Urumqi, capital of the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, lies at the foot of the snow-capped Tianshan Mountains. A city with a population of one and a half million, its walls are covered with the same advertisements for Western cosmetics and designer clothes you see all over China. The only apparent concession to Urumqi's ethnic character are the slogans in Arabic characters. In the main streets, donkey carts loaded with flat loaves of bread, watermelons, grapes and apricots, driven by Uighurs with Central Asian features, thread their way among the Western cars and broad-beamed buses.
Like all large Chinese cities, Urumqi is modern, ugly and chaotic. Yet in some ways it seems straight out of the 19th century. You can buy things you won't find anywhere else in the province, like eau de cologne or a pair of binoculars. You can study, set up in business, or just enjoy the taste and smell of a metropolis. Villagers and oasis-dwellers flock to the city to get married or simply have their photos taken.
Xinjiang is a huge region (1) with a population of 17m, including 8m Muslim Uighurs, the largest ethnic group. It consists of two desert enclaves ringed by the Himalayas. It is of strategic importance to Beijing because of its borders with Mongolia, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Chinese Tibet, as well as its large oil, natural gas and coal reserves. In addition, the Chinese army uses an area in the southeast of the region, near Lake Lop Nor, to test nuclear weapons.
Urumqi has always been a bridgehead for Chinese domination (2), but many Uighurs now live in the city and many more continue to come in search of work. The Uighur quarter begins near the bazaar, where Chinese shopkeepers sell souvenirs to tourists, whereas the Uighurs tend to trade in practical goods like materials, carpets, saucepans, food and spices. The side streets are crowded with Central Asians bustling about their business, displaying the full range of Central Asian physiognomy, hair types and eye colours. Some women wear a small patch of cloth that barely covers their hair. Others wear longer, thicker veils. Alongside men with long beards, you also see women completely hidden under a sort of brown woollen blanket. Ten years ago veiled women were extremely rare. Now there are more and more of them - a sign of the strengthening of Muslim identity in a region not previously known for its attachment to religious tradition.
The Uighurs call their homeland East Turkestan. According to Enver Can, president in exile of the East Turkestan National Congress, "the Uighurs have never been religious extremists. They are socially and culturally tolerant. Many Buddhists and Christians live in East Turkestan. The emergence of more assertive Islamic groups is an entirely understandable response to the Chinese authorities' repressive and insulting attitude to Islam and the harsh restrictions imposed (including a ban on civil servants professing their religion and on religious education for children). The Islamic revival is entirely due to Chinese repression. Our people see it as the only way to assert their identity in public."
The history of Xinjiang is marked by centuries of resistance to Chinese colonisation. A kingdom of Kashgaria, or Turkestan, was established in the 19th century, with Kashgar as its capital. This was followed by brutal repression by the Manchu warlords and the eventual creation of a Turkestan Republic supported by the Soviet Union. Xinjiang finally succumbed to Chinese domination in 1949, when the People's Republic of China decided to consolidate its frontiers in order to contain Soviet expansion and prevent close contact between the Chinese Uighurs and those living in the Muslim republics of the USSR. Since then, the population has been subjected to systematic discrimination. During the Cultural Revolution mosques were destroyed and, in a drive to bury claims for the recognition of Uighur identity under the weight of numbers, the Chinese authorities began to encourage ethnic Chinese to migrate to Xinjiang. Following a brief thaw after Deng Xiaoping came to power in 1978, forced Sinification was stepped up in the 1990s along with a strategy of regional development.
National feeling increased among the Uighurs, who were fast becoming foreigners in their own land. It was given a further boost in December 1991 when Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, the three USSR Muslim republics with a common frontier with China, gained independence (3). On both sides of the frontiers many Uighurs began to dream of an Uighuristan republic, and repression only strengthened the trend. April-May 1996 saw serious unrest followed by a wave of arrests. On 5 February 1997 nine people were killed and several hundred injured in an uprising in Yining (Gulya), a city of 300,000 inhabitants on the Kazakhstan border (4), where demonstrators called for the creation of an independent Islamic state. The United National Revolutionary Front of East Turkestan (UNRF) (5) claims that 57,000 Uighurs were arrested in 1997 alone. Since that time, the authorities have not succeeded in restoring calm to the city.
