Reuters via the New York Times already gets the roll bowling with its “can’t resist to joke” article “China Pulls Rug from Under Flying Carpet Drug Smugglers.” As someone who now sees Xinjiang as my adoptive home in China, I feel a sort of odd pride that drug traffickers in Xinjiang and across the border in Afghanistan and Pakistan have pioneered a cutting edge system for smuggling drugs into China. The smugglers in question insert heroin into plastic tubes 1 to 2 mm wide, then disguise them as yarn by wrapping them in synthetic fibers and weaving into carpets. Naturally, the reason we know about this is because the PRC customs anti-smuggling investigators succeeded in unravelling the diabolical plots woven by those with the intent of harming the stability and harmony of Xinjiang. For a profit. However, the deputy director of the General Administration of Customs’ anti-smuggling bureau still acknowledged that a new level of sophistication was attained by the smugglers who developed the method.

And thus drug smuggler joins terrorist, AIDS kebabs vagabond, and thief on the “ways in which Uyghurs are spoiling the harmony of New China” list. Granted the article referenced above didn’t mention Uyghurs in specific, but let’s face it, for the Chinese reader the modus operandi of carpet smuggling will give it all away (even if it turns out that the operation was run entirely by Han Chinese). But as tourism drops rapidly in the months before the 2008 Olympics, perhaps a story like this one will increase carpet sales in Xinjiang, which is rapidly ousting Yunnan as the drug capital of the People’s Republic.

The intelligent and thought-provoking Blogging for China has put up a full English translation of a forum post entitled “Don’t endulge our ‘race (minzu 民族) complex’”. The original post (“别放纵自己的民族情结”) can be found here on a forum dedicated to minkaohan (民考汉, members of non-Han groups who finish their schooling in Chinese). The post reflects, I think, the feelings of many Xinjiang non-Han, both minkaohan and minkaomin (those who finish their schooling in a non-Han language) alike.

In summary, the poster, herself a minkaohan, found herself despairing of the conflicts that erupted when refugees from the closed Uyghur On-Line site moved onto the forum. Coming face-to-face with the strong minzu (ethnonational or racial) feelings of other posters, as well as her own, she tells some stories from her own life to illustrate the changes in ethnic relations in Xinjiang over the past sixty years. She ends with a heartfelt appeal for mutual understanding, which was well-received by other posters.

This is one of a few examples I have seen on-line recently of appeals made in the name of a pan-ethnic Xinjiang identity. Another of them will soon be translated and available on this site.

I found on Reuters an amusing article describing the harebrained plot of three Shandong natives to pay off some rather steep gambling debts they dug themselves into. Common sense says that when you’re in such a bind the best route to take is extortion, and you can’t extort unless you’re dark, scary, and powerful, armed with the ability to threaten, coerce, and my goodness, if necessary, kill. Or at least the ability to pretend to be in that situation. I think we’re all pretty certain that 3 unscrupulous Qingdao fellas wouldn’t be in a good position to extort, say, 2.08 million yuan, so it was up to them to find a mask to don, something that would get the fat cats shivering in their boots, scared enough to transmit some digital Maos to the right bank accounts. Hm… what kind of appearance to go for? What could strike enough fear in the wary hearts of the rich and powerful of Qingdao, which is the future site of a few Olympic events?

Of course the answer is obvious: Uyghur terrorists!

So Mr. Sun,  23, Mr. Wu, 25, and Mr. Wang, 41 (Good Uyghur names, ah-yep) called in to an as of yet unamed company posing as East Turkestan terrorists and demanding that the above amount be wired to their bank account, or else! Or else they would blow up something. The conclusion hardly need be stated: the police were notified and the unlucky idiots were immediately identified by the personal information attached to the provided bank accounts and quickly arrested.

And that’s pretty funny. It’s funny because the guys put some effort into concocting the appropriate alternate identity without bothering to wonder if their bank accounts would give them away. It’s funny because when in April details about alleged foiled terrorist plans emerged, it really seemed crystal clear from the terrorists’ purported arsenal – athletes as hostages, poisoning foodstuffs, suicide bombers – that money really wasn’t a top priority for the phantom ETIM villains.

