The New Dominion

Since the International Herald Tribune and its parent, The New York Times, ran articles on the Xotän protests yesterday, there has been an explosion of English-language news concerning the protests and the “little-known Turkic Muslim minority” that is the Uyghurs. Most of it wants to know, “Is Xinjiang the next Tibet?”

Poppycock.

Xinjiang stands in an unfortunate position. The land known as Xinjiang, as we know it now, is a political unit with somewhat arbitrary borders, the product – at first – of a treaty between the Qing and Russian Empires following a war with the Junghar Mongol state that was started by Central Asian Sufi sheikhs and involved the Tibetans. Yaqub Beg, the Khokandi warlord, never kept a hold on the whole territory. What the Qing reconquered and reconstituted as a province under the leadership of General Zuo “Tso” Zongtang (of chicken fame) encompassed the old Junghar territories, small independent kingdoms, and two regions that had been held, at one time, by the Buddhist Idiqut and Muslim Karakhanid Empires. The borders were drawn with the involvement of the British, who had been interested in making it a buffer state. Xinjiang has been referred to as the “pivot of Asia” by Owen Lattimore and as the end of or a stop on the “Silk Road” by countless others.

So, the trend in Xinjiang studies has long been to emphasize the diversity of identities found among individual members of its ethnonational groups – though this is certainly changing – while the trend in popular media, which usually can’t handle diversity and still make them interesting, has been to try and simplify the region, to make it readable to the outside world. Even the idea of being “in between” is based on the assumption that something is positioned between identifiably homogeneous points. Uyghurs and Han become monolithic animals, one color each, who wrestle over an undifferentiated, homogeneous, and ultimately timeless national desert. Journalists, whose situation I must admit I understand, have to make something as alien as a peaceful Islamic women’s protest in a place like… Khotan? How do you pronounce that?… and make it accessible.

So, we have the convenient example of Tibet. It’s nearby, it’s big, it’s also in China, people there are violently suppressed, and no one really has a good understanding of it, so it’s an ideal parallel to make. Indeed, when asked at a loud and crowded party, “So, what’s Xinjiang?”, I have been known to answer, “It’s like Tibet, but it’s full of Turks.” It’s an easy analogy to make.

Let’s look at the facts, though. One of the reasons Uyghurs and Tibetans don’t network well is that they don’t like each other very much. The Muslim/Buddhist divide is very strong, especially in Xinjiang, where the above-mentioned Buddhist Idiqut and Muslim Karakhanid Empires fought each other, on and off, for several centuries. For a long time, the word “Uyghur” became synonymous with “idol-worshipping Buddhist”. Indeed, the Uyghur word but means “idol”, as in the kind you’re not meant to worship, the kind that Muslims used to whack the heads off of before the Eighth Route Army and the Red Guards took over for them. Pan-Islamism has been a major political force in Xinjiang for centuries. So has Pan-Turkism, disciples of which, returning or journeying from points west, were largely responsible for the Xinjiang that we see today. Tibet simply hasn’t had a similar intellectual history, a similar epistemological chain giving rise to a similar kind of separatism or nationalism.

Xinjiang’s only periods of “independence”, those looked to by nationalist groups, never covered the entire area of Xinjiang as we now know it. Otherwise, there were periods, which they do not invoke, when that land area was controlled as the personal fiefdom of some outsider, for example Yang Zengxin. Tibetans in Greater Tibet have a clear and internationally-respected (there’s the key!) claim to a historically verified Tibetan Empire focused around today’s Tibet, a religion particularly peculiar to that area, and all of the bureaucracy that comes with both of those things. Uyghurs have no Dalai Lama. They have a close-knit, but ultimately inefficacious intellectual elite that, even when it is hopping mad, prefers to write a mildly subversive allegory rather than raise an armed rebellion. Their modus operandi is to work for a better life for their families and for other Uyghurs now, not to organize actively for a future independent state. This does not necessarily go for the Uyghur diaspora, which is, in any case, too small to gain much notice.

In broader terms, Xinjiang is not as centralized as Tibet is. Ürümchi, which has only really mattered for about a century, is not the symbolic capital of the Uyghur spirit, nor is it even a particularly loved or revered city among Xinjiang people overall. Rather, the Uyghur population, which largely retains its home-town orientation, is found in clusters, linked by long highways across large, open spaces, with every city having some claim to authenticity and its own local problems. Protests and other expressions of discontent, I think, will remain local, not general, and led by unsung heroes of local problems, not by charismatic figures from abroad. One might actually suggest that the riots in Lhasa started the same way, but that’s a topic for another blog.

It was the above-linked post on Nicholas Kristof’s New York Times blog that really got me to notice the simplistic way in which Xinjiang is viewed, the way it parallels Tibet, a similarly nebulous image in the popular discourse. Everything is in a global context readable by post-9/11 Americans, full of familiar images, less information than an example of an already-hegemonic theory of the world. Terrorism is Islamic — a position accepted by many Chinese, as well — and dissent against China is Buddhist. The editors’ blog of Tricycle, a Buddhist magazine that should know better, even refers to the protests in Xotän as “the second front”, albeit only in passing. What, now Buddhism owns dissent in China? Does Falun Gong get this treatment?

It’s time to start studying and understanding Xinjiang on its own terms. I have only seen one newspaper – The Guardian – consult an actual expert on Xinjiang who is not a member of an Uyghur nationalist organization, Nicolas Becquelin. His reasoned and expert opinions show that there are factors internal to Xinjiang and in relation to the central government of the PRC that are responsible for recent displays of discontent.

We are also lucky that we live in a time when a field of “Xinjiang Studies” is forming around the world (outside of China), creating a broader and richer dialogue on this not-so-mysterious region – Indiana University’s Department of Central Eurasian Studies has a program for studying Xinjiang, India’s Jawaharlal Nehru University has a position for a professor of Xinjiang Studies, and the field is booming in Japan. There are more examples, and I encourage you to find them.

In the meantime, there is already a long history of quality research on Xinjiang done by scholars from the PRC itself. This includes work in Chinese, Uyghur, Mongolian, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, and, yes, even Sibe, as well as possibly other languages. Xinjiang is home to several universities, which are home to scholars who do serious research, often of very high quality, on their own Autonomous Region. It would take a sea change in the way the world thinks of language and power to get this work the broad recognition it deserves, especially in the popular eye. However, an effort made by outside researchers to seek out these scholars and their work, in tandem with a greater effort on the part of news organizations to seek less biased sources, will make this region better-known. Perhaps someday we will hear some reporter ask, “Is Yunnan the next Xinjiang?” Maybe projects like our own serial translation of The Awakened Land will inspire someone to look a little further.

So, is Xinjiang the next Tibet? Michael Manning over at The Opposite End of China has, once again, beat us to the punch:

Q: Is Xinjiang the next Tibet?

A: Is Afghanistan the next Bhutan?

Finally, I should note that the PRC-funded Lyndon LaRouche Political Action Committee, a paramilitary group involved in the construction of a New World Order under the leadership of the Sino-Jewish Cabal (that’s irony, folks), suggests that the protests in Xotän were, in fact, incited by Amnesty International under the control of British intelligence agency MI-6. Their pigtailed puppet, Rabiyä Qadir, justified and encouraged the splittists’ acts of inharmonious violence with her snake-tongued lies. See? Now even crazy people care about Xinjiang.