"We have been calling for dialogue for years," says Enver Can in resigned tones. "The Chinese prefer to call us terrorists, fundamentalists or extremists. It is basically a reflection of their own weakness." All key positions in Xinjiang are held by ethnic Chinese, and Uighur officials have no real power. Meanwhile, the massive flow of Chinese colonists continues unabated. Xinjiang, the "new frontier", attracts people from all over China, and a wide variety of ethnic groups throng the streets of Urumqi. Heavily made-up incomers wearing shorts, mini-skirts and high-heels contrast with the austere dress of the Muslim women. Ethnic Chinese from the interior, mostly migrant workers, find jobs in the markets or in agriculture, especially during the cotton harvest. They work alongside Chinese peasants encouraged to come to the region to clear new land and settle in the new towns.
These poor incomers, who are doing pretty unenviable jobs, can hardly be described as colonists. But although they are fleeing from poverty elsewhere, their presence is still felt as an invasion. Especially as they have no trouble getting the precious work permits that are often refused to Uighurs. "Many jobs in the employment fairs are reserved for ethnic Chinese," people complain. "The advertisement boards make that quite plain."
The ethnic Chinese population has grown by 31% over the last 10 years (6), exacerbating the centuries-old strained relationship between the Chinese Empire and the population of Central Asia. When Beijing extended its control over Xinjiang in 1949, the indigenous people comprised 94% of the population and the Chinese less than 6%. Now the Chinese population makes up over 40% of the total, and tension between the communities is rising as the amount of arable land decreases.
These figures include the members of the bingtuan, a peasant-soldier corps to which the task of colonisation was assigned in the 1950s and 1960s. The bingtuan has grown into an all-embracing institution whose activities stretch from prison management to agriculture, via trade and industry. It runs most of the work camps in the Chinese gulag as well as huge state farms, and employs over 2m people, almost all of whom are ethnic Chinese - that is, one in three Chinese living in Xinjiang.
Some of these people are former soldiers demobbed in the region at the end of the civil war in 1949. Others are forced migrants from the 1950s and 1960s, or new arrivals from the 1990s for whom bingtuan and Xinjiang are synonymous. They live in a world apart, in an organisation still strongly collectivist and on land over which the local authorities have no control. With their own universities, hospitals, new towns and police forces, they are accountable only to the central government in Beijing.
All Xinjiang's cities are on the same pattern as Urumqi. They consist of a Chinese new town, ugly and chaotic but undeniably dynamic, where the shoddy tile façades of the apartment blocks are chipped and broken before the buildings are even finished and coloured balloons mark the position of new restaurants, hairdressing saloons and shops. Next to it, struggling to survive the bulldozers, is the Uighur town, a maze of mud-brick houses better suited to the extremes of the climate, shady terraces, mosques, walls decorated with Middle Eastern ceramics, tea rooms, bazaars, little squares - and growing poverty. There are increasing numbers of men with long beards and women wearing veils.
Restrictions on the education of children have become one of the greatest causes of resentment. "An Uighur who does not speak Chinese well has great difficulty in finding work," Enver Can explains. "But if he attends a Chinese school, he is forcibly assimilated. Chinese education policy is designed to Sinify all aspects of Uighur life." Writers and musicians who express ethnic sentiments considered too disruptive are censured or even imprisoned. Chinese policy has created a spiral of violence. Mosques are closed down or demolished, schools in the Uighur language (whose existence is officially guaranteed by the authorities) are deprived of funding, and religious practice becomes the target of repression. The resulting tension gives rise to outbreaks of rioting that are crushed by the authorities at the cost of more and more arrests and executions.
