On Wednesday a car pulled turned into the famous Wangfujing pedestrian shopping street in Beijing. When police officers pulled up to the car to cite a traffic violation, already roused to suspicion by the car’s out-of-town license plate, the people in the vehicle, apparently already doused in gasoline, set themselves on fire in an act of protest whose motives yet remain unclear. 

When news of the act hit the press it triggered a frenzy of speculation as to who the protesters were and why they did it. The National People’s Congress is set to open next week and is often the target of protesters who come to Beijing to air their grievances. Prominently, the date of the protest was the Tibetan New Year, opening the possibility that the protesters were Tibetans expressing discontent with the situation in Tibet. The China Digital Times posted a summary of the various commentaries triggered by the event, along with some pictures, and clearly one can see that despite how sensational the protest itself was, actual information concerning the cause or the participants remained scarce.

The latest by Reuters says that the occupants of the vehicle were a family of Uyghurs, according to information disclosed by an unnamed source at the capital. The father and mother, aged 59 and 58 respectively, are being treated at a local hospital for burn injuries while the son, 28, is in police custody, uninjured. 

The same source claims that the protest was directed at lawmakers and was over a housing dispute. What remains to be disclosed, then, is whether or not there is something uniquely “Uyghur” about the nature of the protest. Was the issue being protested a personal or non-ethnic issue that could’ve happened anywhere else in China, and the Uyghur identity of the protesters was just a coincidental and non-related fact? Or was ethnicity bound up into it all, as if, for example, the “housing issue” being protested was regarding an old Uyghur neighborhood being torn down to make way for a housing development? This distinction is vital, considering factors such as the annual report on human rights issued by the State Department which right off the bat slams the Chinese government for its treatment of minorities in Xinjiang and Tibet.

It’s interesting to keep in mind that this information came from a leak and that government organs have yet to put in a word on the ethnicity or motivations of the protesters. So far, Xinhua and the like have been pretty sparse with the details. That governmental organizations have refused to release any information about the identity or intent of the protesters seems to strongly imply that there is something worth hiding in the eyes of the authorities. In the meantime, we’ll just have to wait for Xinhua to make the next move, or for another helpful “source” to step up and offer a little more info.

James Millward, a Xinjiang scholar at Georgetown who recently published a definitive history of Xinjiang titled Eurasian Crossroads, has published a piece at The China Beat discussing the evolution of the media perception of the Uyghurs from deliberate obscurity to gracing the editorial pages of the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times. Millward also analyzes the potentially explosive role the Guantanamo Uyghurs may play as the Obama administration forms its China policy.

Thanks to a frequent commenter and invaluable contributor who goes by the name “Uyghur,” I now know that Hakim Siyit’s petition video, in which he and many other farmers air their grievances against farming practices imposed by the local government, is available in its entirety at youtube. It’s divided into 8 parts, with all of them approaching 10 minutes each, forming quite a large amount of material both for learning Uyghur and getting an unprecedented, up close glance into the life of Uyghur farmers in Southern Xinjiang. Unfortunately, the videos aren’t subtitled in English as was the case with the RFA excerpt. Perhaps in the future The New Dominion can take a look at each video piece by piece and write an analysis of it. However, that will take time, and so for the time being, here are the links to the video for anyone who speaks or is studying Uyghur.

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8

Firefox is delightful. I use it, and you should too. However, for the small demographic of Uyghur-reading Firefox readers, there’s the problem that on many pages the Uyghur script doesn’t render correctly. It’s a bummer, and it’s without a doubt due to the fact that in China people are mostly still using Internet Explorer… 6.0. *pained sad face* When you’re browsing these sites in Firefox some of them look like this:

However, just the other day I ran into a Firefox extension called IETab, which opens webpages with Internet Explorer right there inside Firefox. After installing it, you can right-click a link and select open in IE tab inside Firefox, or you can press an icon in the lower right corner to send the page you’re browsing to an IE tab. There are some rare and oddball situations where you just have to open a page in good ole’ Internet Explorer. This happens a lot when you’re browsing poorly designed pages based in and mostly accessed from China. Unfortunately, this pretty much includes almost all non-diasporic Uyghur sites. And so it is a must have for Uyghur language browsers using Firefox. Here’s what it looks like, inside an IE Tab that is inside Firefox:

Beats opening up a whole new window and starting a separate browsing session, in my opinion.

