China Road

by Rob Gifford

  The second foray westward came in the seventh century, when China was finally united again, under the Tang dynasty. But by that time, a new power had appeared in Central Asia. The Arabs were pushing east and bringing with them the new religion of Islam. They defeated the Chinese at the battle of Talas (in modern-day Kyrgyzstan) in A.D. 751, and again the Chinese retreated. (An interesting footnote to this defeat: It was at Talas that captured Chinese soldiers first gave the secret of making paper to the Arabs. From the Middle East it found its way to Europe in the twelfth century.)

  It was not until the Qianlong Emperor’s conquest, one thousand years later, that the Chinese intervened successfully again in Turkestan, and they haven’t left since. Yet if you go to the website of the Chinese government or to Chinese history books, they say that Xinjiang has been a part of China since 60 B.C.

  The Qianlong Emperor’s expansion into the northwest was largely for strategic reasons, to create a buffer zone against anyone who wanted to invade, and that is still part of Chinese thinking today. The initial takeover of both Xinjiang and Tibet was military, and the subsequent governing of the regions was not aimed at colonization. The local Muslims (and Tibetans in Tibet) were allowed to continue with their day-to-day life and, crucially, with their religion. The Qing dynasty rulers were not at that stage trying to turn “them” into “us” but were taking the relatively soft line of simply bringing “them” into “our” big, multiethnic imperial Chinese family.

  The fact that they even expanded into Xinjiang is largely because the Qing rulers were not Han Chinese, they were Manchus. The Manchus had invaded China from Manchuria (now northeast China) in 1644 and, in order to rule such a huge empire, had adopted many Chinese ways. But they had retained some Manchu ways as well. They were originally hunters and horsemen, with a pan-Asian view more similar to that of Genghis Khan and the Mongols than to that of the Han Chinese, and they set out to build a bigger empire than the traditional Chinese one, which stopped at the last fort at Jiayuguan.

  This is a crucial point because what modern China today has inherited is essentially a Manchu empire. If the Qing dynasty of 1644 to 1912 had been ruled by ethnic Chinese, I doubt they would have expanded into Turkestan and Tibet. (You will recall that the ethnic Chinese Ming dynasty, from 1368 to 1644, had burned every ship in its navy, hardly the act of a country bent on expansion.) But once that Manchu empire had been enlarged, it became a point of honor and pride for subsequent Chinese rulers to retain it, even after the Manchus were overthrown, in 1912.

  In the late nineteenth century, the Muslims of the northwest became more unruly, chafing at Beijing’s control, and rebellions broke out. Conquering Xinjiang had been one thing for the Manchus; governing it proved something else altogether. And it was then that Beijing’s policy changed from one of letting “them” be “them” in the family of “us” to one of actively trying to change “them” into “us.”

  The first attempts were rather brutal and not very successful. After a Muslim uprising in the region, in 1877 a Chinese general named Zuo Zongtang, with a huge army in tow, swept through Xinjiang, forcing local Muslims to change their customs to Chinese customs, and forcing the teaching of Chinese in schools.

  Then Chinese influence in Xinjiang waned as the country collapsed after the failure of the 1912 Revolution. Following a brief period of trying to maintain a sensitive line with the Muslims in the 1950s, the Communist Party embarked on the second Chinese attempt at turning “them” into “us,” this time through enforcing Communist policies and through the forced immigration of Han Chinese to the region. In 1949 there were about 300,000 Han Chinese out of a population of 4 or 5 million in Xinjiang. That was roughly 6 percent of the population. In 2000 a census showed the figure to be 7.5 million Han Chinese out of a population of 19.25 million. If you include the armed forces, that makes the Han Chinese now just under 50 percent of the population of Xinjiang. And the numbers of Han are growing all the time, as more migrants arrive, attracted by the jobs in the booming west.

  Despite all this, though, the Uighurs and other indigenous people of Xinjiang have still clung to their own identity. The Chinese too keep themselves separate from the Uighurs. The Great Wall, built to keep the Chinese separate from the “barbarians,” may be crumbling in these far western outposts, but the Great Wall in people’s minds, the divisions between different peoples, is harder to destroy, for both the Muslims and the Han Chinese.

