people, six men and two women, attacked passengers with knives in a random and horrific attack in which 29 people were killed and many more injured. Then, in April that same year, three people were killed and dozens wounded in a coordinated bomb and knife attack in Urumqi railway station. A month later there was another attack in Urumqi by five assailants who drove two SUVs into a popular food market and threw bombs into the crowd, killing 39 people.
There was no doubt that at least the last three of these attacks constituted terrorism, bloody and calculated violence designed for effect. But terrorism is a slippery label when it comes to Xinjiang. The three attacks occurred amidst a series of murkier incidents also branded as terrorism but which look more like an embattled populace reacting to excessive levels of control. In all these cases the government resorted to deadly force in the name of China’s war on terror.
In July 2014 Chinese authorities reported that a mob armed with knives and axes had attacked a police station in a small village near Yarkand and 96 people had been killed: 37 bystanders and 59 people who the police identified as ‘terrorists’. According to the authorities the mob had attacked after a crackdown in the town had turned up a cache of explosives. An investigation by the Uighur-speaking reporters at Radio Free Asia, however, suggested an alternative account: the crowd marched on the police station after a crackdown on religious observance during Ramadan and the extra-judicial killing of a Uighur family in a neighbouring town. Faced with a rioting mob the police had opened fire.
The Phoenix Years Page 27