The city of Kashgar is famous throughout Central Asia for its magnificent bazaar, where merchants from all over China converge as they have done for centuries. The people are proud of its role as the capital of southern Xinjiang. In this part of the region Uighurs are still a large majority and the Chinese presence seems even more incongruous. But all this could change quickly now that a new railway has been built linking Kashgar with Urumqi and the rest of China. Tension in the city is palpable, even if people are not willing to talk about it. Posters outside police stations order the population to "hand in their weapons immediately". Just as revealing are the words of an ethnic Chinese taxi driver who used to be an army driver and has lived in Xinjiang for 30 years: "These people are crazy. Who ever heard of East Turkestan? They are criminals and terrorists. The only way is to round them up and shoot the lot of them. That's all they understand."
The authorities' response is just as simplistic. Any sort of gathering is immediately met by massive police deployment. A bus stands empty in the middle of the road. The Uighur driver has been taken away, the police having decreed that anyone not carrying his identity papers is to be arrested. Street peddlers quickly make themselves scarce. A few steps away, life in the Chinese quarter proceeds normally, without interference.
In 1996 the central government decided to solve the problem of unrest in Xinjiang by launching a "strike hard" campaign against crime. It targets intellectuals, dissidents and supporters of self-determination as well as common criminals, and has been condemned by human rights organisations throughout the world as brutal and arbitrary. Violent repression is followed by heavy sentences at mass public trials.
Truckloads of prisoners in blue uniforms, almost all of them Uighurs, their heads shaven and their hands tied behind their backs, are no uncommon sight. Round their necks hang signs in Arabic and Chinese characters describing them as "separatists" or "trouble-makers". The prisoners are put on public display in stadiums filled by the authorities, after which those sentenced to death are taken directly to their place of execution. According to Amnesty International, Xinjiang is the only place in China where political prisoners still receive death sentences. Official figures show over 200 people executed from 1997 to 1999 (7), but the real figure is probably even higher, since for every case the official press reports, there is another it does not mention.
In Hotan, once famous for the quality of its jade, the city centre has been completely rebuilt to remove all traces of Uighur architecture. Yet the inhabitants are becoming increasingly Islamised and there is growing polarisation between ethnic Chinese and Uighurs. Lantern posts are covered with photographs of people wanted by the police for terror attacks or illegal possession of weapons, or simply accused of separatism. "The civilian population are being treated like criminals," a local Uighur resident complains. "Here, like in Gulja, almost every family has had one of its members executed or killed, or someone who has disappeared or been tortured or imprisoned, often without trial. The children in these families are growing up bitterly resentful. They hide their feelings for the time being, but they are certain to take every opportunity to organise resistance."
Beijing has redoubled its efforts to gain control of the situation by adopting a technique that has proved effective elsewhere in recent years: granting a degree of economic freedom in exchange for the abandonment of political demands. This explains the ambitious "western development project", which is supposed to overcome poverty in Xinjiang and almost the whole western half of the country, by attracting foreign investment. But foreign firms are disappointingly slow in coming to the region, discouraged by the lack of infrastructure and the harsh local conditions.
Last summer a delegation of Hong Kong industrialists was brought to Xinjiang in a blaze of publicity. But despite the usual enthusiastic statements to the press, no major contract was signed. In any case, whatever money reaches Xinjiang seems to benefit only the ethnic Chinese, since the bureaucracy systematically discriminates against Uighurs (8). Beijing's hope that economic development will tie Xinjiang more firmly to China seems unrealistic. Uighur businessmen who have prospered from the economic opportunities do not necessarily stop supporting resistance against the Chinese or helping to perpetuate Uighur culture (9). And when Chinese entrepreneurs make money, it only serves to exacerbate opposition to their presence.
Although government propaganda labels any resistance to Chinese control as terrorist, religion is clearly not the issue in Xinjiang. What is a stake is respect for civil liberties and the survival of a people and a culture that are being forcibly assimilated.
* Journalist, Hong Kong
(1) 1.6m km2, one sixth of the total area of the huge Chinese empire.
(2) Urumqi was developed under the Manchu (Qing) dynasty (1644-1911), which consolidated the conquest of Xinjiang during the 18th century. It was formerly a garrison-city for Chinese troops and their families.
