We arrived, we walked, it snowed, we bought jumpers. We saw our first skyscrapers, we ate our first Chinese street food and then we caught our (second) train.

 

We could have made trips to mountain lakes and snowy valleys but we’d done a lot of that in recent weeks. Urumqi was only really a stopover. It was nice to be in a big city though. And it was still interesting to see Chinese and Arabic scripts in the signs and the Turkish looking Uighur people amongst the Chinese faces on the streets.

 

The book I’m reading gave the background to the Uighur - Chinese relations. The book is Oracle Bones, by Peter Hessler and there’s several pages about Xinjiang province. Here’s a shortened version:

 

Apart from a brief spell as the independent kingdom of Kashgaria between 1864 and 1878 and as the republic of East Turkestan in 1933 and 1944, Uighur people have long been subject to Chinese rule... In the early 1980s, the chinese government deliberately encouraged Islam in Xinjiang, funding mosque construction and even paying for religious leaders to make the Hajj to Mecca. The government hoped that religious growth would defuse unrest. It didn’t, as Ted Rall, an American political cartoonist, summaries in an article about Kashgar posted on his blog a few months ago:

 

“...Back in 1999 unemployed Uyghur men were listening to the United States' Radio Free Asia and its calls to resist. Some had even gone to Afghanistan to attend Taliban training camps so they could take on the Chinese. They believed what they heard in the broadcasts. "America will help us," the Uyghurs said.

 

Uyghur insurgents had been blowing up government offices all over western China. I was sucking up a bowl of Kashgari laghman noodles (they make a trip to Kashgar worthwhile, all by themselves) when someone bombed the post office; people on the street hardly noticed. Of course, the regime was anything but oblivious.

 

The East Turkestan Independence Movement (ETIM) was the biggest Uyghur resistance group. Its leaders were executed or imprisoned, its offices raided. Martial law, declared and de facto, shut down Uyghur businesses in Muslim areas.

 

9/11 was the beginning of the end for the independence movement. In exchange for its support in the "war on terror"--or, more precisely, as a quid pro quo for not exercising its veto option in the U.N. security council--China demanded that the U.S. declare ETIM (which had received U.S. funding during the 1990s) a terrorist organization. Its 22 remaining leaders were sent not to a Chinese concentration camp, but an American one: Gitmo. Soon even the hardened torturers at Guantánamo were ashamed. If repatriated to China they would have been killed, so five of the "freedom fighters" were sent to the one nation that agreed to take them in: Albania, whose culture and language were alien to them. The other 17 remain in an isolation unit at Gitmo's Camp Six, where they are reported to be suffering from deteriorating mental health. The U.S. pronounced itself satisfied that it had done the best it could to rectify its mistake. ETIM, and the Uyghur fight against China, is essentially dead.

 

Uyghur activists continue to suffer official repression. In February [2007] Ismail Semed was executed on the usual charge of "splittism"--advocating the balkanization of the Chinese state. Quite by accident, however, the Chinese government has found Uyghurs more receptive to money than bullets.

 

In 2001 geologists confirmed substantial oil deposits in the desert north of Kashgar. Next, in 2005, China opened the first major pipeline to carry oil and gas from Kazakhstan. A big refinery and switching facility opened a stone's throw across the desert from Kashgar. Presto: boomtown!

 

Today Kashgar's skyline is one of construction cranes and scaffolding. Most of the Old City has been razed, its streets paved. New buildings are going up everywhere. There are four-star hotels, upscale shopping malls, even a second-floor café where you can score a passable strawberry margarita. A walk across town used to take an hour. Now you need a taxi.

 

In the New Kashgar it's cheaper to hire the locals than import more Han from back east. So the government has ordered employers to present Uyghurs with a devil's bargain: give up your culture in exchange for a job. Mandatory staff meetings are held during Friday afternoon prayers. Hats (including skullcaps) are prohibited.

 

So martial law is no more. The ghetto, which has the best bazaars, is a tourist attraction. True, there's still a big gap between the living standards of the Chinese, many of whom are second-generation Kashgaris, and the Uyghurs. They're the seeds of a nascent, assimilated middle class.”

 

J