The Emperor Far Away

by David Eimer

  Yet Billy held back from applying for positions which would guarantee him, and his family, a better life. He claimed it was because he despised the Han. ‘I hate them, I do. I’ve hated them since I was a kid,’ he said in his mild way. Listing the litany of complaints the Uighurs have against the Chinese like an imam intoning the Koran, Billy seemed to have lost all hope for the future and thought Uighurs who crave an independent state were just dreaming.

  ‘A lot of Uighurs say they want independence. They look at Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan and wonder why we’re not like those countries. It’s only Uighurs who don’t have their own country with our own traditions and cultures. But we lost our place a long time ago. The Han are too strong. They have all the power and all the weapons,’ Billy said. ‘I think two things will have happened in twenty years’ time. Either the Uighurs are over, finished, and we are assimilated, or another country like the US helps us. Maybe if the Americans fight China we can get our own country.’

  Many Uighurs express similarly apocalyptic sentiments: that it will take either China’s economy collapsing, or a world war, for them to gain independence. It is an unlikely scenario. Xinjiang acts as a strategic shield between China and central Asia and Russia and, more importantly, has vast reserves of coal, oil and natural gas that are immensely valuable to China, the most energy-hungry country in the world. Losing them would be a huge blow, one which Beijing would do anything to prevent.

  It is for that reason that Xinjiang has effectively been ruled by the gun since the communist takeover. In September 1949, the residents of Urumqi were ordered to the airport, or face being shot, to greet the first planeloads of soldiers from the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). Their commander was General Wang Zhen, who would later rise to be vice-president of China. A Long March veteran and diehard Maoist, Wang was notorious for his unreconstructed opinions. After the pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square in June 1989, he suggested exiling what he described as ‘bourgeois-liberal intellectuals’ to Xinjiang.

  Wang oversaw the massive increase in Han migration that occurred after 1950 at the behest of Mao Zedong. It was empire expansion on a grand scale with millions of former PLA troops and their defeated opponents in the nationalist army heading west. Mao recognised that as long as the Chinese remained a tiny minority in Xinjiang they would always be vulnerable to Uighur insurrection. Ensuring that didn’t happen made Wang infamous. Even some Han historians acknowledge that as many as 60,000 Uighurs died during the 1950s, both resisting Beijing’s rule and in what Mao called the ‘stamping out of superstition’.

  Over sixty years later and Urumqi is still full of soldiers. Slow-moving convoys of the Wu Jing, the People’s Armed Police, an offshoot of the PLA, rumbled down the roads at all hours. They were not as visible as they had been in July 2009, when I watched them marching ten abreast through the deserted streets chanting ‘Protect the country, protect the people, preserve stability.’ But they still guarded significant intersections in steel helmets with their AK47s to hand.

  There were newly formed police SWAT teams too, tucked down side-streets in vans waiting to move if there was trouble. My hotel overlooked one of their barracks. In the morning, I’d lean out of the window and watch them doing press-ups or practising unarmed combat in their all-black uniforms. They were mostly Han, with a smattering of Uighurs, including a lone young woman with a ponytail.

  After lunch, Billy and I walked along Yan’an Lu, heading deeper into Uighur Urumqi. North, west and east of People’s Square, Urumqi looks much like any Chinese city. There are only a few Uighur pockets near the former main bazaar, now a market for tourists, where the minarets of mosques poke into the sky alongside the apartment blocks. But the further south you go in Urumqi, heading towards the desert that surrounds it, the more Uighur it becomes.

  By the time we reached a district called Saimachang, we could have been in any one of the small oasis towns that run along the fringes of the Taklamakan Desert in the far south of Xinjiang. On the main street, sheep were being butchered and the meat sold, alongside piles of watermelons and tomatoes. Billy pointed to them proudly. ‘Han people think Xinjiang is just a desert and that we ride camels. They don’t know we grow so much fruit and vegetables. It’s because they only show Xinjiang on TV when something bad happens.’

