Xotän Protest News; Crackdown in Xinijang Amid Fears of Olympic Disruption
A report of the Xotän protests of 23-24 March has now come out from the Chinese news media. Its source is primarily an official from the prefectural Party Committee who refused to be identified. Now, the protests are being cast as a pro-independence rally organized and incited by members of the “Three (Evil) Forces” who are meant to have raised pro-independence banner and even East Turkestani flags. The protest reached the Xotän Grand Bazaar around noon, when perhaps over 100 000 shoppers were present to witness it. No injuries have been reported. (This was picked up by the Wall Street Journal, which assumes a Tibet connection.)
I am unable to locate anything about this on message boards, Fanfou, anything like that in Chinese or in Uyghur. Xinhua Xinjiang is also silent. “Three (Evil) Forces” (三股势力), indicating the “three evil forces of terrorism, separatism and extremism” is one of those blanket terms the PRC uses for dissent in Xinjiang. However, it’s usually discursively reified to suggest that this Axis of Evil-like concept has real organizational substance. It’s the sort of thing one “struggles” against. I am amazed at the total lack of coverage of the event, which makes me wonder how much of an impact it had. Still, I don’t think it’s coincidence that, only a few days later, low-level officials in Xotän were commended for maintaining “stability” in their prefecture and fighting those Three Forces. It seems even less of a coincidence that, on 25 March, Xotän declared a new effort to “bring the rule of law to the countryside”.
In recent days, there has been a clearly visible effort to silence dissent and root out possible sources of disruption in Xinjiang during the run-up to the Olympics. Even as moderate dissident Hu Jia is sent to prison and Uyghur refugees in Turkey protest the running of the Olympic torch, it has been reported that police in Xinjiang have been digging up yards, 70 people may have been detained in Qäshqär (Kashgar), and the police are raiding houses in Ghulja. These Ghulja raids, in which about seventeen individuals may have already been detained, seem to relate to the mäshräp societies that were the focus of crackdowns there in 1997. Anyone living in Ürümchi can tell that the increase in military trucks and personnel, including those making displays at the city’s universities, are meant to show off the strength of the PRC’s military.
Even if there is no large-scale separatist rebellion in Xinjiang right now, the government certainly seems to believe there will be sometime in the near future. I consider this a self-fulfilling prophecy: make innocent people feel like criminals, and they will be inclined to react against that attitude by acting according to expectations. Armed police encourage those who feel pressured by them to take up arms themselves.
1) Language has many meanings, but the first among them is to communicate. Using the spelling “Xotän,” while perhaps expressing solidarity with the Uyghur people, fails to make the article communicate clearly with the English speakers to which it is directed, the vast majority of whom do not know the location of Xinjiang, much less Hotan.
2) FYI: Per the ThornTree forum at Lonely Planet thread: The situation of Xinjiang, the only official report in China was at the Hotan government site:
xjht.gov.cn/
和田市制止一起极少数“三股势力”分子煽动闹事事件
时间：2008-4-1 来源：和田行署新闻办公室 浏览 296 次 上传者:lvhui
3月23日，极少数“三股势力”分子在和田市大巴扎，企图煽动群众挑起事端，被我公安 干警及时制止，并依法处置。
和田市大巴扎是和田地区最大的集贸市场，当日中午，有10万群众赶集。极少数“三股 势力”分子打着煽动分裂国家的旗帜，在市场内聚集闹事，并企图欺骗煽动群众挑起事端， 制造影响。为维护和田社会稳定大局，维护群众正常生产生活秩序，我值勤民警在现场群 众的协助下，迅速制止，依法处置。
在制止过程中，没有发生伤亡，没有影响集贸市场正常交易秩序。
目前，和田社会大局稳定，群众生产生活秩序正常。
The City of Hoten stops a very small group of the “Three Forces” from inciting a disorder
Time: 2008-4-1 Source: Hetian Administrative Newsroom Read: 296 times Uploaded by : lvhui
On March 23, an extremely small number of the “Three Forces” attempted to incite the public to create an incident at the Hetian City Bazaar, but were stopped in time by our Gongan police and were dealt with according to the law.