But in spite of everything our Chinese Larry, Moe, and Curly Joe got wrong, I think they got one tiny thing right, and that’s if there’s one costume to adopt that while cause people to sweat under the collar, if there’s one shadowy specter that will get give cadres the heeby-jeebies and get the armed police moving, it’s the Muslim Uyghur Terrorist. With the silly Olympic Mind Games occuring with the torch in Xinjiang and Tibet (China gets gold for the Fool-The-Terrorist-Switcheroo event) and ghost plots that may or may not have been real appearing and disappearing into the pre-Olympic haze, I think it’s becoming clear that the image of Uyghurs is evolving in the Han popular imagination. Sure, the dancing and singing part is there, but that’s only one half the dual mold that Uyghurs and jammed into – the other half, most readres will know, was “theives.” We saw it a few weeks ago when we looked at some joke maps circulating on the internet. And anyone who has told Han friends that they’re going to Xinjiang undoubtedly was told to watch out for pickpockets. But for the sake of building the foundation of a secure and stable Olympics, a new domestic enemy has been fabricated – no longer Uyghur the theif, now its Uyghur the terrorist. And even a few dumb saps in Shandong “know” that.

Updates: Reuters has an informative article on the broken promise of press freedom in the Xinjiang and Tibet torch relays, part of a series on the Olympic flame. The New York Times also has an interview with noted Tibet scholar Dr. Robert Barnett on the relays in western China.  Here’s a quote: “[W]hat you tend to see is sullen resentment of these major government-organized activities. They’re just huge inconveniences and nuisances for everyone who isn’t a Chinese patriot.”

The Olympic torch has passed through Urumchi and gone. The flame was carried from a quiet, orderly official ceremony — described by XJTV news as renao (lively!) — at 9/7:35 AM yesterday morning. It passed from torch to torch between 209 runners, including members of 47 minzu, famous athletes, a famous dancer (Rena Abdukerim, who did not “sway her hips“), and several pudgy middle-aged men.

A couple of days ago, I wrote of my sincere hope that someone in Urumchi would actually be able to see the Olympic torch relay. Rumors abounded that the whole city would be on lock-down for the day. My hopes were not fulfilled. (See a piece by the BBC’s James Reynolds, which I think is right on the money.) Continue reading →

The Olympic torch, originally scheduled to be in Tibet this week, will be arriving in Urumchi tomorrow (Tuesday 17 June). The flame flew into Urumchi from Chongqing yesterday evening, and it will leave Xinjiang on 20 June.

After the end of the Urumchi torch relay, the torch will proceed to Kashgar, Shihezi, and Changji. The cities on the torch’s route have been chosen as “the center of Asia” (Urumchi), “an important town on the ancient Silk Road” (Kashgar), “the Republic’s first military land reclamation city” (Shihezi), and “the pearl of the northern foothills of the Tianshan Mountains”, which is an awfully nice way to refer to Changji. The first of the 209 athletes to carry the torch, including ten foreign nationals, will be Uyghur boxer Abdushukur Mijit.

Here is the rough schedule for the torch relay in Urumchi: the opening ceremony will be at People’s Square (Renmin Guangchang) at 9/7:30 AM. The closing ceremony is to be at the Xinjiang Athletics Center West Square (Xinjiang Tiyu Zhongxin Xi Guangchang) at 11/9:55 AM. (The site also has times for the relay in other cities.)

For those who want to try to see the torch, it is meant to run down Youhao Lu, I believe from south to north, between these times. The road has been under renovation since April in preparation for the event, and it has now been decorated from end to end with Olympic-theme topiary.

To get a better idea of where the torch might actually be, it is useful to look at what roads will be closed off and when. There have been many rumors circulating in Urumchi today about a total freeze on traffic all day throughout the entire city. The actual regulations, as released by the City Transportation Department on Sunday evening and reported in the Urumchi Evening News today, are as follows:

From 7/5:00 AM to 2/12:00 PM, the following roads, mostly located in the southern-central part of the city (around Bingtuan Headquarters and Nanmen), will be experiencing rolling closures: Guangming Lu, Dongfeng Lu, Jiefang Bei Lu, Heping Bei Lu, Renmin Lu and Xinhua Bei Lu.

From 8/6:00 AM to 2/12:00 PM, the following roads, mostly located in the northern-central part of the city (around Xinjiang Normal University, the Sheraton, and the Xinjiang Library), will be experiencing rolling closures: Youhao Lu, Xinyi Lu, Beijing Lu, and Hebei Lu.

From 7/5:00 AM to 10/8:00 PM, all roads within the Waihuan “ring road” will be inaccessible to medium and large automobiles, though it is not clear if this includes buses. (I am told that most, if not all, buses will not be running.) Starting tonight (Monday 16 June) at 10/8:00 PM, police have been conducting screenings of cars within this area.

Good luck, however, actually getting a glimpse of the torch or its journey down Friendship Street. Continue reading →

Nathan Light. Intimate heritage: creating Uyghur muqam song in Xinjiang. Berlin: LIT Verlag. 2008. Pp. 352. 34.90 EUR. (Part of the series Halle Studies in the Anthropology of Eurasia)

A new book is to be published on the history of and discourse surrounding the muqam, a Turkic musical form with Arabic roots, in Xinjiang. The Uyghur Twelve Muqam were declared a “masterpiece of the oral and intangible heritage of humanity” by UNESCO in 2005. The author of the book, Nathan Light, is a senior researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle/Saale, Germany, and has conducted research on the muqam for over a decade. Sections of his 1998 PhD dissertation on the Twelve Muqam are available for reading here.

