China Road

by Rob Gifford

  Live a broadband life: this is the year of information broadband.

  The city has sprawled, and now has a population of more than 1.5 million. The rhythms of eastern China have begun to infiltrate. In the past, saying there was no city in the world farther from the ocean than Urumqi was confirmation of its irrelevance. Now that doesn’t seem to matter; Urumqi has become a regional hub for western China and also for Chinese influence surging over the border into Central Asia. Five hundred years after sea travel relegated the Old Silk Road to insignificance, the New Silk Road is reemerging and becoming increasingly important to Xinjiang and the whole of Central Asia. In the first half of 2006, Xinjiang was the fastest growing of any of China’s provinces and regions in terms of foreign trade.

  I check into one of Urumqi’s best hotels. With my room key I am handed a voucher offering me a free massage at the “sauna massage” facility on the fifth floor. (The voucher says, “Ladies requiring massage should call in advance.”) If this is the same as every other “sauna massage” in China, that means that, in effect, this fancy hotel, which caters to the growing army of visiting businessmen from eastern China and abroad, is offering free sex to every man who checks in.

  I’ve been researching who I want to talk to while I’m in Urumqi, and discover that the U.S. networking equipment company Cisco Systems has an office not far away. I wander over, hoping that someone might want to talk to me, and am greeted by a smartly dressed Han Chinese manager, who looks and talks as though he must have an MBA. He is about to dash out the door to the airport, to fly to Beijing and on to the United States on business. He gives me five minutes of his time.

  “It used to be that Xinjiang was known just for black and white. Oil and cotton. Then it was black, white, and red. Tomatoes and ketchup. Did you know that Xinjiang produces 31 percent of the world’s ketchup?” He raises his eyebrows and smiles. “Now look at us. Cisco is here. IBM is just across the hall. We’re not making ketchup.”

  He says Cisco is merely leading the way in a huge new market. “Xinjiang is now not backward at all. It is all very connected. And people’s thinking here is all very kaifang. It is very open. Do you know why? It is because everyone here is an immigrant. They have an open, immigrant mentality.”

  I don’t have the chance to ask him how he thinks the Uighurs feel about this, for he excuses himself and dashes out the door. What we didn’t get around to talking about was what Cisco is actually doing in Xinjiang. A whole range of projects, no doubt, assisting companies to get networked, but it is also accused by human rights groups of assisting the Chinese government to monitor the Internet for any signs of dissent. Cisco has sold several thousand routers to Beijing, equipment that human rights groups in the United States say was programmed with the help of Cisco engineers and is integral to the Great Firewall of China, which Beijing maintains around the Internet in order to control information within the country. Cisco denies that it has supplied China with equipment and technology to control what Chinese Web surfers view. It says the equipment it sells to China is the same as it sells elsewhere in the world, and that it cannot stop China from adapting the equipment to its own needs.

  Either way, the fact that I am even having this conversation here says much about the changes in the city and its aspirations. Urumqi, like so many cities along Route 312, has become another mini–Promised Land.

  The next morning I head for the old Uighur bazaar at Erdaoqiao, which means “Bridge of Two Roads.” I go looking for the old maze of stalls at the main bazaar that I’d visited in 2002. At that time, I was searching for local Muslims to speak frankly about Osama bin Laden, the attacks on America, and the subsequent Chinese clampdown on the Uighurs. I had simply gone stall to stall in the dirty, labyrinthine market, quietly asking the shopkeepers if they would talk to me.

  In about the fourth shop that I went into on that visit, a wonderful old stall heaving with every type of dried fruit and nut, the Uighur owner looked cautiously around, then told me in bad Chinese to wait one moment. He disappeared and came back shortly with a Uighur man, no more than twenty-two or twenty-three years of age, who spoke perfect Mandarin. This young man, who never told me his real name, became my guide for a week. He took me first down a maze of alleyways, toward the house of a brother or cousin or friend. We wove our way left and right through the bazaar, to try to lose anyone who might be following us, and eventually ended up at a safe house, where he sat and spoke very openly about how much the Uighurs hate the Han Chinese and love Americans.