The Hetian City Bazaar is the biggest market in the Hetian area. At noon on that day, there were 100,000 people at the market. A very few members of the “Three Forces”, waving the secessionist banner, congregated in the market to create trouble. They attempted to deceive the masses to cause an incident, so as to expand their influence. In order to maintain the stability of the Hetian community, and to maintain good order for work and life for the citizens of Hetian, our on-duty officers, with the help of the masses on the scene, stopped them (the members of the “Three Forces”) swiftly and brought them to justice.
There were no casualties in the process, nor was normal trading in the market affected.
At present, the situation of the community of Hetian is stable, and the citizens enjoy good order in work and life.
CL,
1. Hmm, you’ve got a point. I’m actually doing it out of linguistic obsessiveness — this is the transliteration I use in my notes, and I feel that it’s a clear rendering of both the phonetic of the word and of its Uyghur spelling in several ways. And wouldn’t most people know this city as Khotan, anyway? “Hoten” is an “Internet Uyghur” spelling arising from Uyghurs’ own usage on the Web, one based on an already-confusing semi-pinyin transliteration, so I’m not sure how much usage it really has outside of that community. In any case, I’ll keep that in mind.
2. Hey, thanks for the link and translation! I couldn’t find that on the city’s website itself. It is the report contained in the news story linked to right at the top, though.
[...] spotted a Chinese language press release in which Chinese authorities fascinatingly attribute the protests in Khotan as well as various forms of unrest and troublemaking in Kashgar, Urumqi, and Kizilsu Prefecture to [...]
I understand you point for linguistic obsessiveness. But by doing so, you are shooting yourself in the foot for what I sense is the greater goal of your blog.
Journalistic style call for using words in the language in which you are writing unless there is no alternative. Writing in English, for example, I would write ‘He went to Germany,’ not ‘He went to Deutschland,’ or ‘He went to Alemagne.’ Even though the latter two are also ‘correct’ in their proper place, they are not correct in a journalistic sentence in English, unless I wrote, ‘He went to Germany, which in German is called Deutschland.’
If you are writing a lesson on speaking Uyghur, then it may be correct to write Xotän. But if you are writing a general journalistic piece regarding a place, the proper name to use the common spelling of that place name in the language in which you are writing.
Clearly that’s a challenge with many places in Xinjiang which have a distinctive Uyghur and Chinese name. Jounalistic style allows one to make a choice, perhaps making a reference in passing to the other option, for example, ‘Kashgar, which in Chinese Pinyin is spelled Kashi…’
Hotan, of course, presents an additional challenge by having a traditional English version of Khotan along with the more modern Hotan and the Chinese Pinyin Hetian. For this reason, large organizations, from the US government to the New York Times develop a style guide which includes their standard spelling for a list of people’s names and place names. Towns in northeast Xinjiang, for example Kumul (or Qumul) which better known in English by its Chinese Pinyin name of Hami, while Gulja is better known in English sources by its Russian name of Ili and Kashgar by its Uyghur name. Different sources vary on whether to include the umlauds for Urumqi. Most smaller news sources settle on the style sheet of a larger news source to avoid debates and inconsistencies.
Currently, most English sources use ‘Hotan.’ Some, including Radio Free Asia and many academic sources, still use ‘Khotan.’ Granted the roman-script rendering is Hoten, but that doesn’t make it an English speling. No English journalistic source I’ve seen uses Xotän.
If you are going to choose your standard as the linguistic spelling, then you’ll want to be consistent and use Shinjyäŋ for Xinjiang, Chīnə for China, Ueruemchē for Urumqi, and Wēgər for Uyghur. (Don’t get me started on the spellings of Uyghur.)
The purpose of journalism is to communicate, not to teach pronunciation (except once as an aside, as needed). However, even if one wants to teach pronunciation, then one should choose a standard way of presenting the pronunciation. The standard linguistic representation of Hotan is hōtän and for Khotan is ḵōtän. Using the letter ‘X’ is inappropriate because the ‘X’ sound does not represent that throaty ‘k’ except if writing phonetically in several languages other than English, such as Spanish. In English, an ‘X’ at the beginning of a word represents a ‘z’ sound, such as in Xerox or Xavier.
