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Xinjiang's Bleached Bones and Turquoise Tombs |
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Written by Paul Mozur
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Friday, 16 October 2009 |
 Few opportunities exist for Uighurs to assimilate into greater China
Earlier this week, courts in Xinjiang sentenced six men to death and
a seventh to life imprisonment for murder, arson and robbery during
riots that swept the region in early July, leaving nearly 200 persons
dead. Paul Mozur, a Taiwan-based correspondent, traveled through the
area shortly after the riots. This is the final installment of a
three-part report which started Wednesday.
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For all practical
purposes Iparhan might have been better off studying the Abakh Khoja
mazar for four years. Though the 26-year-old graduate of Beijing Normal
University has an undergraduate degree in chemistry and can seamlessly
jump between English, Mandarin and Uighur, she has been unable to find
a steady job since graduation. Instead she makes money to help her
family by taking tourists to the tomb of the powerful 17th century
Kashgar ruler Abakh Khoja. She lit up when she learned I used to live
in Beijing, "I really wanted to stay there after graduation, the
opportunities are better, but there aren't any jobs there for Uighurs."
"It's
better this way anyway, I get to be around my family." She frowned when
I put forth the prospect of finding a job in Xinjiang. "There's too
much discrimination for me to find a job, even before July 5th people
did not want to hire Uighurs." She admitted most of her Han classmates
had found jobs by now, but tried to strike a positive chord claiming to
be lucky to meet foreigners through her English and part-time job as a
tour guide in Kashgar. Still she admitted, "right now the situation is
very bad, whenever we see Han or Uighurs who have come to the city we
do not know why they are here, we wonder if anyone is coming to start
trouble."
Throughout our conversation Iparhan broke off to joke
with her Han friend Mei, whom she had brought for an excursion outside
the city. Iparhan is typical of more and more Uighurs, who are educated
in Mandarin at an increasingly younger age and leave Xinjiang to attend
college in eastern China. Though on the surface their integration would
seem to neutralize them as potential threats, in many ways they are the
greatest threat to China. As Human Rights Watch's Nicholas Bequelin
explains: "The source of political and religious radicalism in Muslim
societies has often been people who were both educated and
disaffected."
Iparhan said there were many others like her.
"It is this way everywhere, there is no chance of success opened to
us." It is this fact, she told me, that helped her to see through the
propagandistic side of her education. "Many of my Han classmates simply
believe what the teachers or the government tells them. If they hear it
is foreigners who caused a problem in Xinjiang, they believe it, they
don't ask for proof and they don't ask why," she complained. "I think
because growing up we know we are a minority and then we see
discrimination everyday we learn not to listen to the government."
Even
if the economic realities on the ground are addressed, Bequelin still
believes the region will remain restive. "The promotion of economic
development cannot make up for restrictions on cultural expression, and
there is no look to change these cultural policies. Ultimately the
party leadership is still clenching onto ideological clichés that
encourage ethnic polarization." Across Xinjiang's urban areas young
Uighur kids have become reliable speakers of crisp Mandarin. If in a
matter of a decade the Chinese government can succeed in forcing the
province's education system to switch from Uighur to Mandarin, it
doesn't seem unrealistic that it could at least partially succeed in
teaching cultural understanding, instead of falling back on banal
socialist phrases.
But for now the government has shown itself
content to simply squelch violence and retain stability at all costs.
In doing so it is increasingly alienating an already incensed
population of Uighurs and an unhappy majority of Han. And to make
matters worse in shutting down communications, setting up checkpoints
on roads, and placing militia and military on the streets it has
multiplied potential flashpoints.
Right now it is up to the PRC
government whether future Uighurs will build secret mazars (tombs) for
martyrs or malls for their children. If the Chinese lose the Iparhans
of Xinjiang, the newest generation of middle-class, eastern-educated
young Uighurs, it will have passed a critical opportunity to inaugurate
change in the region. And considering Al Qaeda's recent grumblings
about the treatment of Uighurs, it may not even be the traditionally
moderate Sufi-influenced minority who act in reprisal for this failure.
Xinjiang is already a land covered with the dead, Mummies and
tombs are some of its greatest attractions and tales of horrible
violence pepper its history. Unfortunately the 60-year history of the
PRC, which in many ways rivals Xinjiang's own for brutality, has taught
its leaders little regard for restraint and less for tolerance. Instead
the Chinese government seems dead set on continuing the region's
wealthy legacy of violence, and so it will remain a land of bleached
bones and turquoise tombs.
Paul Mozur is a free-lance writer based in Taipei.
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However Shi 's own post contains several errors which are common to little patriots who have been through the chinese "education system" --
: "China has more than 5 000 years of unbroken history". How ridiculous. Nothing survives from 3000 BCE except highly suspect records kept by toadying clerks of brutal aristocrats -- whose palaces and feudal domains by the way were in the Yellow river valley and nowhere near the regions discussed in Mozur's articles.
: "these Uigeees are of Turkish descent." Commentor Shi should know that it seems racist not even to bother to spell their name right ! Uighurs are not of Turkish descent; both groups are of Altaic descent (as are Mongols and Manchurians). They are all ethno-linguistic cousins. That is why "their language is so similar to the Turks".
: "They migrated from Turkey to Chinese territory." 1.They did not migrate from Turkey. 2.It wasnt Chinese territory. It was territory that in the past had for a time been annexed to the Tang Imperial state, and later wasnt, and later still became Mongolian. Why do these little patriots think that anywhere a "chinese" soldier has ever set foot must become "China" forever?
Lastly, Shi advises us to surf You-tube to find the truth which the "Western prapaganda machine" denies us. If that is so, then may we ask the honourable Shi why You-tube is blocked in China ?