  So now, Beijing is trying a third policy (while retaining the other two). It is pouring money into western China and trying to buy off the Muslim peoples with economic opportunities. At the same time, it is using an increasingly integrated education system, not to mention an increasingly improved transportation system, to start earlier in Uighur children’s lives the process of trying to turn “them” into “us.”

  This policy is being played out in real time in the parking lot of the Hami bus station, in the life of fourteen-year-old Rebiya. She is a small girl, dressed in a plain blue shirt, jeans, and sneakers, looking like a Han Chinese teenager except for the fine Turkic features of her face. She is embracing—or rather being embraced by—her mother, who is dressed like a traditional Uighur woman, in a long, voluminous dress, head scarf, and gold earrings. Her mother is weeping. Her father, a handsome man with a bushy mustache, is standing stoically, gently patting Rebiya on the back.

  I have come across Rebiya quite by chance. After a couple of hours wandering around the pleasant but unspectacular town of Hami, I had bought an overnight ticket on the sleeper bus for Turpan, 250 miles to the northwest. Rebiya is one of a group of forty ethnic minority students in Hami, and thousands from all over Xinjiang, who are taking the overnight bus this bright summer evening to the regional capital of Urumqi. All forty of them are milling around at the station, and an extra bus has been added to accommodate the overflow for the twelve-hour journey.

  In Urumqi they will take part in an orientation program with local educational officials before they all board a train and head east, to high schools in Shanghai, Xiamen, Tianjin, and other cities near China’s Pacific coast.

  Rebiya is one of the top high school students in Hami, and this is a reward for her hard study. She already speaks accentless Mandarin Chinese, unlike her parents, whose Mandarin is coated with a very thick Central Asian accent. The government chooses the best students from the ethnic minorities in all the schools in Xinjiang and Tibet, and offers them expenses-paid places at schools in eastern China. Travel, fees, books, everything is paid for. It’s an offer that most families find impossible to turn down.

  The Chinese government says its policy provides a great opportunity for these children to get an even better education, and that is true. Rebiya is excited to be going. But the by-product of the policy is that the cream of Uighur youth have their ethnic identity diluted and become, in their formative years, much more Chinese. For the Chinese government, it is a very efficient way of making sure a generation of ethnic minority high achievers in Xinjiang becomes more like the new generation of young Han Chinese in the east of the country.

  Some observers believe that China is likely to follow the route of Taiwan and South Korea and other Asian tigers, and will, with economic growth and the emergence of civil society, evolve slowly toward democracy.

  There are several main reasons to fear that political change in China will be different from Taiwan or South Korea. One is simply China’s size. South Korea, with some 48 million people, and Taiwan, with 22 million, are smaller than most Chinese provinces. It took them only a couple of decades to industrialize and urbanize, creating a middle class that then demanded political reform. China’s population is sixty times the population of Taiwan, and so far the Chinese government has been very savvy about making the new middle class stakeholders in the political status quo.

  Another reason to fear that China will not take the same relatively smooth path to democracy is the so-called Ethnic Issue. The influx of Han Chinese into the west of China is rapidly chan
ging the demographics here. But if Chinese troops were moved out of Xinjiang and Tibet today, I think there would likely be uprisings there tomorrow. And Chinese leaders must be even more concerned about giving the vote to Uighurs and Tibetans than they are about giving it to the Han Chinese. That’s why Beijing is pedaling so fast to try to make Uighurs and Tibetans more “Chinese,” so that if the crunch comes (or even if it doesn’t) they will be too well integrated into China to want to opt out.

  As well as the Uighur children and their families gathering to board the bus, there are plenty of Han Chinese. I stand for a while chatting with people in both groups as we all wait, and it’s clear how much Rebiya’s generation has already been changed. The older generation of Uighurs and Han are really two completely different peoples.

