Blips of Unrest in Kashgar and Ghulja
In stark contrast to the recent riots in Tibet, where an originating fire lit in Lhasa spread quickly and eventually consumed whole Greater Tibet tinderbox in a matter of days (illustrated vividly and amusingly here at our blogging neighbor), unrest in Xinjiang has instead been dispersed among a number of isolated, relatively unconnected incidents. Following closely behind recently released information on riots in Khotan are reports on house raids near Ghulja from RFA and claims from an unnamed “exile group” coming through Reuters that 70 individuals have been detained in Kashgar. I’m a big information visualization enthusiast, so here’s a an embed from Google Maps to better illustrate the geographic spread we’re looking at.
According to the linked articles, the house raids in Ghulja were part of a secret operation that Chinese police spokespeople were unwilling to divulge any information about. Eyewitnesses report digging, as if searching for weapons, and also the detainment of several individuals. The Reuters article was unable to provide any reason for the 70 detained Kashgarliks except for increased anxiety as the Olympic Torch Relay draws near.
OpkeHessip just published a detailed analysis of the most recent media coverage of unrest in Xinjiang and makes a point that I also hold with conviction, namely, that spurious comparisons between Tibet and Xinjiang are invalid for a whole slew of reasons, one of the most prominent being historical factors creating fractured groups of Turkic peoples inhabiting the Jungharia and Tarim Basins and only recently united under the name “Uyghur” on one hand, and a culturally integrated Tibetan people who share a cornerstone in history, religion, and spiritual leadership on the other hand. Really, you should give his analysis a good look over or two. The visual element that I’ve supplied above I feel serves to reinforce the fact that in Xinjiang, where there is unrest, we’re dealing with isolated pressure points that make a pop that doesn’t resonate with other localities, whereas in Tibet there’s more if a unified network where stress on one side of the structure inevitably leads to creaking and snapping throughout the whole caboodle.
I like looking at this with the “terrain” or “satellite” visualizations. It reinforces the problem of infrastructure and easy communication that determined much of Xinjiang political, social, and economic activity until very recently. It’s hard to get from any of these points to the other. This, I believe, was Justin Rudelson’s Big Point in “Oasis Identities”, an important but otherwise unspectacular book: local identities and the retention of local networks, even among second-generation Urumchiliks, are reinforced by the difficulty of transportation through Xinjiang, compared to the relative ease and lure of travel to other nearby territories. (Ghulja to Kazakhstan, Urumchi and Turpan to the Central Plains of China, Kashgar and Hoten to the Indian Subcontinent…)
Wasn’t Ghulja where there was some big crackdown a number of years ago?