The book’s abstract (after the break and also posted here) indicates that Light has taken a broad and multidisciplinary approach to research on the muqam in Xinjiang, incorporating musicological, historical, and ethnographic data to come to some interesting conclusions. I find particularly interesting his assertion that, in the process of further preparing and refining the Uyghur muqam over the past fifty years, the historical and ethnic consciousness of the editors has played a more powerful role than that of the state censors. Subaltern discourses appear in such interesting places. Light also looks at the way the Twelve Muqam, too often regarded as a fixed, formalized collection of “folk classical” music and an unchanging symbol of a transhistorical Uyghur identity, have changed in recent history in response to other social factors.

But perhaps the abstract should speak for itself. I look forward to reading this book as soon as it becomes available.

Continue reading →

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(All GoogleDitu maps now automatically focus at the all-China level. Please scroll west.)

According to sparse reports from the international press, a police station was assaulted last week in Sangong Hui Village by a group of Uyghurs. The Uyghurs are said to have used rocks and gasoline bombs in their attack. Several dozen people may have been arrested in connection with the attack. The attackers may have been protesting crackdowns on civil liberties in the run-up to the Olympic Games to be held in Beijing in August. No more details are known at this time. Although the incident has not been reported upon in the Chinese press, the Epoch Times, which I cannot for the life of me access from China, appears to have picked up the story. Michael Manning’s The Opposite End of China has some commentary.

Sangong Hui Village (三公回族乡) is a small village, encompassing nearby Upper and Lower Sangong Villages in Huocheng (霍城) County, 53 kilometers from Ghulja (Yining) and near the border with Kazakhstan. It is situated between the 218 and 312 highways, the latter of which leads west to Qorghos and Kazakhstan.

Thus far, the only source of this information has been Dilxat Raxit, spokesman for the World Uyghur Congress. If the story receives further press, we will comment on it here. Continue reading →

The following is a serial translation of Abdurehim Ötkür’s 1985 historical novel Oyghanghan Zemin, Chapter Two, pp. 54-60. New readers are encouraged to start from the beginning, Chapter One, Part One. This translation is presented for information and entertainment purposes only. New sections will be posted every Sunday, pending their completion and the satisfaction of the translator. It is also a work in progress – comments are welcome, especially on the (questionable) quality of the translation.

When we last left Xojiniyaz Palwan, he was about to explain how he ended up at the home of Alipbay…

2

This is what happened up until then in a place in Altay called Chinggil seven months after Tömür Xälpä was killed. As the reader may remember, when Tömür Xälpä went to Ürümchi in anticipation of Li Shufu’s deception, Xojiniyaz, sensing the tragedy of his end, has hurried off into the mountains [near Qumul] and lived in refuge in the dark valleys. Only one person, his brother-in-law Qurban, communicated with him. His mother and father, too, kept aware of his situation through this young man. However, King Shamäxsut’s notice concerning Xojiniyaz’s capture was spread all over the land of Qumul, so greedy people were on his heels, and, in the end, even the mountains of Qumul began to feel crowded. In the meantime, King Shamäxsut, saying “You have not found your son for me,” threw his father, Iminniyaz, in the palace’s dungeon. Iminniyaz was originally one of the simple shepherds in the palace’s service who took care of the “iron livestock” [breeding stock]. Because he was, himself, a clever, strong, and reputable man in that country, Shamäxsut took him in as his own hired hand, intending to take advantage of him. Not only had he been separated from his son while still alive, finally, Iminniyaz’s imprisonment caused pain like that of kicking the dead to Aysä Appaq, who came to be bedridden. Hearing this grave news, Xojiniyaz, his patience spent, said, “I am what I am” and came to desire to go before Shamäxsut himself. As his [Xojiniyaz's] son came to hear of these intentions through Qurban, Aysä Appaq said, “He should never think this way. What if he is discovered, then, fine, he will never stay alive. We’ve eaten what we had to eat, we’ve worn what we had to wear, now we’ll see the completion of our fates. Xojiniyaz is still young; wherever he goes, he should protect himself. We are content with him.”

After this, Qurban went into the mountains and invited Xojiniyaz to leave for Altay or Inner Mongolia. Xojiniyaz went to the country of Altay and found a place to be among the Kazakh people. He wanted to exchange his horse and head to Altay be way of Bariköl. Qurban had been his companion all the way up to the mountain slopes layered with ice all year around. Continue reading →