  The older ladies in their flowing dresses and their head scarves would fit in anywhere from Istanbul to Tashkent.

  Uighur men dress more similarly to the Han Chinese. Their main difference comes down to facial hair. Chinese men can be macho, but they manage to do so without the assistance of stubble. This looks strange to visiting Westerners, since, in the Western mind, every mean son of a gun who ever moseyed up to a saloon bar this side of Dodge City would of course have skipped the grooming pages in his Gentlemen’s Quarterly.

  Uighur men are hairy like Westerners. In fact, a Uighur man can grow more stubble in half an hour than a Chinese man can grow in a lifetime, and almost all the Uighurs here have either mustaches or beards. To the Uighurs, facial hair is the sign of masculinity, and that in itself is enough to form a closer bond between Westerners and Uighurs than between Westerners and Chinese. Put simply, they look more like we do.

  Today, though, the disparate groups, regardless of beardedness, are jumbled together like jelly beans on a pair of shiny gold buses heading west to the regional capital. Our bus finally pulls out of the dusty parking lot, and Rebiya’s weeping mother puts her hand to her mouth to stifle a sob as she waves goodbye.

  The journey to Turpan takes nearly eight hours. It’s a sleeper bus, with the bunks arranged in three narrow lines along the length of the vehicle, separated by two narrow corridors. Mine is an upper bunk right at the back, and I have to climb up, stepping on the bunk of the passenger underneath. He nods a greeting as I heave my pack up and climb onto the tiny bed.

  It’s a wonderful sunset over the Gobi, and I watch it, full of Silk Road reverie, as the bus heads westward along Route 312. The glow of the orange sun grows richer as it sets, pouring brightness and warmth into a landscape drained of color. I would have taken more of these sleeper buses back east if I had not wanted to jump out so often and talk to the people along the road. Here, there are very few people living on the road, which is just one lane in each direction, so there is no real reason to stop, and traveling by sleeper means I don’t have to use up a whole day traveling across the open desert.

  As the sun sets, I climb down and sit with the two Han Chinese men on the bunks below. They both work for a heavy machinery company. They are visiting the places where their machinery has been sold and offering service to the companies who have bought it. On this trip alone, they are traveling all over Xinjiang and down into Qinghai, where they have supplied equipment for the construction of the Tibet Railroad.

  “You guys are literally building the country,” I tell them, and they laugh.

  The senior of the two, named Li, has a buzz cut and a deep voice. He is very macho but also very courteous, just the kind of man you want touring your facilities in western China, or policing your ethnic minorities for that matter. He looks me in the eye and sizes me up carefully, but he has a quick laugh and a generous manner.

  His friend, who doesn’t tell me his name, is chubby and smiley, and clearly plays second fiddle to Li. I ask them what they think of Xinjiang. Li looks out at the sun setting over the desert as Hami disappears behind us. “It’s epic, it’s magnificent, it’s mysterious, it’s…unbelievable. I think every Chinese man should see this place. It was here hundreds, thousands of years ago, and will still be here in thousands of years. It makes me feel like a blade of grass.”

  I have seldom heard a Chinese person talk that way about anything. Li looks out the window at the barren landscape flashing past in the half-light.

  Both he and his friend are extremely optimistic about the future. They are both in good jobs, and they are doing something for their country. China is becoming wealthier, they say. China is becoming a better place to live.

  We talk for a while, then I wish them good night and climb back onto my bunk. I can’t take my eyes off the orange moon that is rising, traveling alongside as we accelerate into the night. Mildred Cable wrote some of the best descriptions of crossing this part of the desert. The Trio traveled at three miles per hour on their donkey-drawn cart, but Mildred’s sense of the spirit of the desert can still be felt today, even when viewed from the bunk of a large, noisy Chinese-made bus, traveling twenty times as fast.

  Silence settles on the whole party. The mules know their business, the carters…tramp in the starlight, with sure feet. The traveler, if his line of communications with God be open, sits in a rapt sense of the Divine which checks self-expression, and commands the tense stillness of utmost reverence. The spirit takes control of the self-expressive soul…. The desert has caught you, and you, the so-called teacher of men, shall be taught…. Man-made constructions never again look imposing.