  Food is almost as important to Uighur identity as Islam. Streetside bakeries making naan dominate any Uighur neighbourhood. The bakers knead the dough and sprinkle it with water, before sticking it on the sides of the tonur, the bread oven. When ready, it is removed with two skewers with their ends bent into the approximation of a fish hook. In Urumqi, naan comes in every conceivable variety: plain or with elaborate patterns imprinted on the bread, sprinkled with sesame seeds or rice, and sometimes with lamb embedded in it.

  No one was going hungry in Saimachang. Instead, it is jobs and money that are in short supply. Kids with bright eyes shining out of dirty brown faces offered to clean shoes, while groups of young men lounged around in ill-fitting camouflage uniforms. Ostensibly security guards, they are hired by the local government in an effort to reduce the absurdly high Uighur unemployment statistics. Billy told me they were paid 1,000 yuan (£100) a month.

  Old men with white beards sat stoically on the steps of the tenement buildings that line the narrow alleys off the main street. The women were dressed much more conservatively here than elsewhere in Urumqi. All but the very young wore headscarves and long dresses that covered every inch of their bodies bar their hands. But even if just their large eyes were visible, no one was in the dreary all-black worn in the Middle East, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Uighur women love bright colours, and their dresses and hijabs were a kaleidoscope of patterns in lilac, turquoise, pink, red and yellow.

  ‘They’re not from Urumqi. Most of the people here are from the country, from the south,’ said Billy as we walked the alleys. Southern Xinjiang is the Uighur heartland where agriculture is the main industry. But much of the south is made up of the Taklamakan Desert and is far from suitable for cultivating anything. So more and more Uighurs are choosing to follow the example of Han farmers elsewhere in China and moving to the cities in search of better-paid work.

  Lacking both education and fluency in Mandarin, most of them fail to find jobs. Many of the 2009 rioters were newcomers from rural areas. Saimachang was where I had come two days after the violence, to find that almost all the men under fifty had been taken away by the police. Now, its residents are subdued to the point of hopelessness. Hanging grimly on at the very edge of Urumqi, Saimachang is an outpost in enemy territory – the site of the Uighurs’ last stand in a city where they have been all but vanquished by the Han.

  2

  The New Silk Road

  Billy drank alcohol only on special occasions, so most evenings in Urumqi I went alone to the one western-style bar in the city. It was owned by Hiro, a stocky, long-haired Japanese guy with a goatee, and Manus, a laidback Irishman who was tall and thin with a shaved head. Both were eight-year veterans of Urumqi who had first arrived as language teachers.

  Their bar functioned as a gathering place for the city’s tiny foreign community, who were mostly students or taught English, and passing travellers. But, uniquely for Urumqi, it was a place where Uighurs and Chinese drank side by side. The bar attracted a crowd who could be described as Urumqi’s bohemians, people whose work brought them into contact with westerners or those who had rejected the local entertainment options.

  Uighurs patronise dance clubs no Chinese will step into for fear of being stabbed, and which are dangerous too for foreigners who try it on with the Uighur women. Han head to the karaoke joints or the Chinese bars, where whisky is bought by the bottle and mixed with green tea and endless games of liar’s dice are played, with the losers downing their drinks in one as punishment. One of my Han friends in Beijing used to tell me that the Chinese don’t really like western alcohol and only drink it as a sign of status. He thought the dice games were a way of forcing each other to consum
e it.

  At Hiro and Manus’s bar, though, everyone was thrown together. Chinese customers had no choice but to play Uighurs at pool if their names came up on the blackboard. Americans and Europeans, as well as a few Africans, drank foreign beers, talked endlessly of their China experiences and chased the local women regardless of whether they were Han, Uighur, Mongolian, Kazakh or Uzbek. It was integration on a tiny scale, but so divided is Urumqi it seemed startling.

  That alone ensured the bar aroused suspicion among the authorities. ‘The cops don’t like us and would rather we shut down. They don’t like the idea of foreigners gathering in one place and they don’t like the fact that a lot of Uighurs drink here,’ said Hiro. Smart, fast-talking and more than a little burned out by his eight years in Xinjiang, Hiro was one of the rare foreigners who can speak fluent Uighur. He needed to, just to mediate the disputes that erupted almost nightly between the bar staff.

