Author: Geoffrey York
Publication: www.theglobeandmail.com
Date: May 1, 2004
URL: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/TPStory/LAC/20040501/KASHGAR01/TPComment/TopStories
This week's massive firefight in
Iraq symbolizes the depth of Islamic defiance -- but not in China, reports
GEOFFREY YORK. Remote Xinjiang's one-rebellious Muslims now live in fear
Under the midday sun, an old man
climbs slowly to the roof of his centuries-old Silk Road mosque. Then,
standing beside a minaret, he calls the faithful to prayer.
But the cry goes almost unheard.
Prohibited from using an amplifier, the muezzin is barely audible above
a nearby loudspeaker pumping out government propaganda.
Here in the heartland of China's
Muslims, mosques are usually pad-locked. In the brief time they are open,
worshippers must obey a strict set of rules: no criticism of the authorities,
no unregistered guests, no contact with foreign organizations, no visitors
under 18, no encouragement of veils and mandatory reporting of people's
prayers.
China is one of the few places where
Islam is visibly in retreat. Elsewhere, the world's fastest-growing religion
is on the rise, battling mightily against global superpowers. This week
alone, Muslim insurgents gave Iraq some of its bloodiest fighting since
the fall of Saddam Hussein.
Here, however, Islam has collided
with the ruthless methods of the world's biggest Communist state -- and
the state is winning.
In the 1990s, China's Muslim territory,
Xinjiang, was restive and erupted in a wave of bombings and violent attacks
by groups seeking independence. But today the separatists have been forcibly
subdued. Beijing has managed to crush almost all resistance by the eight
million Muslim Uighurs who live scattered across this remote desert territory
in China's far northwest.
Now, the traditional identity of
the Muslims is under siege. Their historic streets are being demolished
to make room for Chinese shopping malls. Their language and culture are
eroding under a tide of newcomers from China's Han majority. Hundreds of
mosques still survive, but they are tightly controlled and monitored. Thousands
of Muslims have been arrested as suspected terrorists, and hundreds have
been executed.
"The government wants to get rid
of our nationality," says a young man in Kashgar, an ancient city of mud-brick
houses and narrow alleys where 80 per cent of inhabitants are Uighurs,
Turkic followers of Islam for 1,000 years.
"They tell us to get rid of our
beards, the veil, our traditional knives," he says, sipping tea. "They
want our culture to be gone. They want only Chinese culture here."
After centuries of sporadic Chinese
incursions, the Uighur homeland was finally conquered in the 18th century
and given its Chinese name (Xinjiang means "new frontier"). Since then,
the Uighurs have launched repeated uprisings, including rebellions in 1933
and 1944 that twice led briefly to the proclamation of an independent republic
of Eastern Turkestan.
Beijing was so disturbed by the
violence of the 1990s that it responded with a systematic campaign to quell
Muslim agitation with a calculated mix of economic incentives, shrewd diplomatic
manoeuvring, and brutal police and military intervention.
Its Communist-appointed chairman,
Ismail Tiliwaldi, boasts that he now runs the safest region of all. "There
was not a single explosion or assassination in Xinjiang last year," he
said recently in Beijing.
The iron fist that maintains China's
grip is visible just outside Kashgar, where long military convoys can be
spotted, carrying hundreds of heavily armed soldiers ready for any sign
of dissent.
"The Uighur people are wild and
rude," an army general explains during a flight to Xinjiang. "But in the
future the Uighurs will be like the Manchus, assimilated by the Chinese,
because the Chinese culture is much stronger."
Beijing also uses diplomatic lobbying
to help keep the Uighurs isolated and, since the Sept. 11 attacks in the
United States, has found it easier to portray Uighur separatists as terrorists.
It has persuaded Washington to declare one Uighur group a terrorist organization
and applied heavy pressure to Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan to crack down on
Uighur activists.
At the same time, Beijing has lashed
the region to the Chinese economic growth machine, providing a source of
hope for discontented Uighurs. Jobs and education are more plentiful now.
Official growth in Xinjiang was 10.8 per cent last year, well above the
Chinese average. Even if most of the new money is earned by Han Chinese
businessmen and migrants, enough trickles into Uighur hands to convince
many that life is getting better.
Even so, there is still widespread
resentment of Chinese dominance. Beijing's levers of control are everywhere.
Uighurs who work as teachers or other public-sector jobs, for example,
are prohibited from wearing Islamic beards or veils, carrying the Koran
or attending mosques. Female schoolchildren cannot wear the veil. Most
Uighurs cannot get passports for foreign travel.20
The streets are filled with undercover
police and informers. There is a climate of fear among ordinary Uighurs,
who seldom dare to discuss politics with a stranger. "The walls have ears,"
one man says.20
Uighurs tell the story of a teacher
who stood up at a public meeting to protest against the ban on beards.
Even Karl Marx wore one, he noted -- and soon lost his job.20
To have a career as a teacher or
bureaucrat, people must give up the Koran and accept Communist indoctrination.
But many retreat into a secret world where Islam still rules. University
students, barred from attending mosques, pray in seclusion in their dormitory
rooms. Mothers often have three or four children, violating the Communist
child-control limits. To keep their pregnancies secret, they move back
in with their parents.