  Soon afterward, though, the United States shifted its policy. The majority of Uighur Muslims are from the moderate, mystical branch of Islam called Sufism, and during the 1990s the U.S. government had championed their freedom of religion as part of its criticism of China’s human rights record. But after September 11, 2001, a handful of Uighur extremists had been captured by the United States, fighting with the Taliban in northern Afghanistan, and Washington needed Beijing’s help at the UN in the War on Terror. So in the summer of 2002, the administration of George W. Bush agreed to put a previously unknown Uighur group called the East Turkestan Islamic Movement on its list of terrorist organizations.

  Few people had even heard of this group, but the U.S. move provided, and still provides, a blank check for Beijing to do what it wants in suppressing any kind of dissent in Xinjiang, under the guise of combating terrorism, without fear of any criticism from Washington. For the Chinese leaders, 9/11 was a dream come true. Not only was the pressure off them as the next U.S. enemy but President Bush was calling China a partner in the War on Terror, and Beijing was consequently able to extract its own price in Xinjiang for cooperating with the Bush administration. Human rights groups accuse the U.S. government of selling the Uighur people down the Yellow River.

  When I get to Erdaoqiao, I think the taxi driver must have brought me to the wrong place, because I can’t find the old bazaar anywhere. When I ask a man in a carpet store, he says in bad Mandarin that the old bazaar has been knocked down. In its place stands a shiny, generic Chinese-style modern building, also calling itself Erdaoqiao. Outside the new market is a bridge over a small pool and some bronze sculptures of generic Uighur people, doing things that Han Chinese people imagine Uighur people do: one making naan bread, one playing a Uighur instrument. In other words, the thriving, very Uighur, very Muslim bazaar of Urumqi has been turned into a sort of Uighurthemed Chinese shopping center, another branch of the Uighur World theme park I’d seen in Turpan.

  To be fair to the Chinese, as my friend Murat had pointed out, it is not just Sinification that is going on, it is globalization, of a sort that is happening everywhere. To some extent, the Chinese motivation for developing Xinjiang is very genuine: a wish for people there to have a better life. But because, for the Uighurs, the Chinese are the agents of this modernization, there is a particular bitterness to it.

  From a security point of view, you can see why the Chinese are knocking down the old parts of the city and putting up new shopping malls. The warren of houses and shops of the old bazaar was a perfect place for me to duck and dive, whisper and plot when I had been looking for disaffected Uighurs. Today, I spend several hours walking around the new, shiny Erdaoqiao market, trying to find someone to talk to me frankly about relations between the Han Chinese and the Uighurs, and no one will. The bright neon striplighting and the open shopfronts make conspiracy of any sort more difficult. And that is, of course, part of the Chinese plan.

  Most of the Han people who live in eastern China have never been to Xinjiang or Tibet and have no idea the Uighurs and the Tibetans are angry. They have always been told that, since time immemorial, Xinjiang and Tibet have been part of China, and that all China’s ethnic minorities are happily integrated. They are also aware of the beneficial treatment ethnic minorities receive, a kind of affirmative action Beijing employs to try to keep the minorities happy. And, of course, they read a lot of news reports about all those wonderful new shopping centers being built for the lucky Uighur pe
ople. So when they visit Xinjiang or Tibet, they are often mystified by the cool reception, and sometimes active hostility, they receive from the Tibetans or the Uighurs. Aren’t we giving you everything? they ask. Aren’t you getting beneficial policies? Aren’t you allowed to have two children rather than one, and get into university with lower test scores?

  There is a famous story from the eighteenth century told by both the Han and the Uighurs that perfectly illustrates the interaction between the two sides, even today.

  The Qianlong Emperor had, during the conquest of Xinjiang in the 1750s, heard about a beautiful Uighur girl called Iparhan. Her body was said to give off a fragrance all its own, and Qianlong ordered that she be brought to Beijing to become part of the royal harem. Iparhan became known as the Fragrant Concubine, or Xiang Fei in Chinese.