  21. “China Is a Colonial Power”

  “What’s your name?” asks the young, unshaven Uighur man as he sits down at the table next to me, in a small but bright café in Turpan.

  “Robert,” I tell him. (Many people in Asia have trouble with the shortened version of my name.)

  “Like Robert the Bruce?” he asks in English, raising his eyebrows.

  “Yes!” I reply. “How on earth do you know about Robert the Bruce?” My namesake was a king of Scotland in the fourteenth century. After initial defeats by the English, he took refuge in a cave, and as every British schoolchild knows, while living in that cave, he saw a spider trying to make its web but failing, over and over again. Eventually, the spider succeeded in swinging itself far enough to complete its web, and this perseverance persuaded him that he too must persevere until he defeated the English, which he duly did, at the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314, confirming Scottish independence.

  “I read about him in a book,” says my new friend.

  I compliment him on his knowledge of British history and tell him of my theory that Xinjiang and Tibet are like Scotland. They could end up like England’s northern neighbor within the United Kingdom, contained within a country they don’t want to be part of but, after a few centuries, unable or unwilling to make the effort to secede. He listens carefully.

  “Do the Scots still speak their own language? Do they still have their own customs?” he asks.

  “They have not retained their language, though they do still have some of their customs. And their kilts, of course.”

  “What?”

  “Kilts. Like skirts. Scottish men wear skirts.”

  “See,” he says. “So we are better off than the Scots. We still have our own language. And our men do not wear skirts.”

  I like him immediately. He says his name is Murat. He is in his twenties, and his Central Asian looks—high-bridged nose and high cheekbones—set him apart from the many Chinese who are visible on the streets of Turpan.

  We dive straight into an intense and very frank conversation about relations between Uighurs and Han Chinese, and about the future of his people.

  “Things are getting worse here,” he finally admits, taking a calculated, but fairly safe, gamble that I’m not going to sell him out to any passing Chinese policemen.

  “What is getting worse?” I ask, thinking he may be talking about direct, physical oppression of the Uighurs by the Han Chinese. But he’s not talking about that at all.

  “More Uighurs are choosing to send their children to Han Chinese schools. They don’t h
ave to, but they are doing it, because they know that is where the future lies. In the Uighur schools too, children are learning Chinese in the first grade. It used to be third grade. In twenty, thirty, fifty years, perhaps no one will be able to speak or read or write Uighur. Just like the Scots. We’ll lose our language. Even now, many children can speak it but not write it.”

  Some other people sit down at a table near us, and he lowers his voice.

  My bus had arrived at 3:30 A.M. and I’d checked into my hotel and slept late. Consequently, I had missed the group tour of the places of interest around Turpan. Instead I had bumped into Murat. He had approached me as I was eating brunch and spoken to me in English.

  There is a general assumption among Uighurs that Westerners are sympathetic to their plight. The same is true among Tibetans, and they are usually correct. Part of it is just a Western tendency to support the underdog, plus general opposition to Communist Party oppression of anyone, whether Han Chinese or Uighur or Tibetan. Maybe it’s also a stubble thing. I surreptitiously compare Murat’s beard with my own, and I suspect he may be doing the same.

  We chat for half an hour about Xinjiang, America, and Europe, then I tell him what I am hoping to do in Turpan. “I have always wanted to sleep out in the desert. Where’s a good place to go?”

  He smiles at the idea and looks at his watch. “I will talk to my brother.” We exchange cell-phone numbers and agree to talk later in the day.

  The Turpan Depression is the lowest place in China, and the second lowest in the world (after the Dead Sea), at 426 feet below sea level. It is also the hottest place in China, with a highest recorded temperature of 121 degrees Fahrenheit (49 degrees Celsius). The depression is a desert basin that covers nearly 20,000 square miles and has a population of 170,000, of which about three-quarters are Uighurs and the rest Han Chinese.