Much of Beijing's growing control,
however, is exercised through its cultural and commercial influence. Millions
of Han Chinese migrants have flooded into Xinjiang in recent years. A new
railway, driven straight as a knife through the vast Taklamakan Desert,
reached Kashgar in 1999 and made it even easier for the Chinese to reach
the city.
Government policies are tilted to
favour the new arrivals. The best jobs and university opportunities are
reserved for those who speak Chinese, leaving the Uighurs largely on the
outside. Most university classes are taught in the Chinese language. Even
in Kashgar, an overwhelmingly Uighur city, most street signs and shop signs
are written in large Chinese characters, while the Uighur signs are smaller
or non-existent.
Kashgar's only official bookstore
has plenty of Uighur-language texts -- on Buddhism and Confucianism, but
not on Islam. On the city streets, when a visitor notices her reading,
an old woman quickly hides her a book on Islam. "It's just a storybook,"
she mumbles.
The commercial heart of the city
is dominated by a huge monument of Mao (one of the few still found in China).
Propaganda banners declare that "Xinjiang has been an inseparable part
of China since ancient times. The Han people cannot separate themselves
from the minorities; the minorities cannot separate themselves from the
Han."
Every Friday, thousands of Uighurs
flock to midday prayers at the 560-year-old Id Kah mosque, which is Kashgar's
biggest but most days serves as merely a tourist attraction. These days,
it's also hidden behind the steel fences of a massive building site, with
the red Chinese flag flying above the giant construction crane. Medieval
streets nearby have been demolished, ancient tombs dug up and moved, and
hundreds of Muslims forced to relocate to make room for a 55,000-square-metre
shopping plaza with almost 3,000 new shops.20
Nearby billboards carry images of
$100 U.S. bills and urge investors to rent space, but local merchants say
they cannot afford it, so Chinese businesses are expected to take over.
In fact, an artist's depiction of the plaza shows it populated entirely
by Han Chinese, with the mosque reduced to a backdrop.
Xinjiang's biggest city, Urumqi,
is already largely Han. "In 10 years, Kashgar will be like Urumqi," one
man says. "It's very sad."
The owner of an instrument shop
believes that it's already too late. "When the Han people came to Kashgar,
it was destroyed," he tells a Chinese visitor. "Just like Japan invaded
you, you have done the same to us. You have brought more money here, but
if you have to choose between money and freedom, what would you choose?
We would choose freedom."
Geoffrey York is The Globe and Mail's
correspondent in Beijing.20
Not a love story
As he stares at a belly dancer gyrating
to the Venus club's throbbing disco beat, Kuresh laments the shortage of
virgins.
"Probably I will have to marry a
Pakistani girl," he says with a sigh. "The girls there are still keeping
the old traditions."
As a proud Muslim, he insists on
marrying a virgin. Yet he finds it difficult to resist the temptations
flooding into China's remote northwest. Like many people, he is alternately
shocked and seduced.
"When I was young, I never would
have dared to enter a nightclub. Even 10 years ago, we would have refused
to enter this kind of place. Uighur girls would never have dared to perform
in such places, but now they do, and they earn a high income from it."
Kashgar, located near the border
with Pakistan and Afghanistan, has always been one of China's more isolated
places -- a city of veils and mosques, surrounded by harsh deserts and
forbidding mountains, with a religion and language that reinforce the sense
of separation.20
In the past decade, however, it
has changed so rapidly that the local population suddenly finds itself
caught between Islamic morality and China's secular mainstream.
A local tour guide, for example,
says he quit a job at a hotel when he discovered Uighur men were using
it for liaisons with prostitutes, something he says never used to happen.
Meanwhile, 21-year-old Akbar is
nursing a hangover. He was so upset upon discovering his girlfriend of
two years wasn't a virgin that he spent all of last night drinking wine.
That, too, is a breach of the Koran, but "I'm in such pain," he moans.
"I can't marry her, but I still love her."
Kuresh says a growing number of
women undergo surgery to "restore" their virginity before their wedding
nights. Uighur girls, he says, "are much different from a few years ago,
but they still know that they will be driven out of their home by their
bridegroom if he discovers that they are not a virgin."
He lost his own girlfriend of three
years, who was ethnic Chinese, because their parents objected. When someone
spotted them at a disco, the girl's father kicked her so hard she wound
up in the hospital. "I miss her," Kuresh says, "but we have to accept reality."
This culture clash is epitomized
by the story of the most famous of all Kashgar women, known as the Fragrant
Concubine. She lived in the 18th century and was so beautiful that Emperor
Qianlong ordered her brought to Beijing wrapped like a piece of porcelain.
She was installed in the Forbidden City and spent the rest of her life
there.20
"Love between this Uighur maid and
the emperor is evidence of the great unity among different ethnic groups
in China," according to a sign at the tomb of one of her ancestors.
But the Uighurs scoff at this notion.
They claim the Fragrant Concubine defied the emperor, refusing to let him
touch her, and finally committed suicide to preserve her honour.