  The emperor gave her a splendid room and a beautiful garden, but she spent her days crying for her homeland. The emperor then built her a miniature oasis to remind her of her home village, but she was still inconsolable. He built her a mosque and a bazaar and a pavilion she could climb and look west, and still she was not happy. Finally, he asked her what would make her happy, and she said she longed for the fragrance of the tree whose leaves are silver and whose fruit is gold. So Qianlong sent to Kashgar for the plant, known as the oleaster or silver-leaved sand jujube, and as the Chinese tell the story, at last the Fragrant Concubine was content.

  The Uighurs tell the same story, but with a very different ending. In their version, Iparhan paces her apartment in the Forbidden City in Beijing with little daggers hidden up her sleeves in case the emperor calls her to the imperial bedchamber. In the end she commits suicide rather than face such dishonor.

  For the Chinese, the Fragrant Concubine symbolizes how the wild Turkic people of the west finally became reconciled to being part of the civilized and infinitely superior world of China. To the Uighurs, she symbolizes how they and other Turkic peoples have never accepted Chinese rule and never will.

  Even if you were to knock down all the Uighur buildings, though, there are two parts of life in Urumqi that would still linger. The first is the smell, of flatbread, of roasted lamb, of spices. The second is the music, not the measured, ordered notes of Han China, but the wilder, hypnotic rhythms of the bazaar. Both are swirling in the air on the main street beside Erdaoqiao. Unshaven Uighur men are grilling lamb kebabs doused in bright red spices on open charcoal fires, and if you are not already thinking about the road west toward Central Asia from Urumqi, just a whiff of the air here will transport you there. A little farther down the road, four Uighur musicians are sprawling lazily on a bench, making a noise that seems disproportionate to the energy they are expending. All four musicians wear colorful Uighur caps; three are blowing on some kind of Uighur wind instrument, one is banging a pair of small drums. Suddenly, in front of them, a middle-aged Uighur man dressed in a suit and tie begins to dance crazily in the heat. It looks as though he has just stepped out of one of the surrounding office buildings on his lunch hour. Perhaps he’s drunk. Or perhaps he’s just letting off steam. A crowd gathers, and I stand among them, watching the man whirling like an office dervish on the sidewalk.

  And so, finally, to a place of sublime beauty. China is a very beautiful country, but I suppose Route 312 does not really witness the best of it. The east and the middle are just flat, flat, flat. Flowery Mountain, near Xi’an, is impressive and mystical. The Tibetan Plateau at Xiahe is beautiful in a wild kind of way. The loess plateau is earthy and real. The Gobi, of course, has its own raw, wide-open beauty. But if you want drop-dead-gorgeous, stand-back-and-stare natural beauty within a few hours of Route 312, there are few places to compare with the Lake of Heaven.

  There are three mountain ranges that stretch across Xinjiang like outstretched fingers from the West, and between the three ranges are two basins. The Altai Mountains run along Xinjiang’s northern border. The Pamir and then the Kunlun Mountains run along Xinjiang’s southern border with India and Tibet, and the Mountains of Heaven cut a swathe through the middle. The Lake of Heaven sits on the north side of the Mountains of Heaven, two and a half hours’ drive northeast of Urumqi.

  I had been out exploring the city with a Han Chinese taxi driver named Wen, who had shown me one of Urumqi’s transportation hubs, a huge parking lot where trucks are loaded with produce to head east toward Shanghai and west toward Central Asia. The signs are in Chinese, Uighur, and Cyrillic.

  Wen tells me his parents first came to the region as members of the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps (or XPCC), known in Chinese as the bingtuan, a sort of paramilitary development agency formed in the 1950s and made up of Han Chinese from the east who were both soldiers and farmers. They have been compared to the homesteaders of nineteenth-century America, or are sometimes described as “settlers,” sent to protect the newly fixed borders of the People’s Republic and to turn the desert green.

  The XPCC still exists and is a ministate unto itself, Xinjiang’s biggest employer and landowner. Organized like a military unit, it has fourteen divisions, each with its own regiments and companies, and runs many of the labor camps around Xinjiang. During the Maoist years, the camps housed Chinese political prisoners from the east, but as their numbers have declined, they have come to contain mainly common criminals and a few Uighur separatists. As China has changed, the bingtuan has changed too, and like all Chinese state-owned enterprises, it has diversified into all kinds of business as the country has plunged into the market economy.