  ‘I’d prefer to employ Han waiters, to be honest. The Uighurs don’t work as hard and they’re always arguing with each other. If they can’t agree among themselves, how can they expect to get anywhere? Uighur means “union”, but they never have been united. It was the Chinese who created Xinjiang. Before 1949, it was just a series of city states,’ said Hiro. It was true. Only in the 1930s did the natives of Xinjiang begin using the term ‘Uighur’. Until then, they identified themselves by their home region. They were ‘Urumqilik’, which in Uighur means someone from Urumqi, ‘Kashgarlik’ or ‘Hotanlik’.

  Hiro had no time for the wide-eyed solidarity expressed by the few foreigners who embrace the Uighur cause. Nor was he impressed by my efforts to pass as a local. ‘You look too clean. You look like a westerner with a moustache. If you really want to look like a Uighur, you need to stop washing your hair,’ he told me. It was harsh, but he was right. Personal hygiene isn’t always a priority for Uighurs, and the closest I had come to being taken for a native was when taxi drivers asked me if I was from Kazakhstan.

  But there were other people who drank in the bar who also looked nothing like the Uighurs, and they had been born and bred in Xinjiang. I was most intrigued by six-foot-tall Fei Fei, whose extraordinary high-angled cheekbones and slanted eyes marked her out as pure Manchu, and Kamil, a Chinese Tatar. With his blond mullet haircut, pot belly and taste for loud shirts, he looked like he should be propping up a bar in Vladivostok.

  So Russian did Kamil appear it was only when he opened his mouth and Mandarin came out that I remembered he was a Chinese citizen. Hearing him speak was disconcerting. It reminded me of how foreigners are sometimes wheeled out on Chinese TV shows to perform in perfect Mandarin, while the live audiences stare at them as if they are chimpanzees holding a tea party. Certainly, I used to gaze at Kamil and Fei Fei like they were rare animals in a zoo. Tatars and Manchu have intermarried so much there are very few left who look as they did, and Xinjiang is the only place they can be found.

  Descendants of their Russian cousins who wandered across the border centuries before, the Tatars are now one of China’s smallest minorities. Fewer than 5,000 of them are left, living mostly around Yining in the Ili Valley near the frontier with Kazakhstan. Also resident in the Ili Valley are the 200,000 Xibe. Closely related to the Manchu, and like them originally from north-east China, the Xibe are the ancestors of soldiers sent to garrison Xinjiang in the eighteenth century.

  Unlike the Manchu, who assimilated with the Han they had conquered to the point that their tongue is now virtually extinct, the Xibe have retained their version of Manchu. Xinjiang is now the sole place where you can hear an approximation of the language of the Qing dynasty emperors, a geographical irony given that it is thousands of kilometres away from the Manchu homeland.

  Kamil seemed to spend most of his time drinking or destroying all-comers on the bar’s over-subscribed pool table, but he somehow managed to run a successful import and export company. China’s Tatars are known for being bright. Ninety-five per cent of them go on to higher education, the highest proportion of any ethnic group in China, and Kamil had spent four years at Moscow University.

  In contrast, Fei Fei was the outdoor type. A star basketball player for Xinjiang in her youth, she took Han tourists on adventure tours to the Altai Mountains and spent her free time scaling peaks in Tibet. So rare is it to encounter full-blooded Manchu people that many of her clients mistook her for a Mongolian, even though she had the pale skin and oval face desired by all Chinese women. I told her jokingly she would have been a princess in the Qing dynasty. Fei Fei answered seriously that her family were once very rich and powerful and had owned a huge estate in the north-east.

  Spending a night at the bar was to rewind back through the centuries to when Urumqi was a crucible of races and religions. It was a modern-day version of the caravanserai, the inns along the Silk Road where merchants and travellers from the Middle East, central Asia, India and China had spent their nights telling tales around open fires. Indeed, some of the bar’s customers were the same traders from central Asia and Russia Kamil did business with.