(3) The 1989 census showed 263,000 Uighurs living in (former) Soviet Central Asia. Uighur sources put the figure at over a million.
(4) Ten dead and 130 wounded, according to Beijing.
(5) The UNRF independence movement claimed to have at least 2,000 combatants in 1997.
(6) For recent developments in Xinjiang, see Nicolas Becquelin, "Xinjiang in the Nineties", The China Journal, no 44, Canberra, July 2000.
(7) For an up-to-date account of human rights in the region, see Human Rights Watch Backgrounder Human Rights Concerns in Xinjiang, October 2000.
(8) See Bruce Gilley, "Uighurs Need Not Apply", Far Eastern Economic Review, Hong Kong, 23 August 2001.
(9) Rebiya Kadeer, an Uighur businesswoman who made a fortune in trade, is a case in point. Once held up as an example by the authorities, she has been sentenced to eight years imprisonment for allegedly passing state secrets to her husband, who lives in exile in the United States.
The 8m Uighurs, who are Turkic-speaking Sunni Muslims, are the largest officially recognised national minority in Xinjiang. Despite the difficulties in enumerating and defining the many cultures and ethnic groups in China, the Beijing authorities have decreed that the People's Republic is inhabited by 56 "nationalities", the largest being the Han, or ethnic Chinese, with 92% of the total population. The remainder are an assortment of "minorities" ranging from Tibetans to Mongols. They include southwestern groups like the Miao, Yao and Yi, and northwestern groups such as Uighurs, Kazakhs, Russians, Kyrgyz and Tajiks (1).
The "minorities" have become a sort of Disneyland attraction, as shown by the existence of two theme parks in Beijing and Shenzhen called "China in miniature" and "Minorities in miniature". Here, beside reproductions of their typical architecture, the minorities sing and dance in traditional costume, reduced to serving as a background for the family photos of the new Chinese middle classes.
(1) See Frank Dikötter, The Discourse of Race in Modern China, Hurst & Company, London, 1992; Colin MacKerras, China's Minority Cultures, St Martin's Press, New York, 1995.
In recent years Uighur Islamic militants have not only established close contacts with likeminded coreligionists in the former Soviet Union. They have also forged links with groups in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia and have drawn inspiration from the Afghan rebels. Some of them have been fighting in Afghanistan since 1986, and many Chinese Uighurs have studied at madrasas (Islamic religious schools). But these are the acts of individuals. No Uighur organisations are known to have supported the Taliban, even if the Taliban themselves were busy exporting two of their own specialities to China, especially Xinjiang: religious fundamentalism and, via the Wakhan corridor, cheap heroin.
China's Muslim western region is therefore directly affected by the upheavals in Central Asia. Since 1996 Beijing has redoubled its diplomatic overtures to its neighbours in its concern to prevent the effects of the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the creation of new Central Asian republics - the countries most likely to provide a rear base for independence movements - from spilling over into Xinjiang. This flurry of diplomacy gave rise to the Shanghai Group (China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan), which was renamed the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) when Uzbekistan joined last June. In addition to fostering economic relations between the member states, the SCO's official aim is to contain the threat of Islamism.
Scarcely two months after the events of 11 September, the six countries signed a joint agreement on the struggle against terrorism, aimed specifically at preventing Uighur independence activists from taking refuge in any of the signatory states. Up till then the recent US presence in the region had annoyed China. Washington had even been accused of adding fuel to the fire, when Uighur fighters captured by the Russians in Chechnya in the spring of 2000 were found to have been trained in Turkey, a member of Nato (1).
But after a moment's hesitation China tried to turn the situation created by the 11 September attacks to its own advantage. Denouncing the Uighur independentists as "separatist terrorists", it demanded they be added to the list drawn up by the international coalition. The Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman, Sun Yuxi, claimed that failure to do so would be to apply double standards. Jumping on the bandwagon, Russia's president, Vladimir Putin, declared the Chechens Islamic terrorists.