If you want to scream out your solidarity with the plight of the Uyghur people in every sentence, then you should use the Hoten spelling.
If you want to shout “I am first and foremost a linguistic purist but insist on my own phonetic conventions and I don’t care if any search engine ever finds my obscure blog entries,” then by all means, continue with Xotän.
If you want to communicate with the average reader about where the heck you are talking about and desire to inform, persuade and entertain regarding a little-known region that deserves wider recognition and understanding, then may I respectfully recommend that you choose either Khotan or Hotan.
CL,
Ah. We have come to a point of difference. I do not consider myself a journalist. Were I a journalist, my situation living in Xinjiang would be difficult indeed. I am an academic with a blog which happens to involve news analysis.
I am not really sure where you are getting your standard linguistic representations. Do you have a background in Persian? Or is this from ESL? (The macron confuses me.) If I wanted to use IPA, I’d go with [͵xoʹtæn] (it’s a velar fricative), [͵yrymʹʧɪ] (though that stress is not consistent), [͵ʃɪnʹʤaŋ] (the diphthong is never realized in the second syllable, and stress seems to vary by education and class), and [͵ʤuŋʹgo] or perhaps even [͵xɪʹtaɪ] or [͵xɪʹtaj]. (Now that would REALLY be picking a side!)
This raises the issue of the arbitrariness of representing a phonetic signature and its presumed phonological representation in writing. Why not just feed the signal into Praat and put a spectrogram in place of the written word? Even if that were reasonable in this context, it would still, in a sense, favor those sounds which a certain community considers to be important to the process of language production, as well as the production of those speech sounds in a context that many would consider unnatural?
Returning to the present question, a good and fairly well-accepted benchmark for measuring the effectiveness of a broad transliteration or transcription system is whether or not a single character represents what could reasonably be considered a phonological segment or, in Jakobson’s terminology, a phoneme. There is an interesting conference paper on the transliteration of Uyghur which takes up exactly this question. (Duval, Jean Rahman & Waris Abdukerim Janbaz. 2006. “An Introduction to Latin-Script Uyghur”. Presented at 2006 Middle East & Central Asia Politics, Economics, and Society Conference, 7-9 September, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, USA.) They put forth a system which satisfies this requirement and, indeed, it uses for [x]. This script, which was developed by Uyghur scholars of the Uyghur language in cooperation with Chinese and foreign governmental and private organizations, is meant to be the new standard for the transliteration of Uyghur in the Latin script. The difference I have with it is using < ä> in place of and in place of < é>.
Perhaps this problem is most easily resolved with the use of tags, which mark each post for content. We can add alternative spellings of (that city), which should let them show up on Google searches. In the meantime, in cases of extreme differences in spelling, I will make sure to include alternative spellings.
Ah, darn it… Everything I put between “< " brackets got interpreted as HTML and disappeared. I should've seen that coming. Here it is again, with quotes instead of brackets:
I knew I shouldn’t have thrown in the phonetics. I just knew it would pull you off the point. Ah well…
Google searches take into account the location and frequency of word usage. An article with ‘Hotan’ as a tag will appear far, far down a list from an article with ‘Hotan’ in the title and frequently in the text.
If you want your blog to be of value, it must be read.
To be read, it must be found.
To be found, it must be visible.
Using the Xotän spelling, with the Hotan spelling in effect a footnote, loses you most of your potential readers.
Further, it detracts from what you want to say to those who do find you.
All I’m saying is that you are hiding your light under a basket.
Your preferred spelling may indeed be the most true and the most beautiful. Yet in the context of what you are writing about recent events, I still respectfully contend that your spelling is wrong.
[...] makes some sense. Indeed, the restrictions imposed on life in Xinjiang, especially since the Khotan (Xotän) protests in March, have been sudden and without a satisfactory explanation: curfews of 11/9:00 PM have been imposed [...]