  Lured to Urumqi not by the promise of rare spices and exotic inventions but by the low cost of more prosaic items like furniture and household appliances, their increasing presence in Xinjiang is a sign a new Silk Road is emerging. It is one where the cheap clothes and goods churned out by the factories in the south and east of China head west via Urumqi, while the natural resources of central Asia travel in the opposite direction.

  Come dawn, though, and the bar’s cosmopolitan atmosphere seemed fantastic, a mix of races that belied the reality of life in Urumqi. It was as if the desert sun illuminated the true nature of the relationship between the Chinese and the Uighurs, while the night sky cloaked it, because there was a palpable tension on the streets during the day. You could see it in the eyes of the police sitting in their vans scanning passing pedestrians, and the security guards who stood outside the banks and big shops.

  Whenever there were Han and Uighurs in the same vicinity their mutual loathing was obvious. So polarised are they that they look straight through each other, as if that Uighur selling sweet apples or the Chinese newspaper vendor didn’t exist. But in the centre of Urumqi the Han and Uighurs have to walk the same streets every day, and there is always the sense that it would take very little for the barely suppressed hatred on both sides to explode.

  One afternoon, Billy took me to meet his friend Mardan. He looked like a caricature of a Uighur: big-eyed and dark-skinned with a curving nose, thick black hair and a moustache that straggled down both sides of his mouth. We met him on the edge of Saimachang, where he was waiting for us at the wheel of a Chery, a cheap Chinese car, his shiny grey shirt and trousers set off by eye-catching red fake-leather shoes.

  He was what the Chinese call a black, or unlicensed, cab driver and rented the car for 70 yuan (£7) a day. ‘I can make 1,000 yuan [£100] a week if I am lucky,’ said Mardan, whose name means ‘brave’ in Uighur. He hardly spoke Mandarin, despite his years in Urumqi. ‘I didn’t have much education. I just went to middle school, not high school. This is the best way for me to make money.’

  His job is a direct consequence of the 2009 riots, which prompted a big rise in car ownership among the local Han and created a subsequent glut of inexpensive, second-hand motors like the one Mardan drove. Fearful of what could happen if there is a repeat of the violence, the Chinese residents of Urumqi no longer want to take public transport to work, or let their children walk to school. Many of the Han victims of the riots were attacked on buses. I interviewed one young woman in hospital whose face was a swollen, purple mess of cuts and bruises. She had been dragged off a bus coming from the airport and beaten half to death.

  Mardan knew something of the rage that drives people to commit such an appalling act of violence against a defenceless woman. His cousin was one of five Uighurs who stabbed a Han man to death on Yan’an Lu during the disturbances. He had agreed to talk to me about it but was twitchy about doing so in a public place, so we drove through Sa
imachang until we found a quiet alley to pull into.

  Like Mardan, his cousin hadn’t graduated from high school. He was twenty-four and unemployed at the time of the riots. His only previous job had been working in the kitchen of a restaurant. As Urumqi erupted in anger, so did he. ‘He was in the wrong place at the wrong time. He went out with his friends and lost control,’ said Mardan, who was clearly reluctant to describe the exact horror of what his cousin had done. ‘The whole family are heartbroken. He was a good boy, he went to the mosque. He’d never been in trouble before.’

  Embarrassed about recalling the details of his cousin’s role in the attack, Mardan was also fatalistic about it. ‘It has happened. We can’t change it.’ The only bright spot from the family’s point of view was that he had escaped being executed. At least twenty-five Uighurs were given death sentences after the riots, but Mardan’s cousin had avoided that by turning himself in to the police. He had no choice, because one of his friends was already in custody and had offered up his name.

  Now he was serving life in a prison in Aksu, nearly a thousand kilometres away. It was too far for his family to visit, even if they were allowed to. ‘We haven’t heard from him since he was arrested. He’s not permitted to write,’ said Mardan. His parents had seen him at his trial, but weren’t able to speak to him. They had hopes they could get him out of prison in a few years by paying compensation to the dead man’s family. I didn’t say what I thought, which was that it would take an awful lot of money for the victim’s family and the authorities to agree to release a Uighur convicted in those circumstances.