  The hundreds of thousands of Han Chinese who came west with the XPCC were deeply indoctrinated with Communist teaching about sacrificing for the motherland. My taxi driver talks about how his parents “ate bitterness” for two decades, in the 1950s and ’60s, as they tried to build socialism in Xinjiang.

  There are now hundreds of thousands of second-generation Han Chinese people like Wen, and plenty of third-generation too, for whom Xinjiang is home, and indeed the bingtuan does not need to encourage settlers to come anymore. The economic enticements from the investment of government money here are bringing enough Han migrants without the need for more forced immigration. In fact, Urumqi has become almost as much of a magnet for migrants as Shanghai. The center of the city is a jungle of new office buildings, roads, and hotels, and enough construction to rival major cities two thousand miles to the east. “All this used to be fields,” says Wen, parroting the words of every taxi driver in every city I have ever visited across China as we head through the outskirts of town toward the road for the Lake of Heaven.

  Wen’s wife is employed by a large Urumqi company that has just built an iron and steel works in Tajikistan, supplying steel for the reconstruction of Afghanistan. She has been working near the Tajik capital, Dushanbe, as an accountant for nearly a year and is making good money, he says.

  We climb up into the lush green mountains, and at the end of the road, near the top, is a huge parking lot and the entrance to a mini–cable car system, which takes tourists, two at a time, up to the lake. The area is heaving with Han Chinese tourists.

  I take the cable car to the top and there suddenly is the most beautiful little lake I have ever seen. It feels as though a chunk of the Montana Rockies has just been plonked down in the middle of northwest China. Surrounded on three sides by beautiful pine-clad hills, the lake stretches for about a mile, and looming above it is Bogda Feng, the Mountain of God, still covered in snow in August, scraping the sky at nearly eighteen thousand feet.

  The throngs of Chinese tourists are all gathered at one spot, beside a large rock on which have been carved the two Chinese characters for the Lake of Heaven, tian chi. There is a long line of people waiting to stand next to the characters and have their photo taken. Motorboats are roaring out across the water, the buzz of their engines echoing around the otherwise peaceful lake. The need to escape the crowd overwhelms me. So I set off on the small road that leads up the east side of the lake, and within about five minutes there is nobody.

  The ro
ad becomes a path, and after walking for an hour, I come across a large sign, which reads RASHIT’S YURT. Rashit, it turns out, is an entrepreneurial Kazakh who speaks good English (and Chinese) and rents out spaces in his traditional Kazakh tents, known as yurts, mainly to foreign backpackers. I dump my daypack and head off farther along the lakeshore as the afternoon sun disappears behind the mountains.

  The dappled hills rise from each side of the lake, a patchwork of contrasting greens. The coniferous trees are arranged in long, broad stripes down the mountainsides. The deciduous trees, by contrast, seem to grow in clusters, small knots of brighter green that are just starting to think about turning yellow.

  Someone has laid out the skin of a freshly slaughtered sheep on the rocks by the lake to dry. Mushrooms sprout from rotting logs. There is moss everywhere, and clean air to be breathed, and silence. An occasional goat skips up the hillside above the lakeside path. An eagle circles overhead, then flaps toward the top of a tall fir tree. I find a patch of grass among the goat droppings between the path and the lake, and sit motionless for what must be at least half an hour, watching the great bird.

  Eventually, the eagle flies off, and I get up to return to Rashit’s yurt for dinner. It’s a simple but delicious bowl of noodles and meat, eaten with a couple of other backpackers who are also taking refuge in the mountains, resting from their journeys through China. Nothing at all happens that evening, which is wonderful in its way. As night falls, I wander down to the lake alone and stand in the dark, looking up at the stars, as I always do. We sleep with our feet pointing toward the middle of the circular tent, under thick Kazakh blankets provided by Rashit against the chill of the summer night.