Oh, and the little sample clips above are taken from Salkin Web’s news site and show the site’s discussion of a 13 year old British kid who apparently fathered a child with his 15 year old girlfriend. Jumpin’ Jehosaphat! This is quite a shocker even for us in the debauched West; I’m sure the shock value is twenty times bigger for the Uyghur readers of Salkin.

For what is perhaps a sorely-needed break from the usual content here on The New Dominion, I refer our readers to the Xinjiang Snow Leopard Project.

The Xinjiang Snow Leopard Project (XSLP) is an initiative started by the Beijing Forestry University and the Wildlife Conservation Research Unit (WildCRU) at Oxford University.

Working closely with the Xinjiang Government and local communities we are undertaking a responsive research programme, to assess the current status of snow leopards and their prey within the Taxkurgan area of West Xinjiang. We are using this basic information to determine current threats and devise mitigation strategies for policy makers to safeguard this unique ecosystem and its species.

Doctor Philip Riordan, a senior British researcher with the team, is maintaining a blog on the experiences of tracking down elusive snow leopards in the beautiful wilds of Tashkorgan here on blogger. It’s great because he’s just started his blog so we all can track the progress he manages to post on his blog from start to finish. The downside, of course, is that all that’s up so far are the issues he’s having with Fedex coordinating the shipping of the seemingly intricate and expensive equipment you need to get a photo of one of these creatures in action. Frankly, why waste so much money when Chinese farmers have developed much cheaper methods? The UK has a lot to learn from China about these issues.

Okay, haha, but seriously it is indeed refreshing to see Westerners, Han Chinese from the interior, and locals get together for a cause that for the most part has no thorny political aspects. The team includes a certain Arimujiang Deyimbayi and a Mr. Kometti; the area in question being Tashkorgan I cannot really say with authority that these guys are Uyghurs or Tajiks, but they’re definitely not Han. And I’m definitely intrigued by this Mr. Kometti, whose glaringly non-pinyin ethnically ambiguous surname, puzzling lack of a first name, and rugged looks make me for some reason think him to be a character in romping murder mystery theater production.

Of course, how could something this delightful not bring about some much needed international and interethnic cooperation?

The story of a disgruntled farmer gathering what is, for him, a significant amount of savings and traveling to Beijing to lay down his grievances before the authorities is nothing new to China. It is also not a big surprise when security officials, usually from that farmer’s home jurisdiction, follow the farmer to Beijing then force him to return without having accomplishing anything, and usually to some unsavory punishments awaiting at home.

What is unusual, however, is a Uyghur being among the petitioners bearing complaints. Not that the Uyghurs have no complaints; rather, my guess is that many rural Uyghurs who have such complaints are intimidated by the long trip, deterred by the language barrier, and most importantly are far more alienated from the central government then say, Han farmers who still retain some sense that the authorities in Beijing are “for” them. I have no statistics regarding the number of Uyghurs among the complainants in the capital but at least when Hakim Siyit went to Beijing, the number was around one in seven hundred:

“There were eleven people from Xinjiang out of nearly 700 people in total. I was the only Uyghur there. I did not know what to do. I only speak a little Chinese. I was worried that they might take me somewhere and no one would know about it,” Siyit, a member of the mostly Muslim Uyghur ethnic group, said.

It hardly need be said that two officials from the Kashgar Public Affairs Office came and coerced Siyit into returning home before he could accomplish anything – and this happened, of course, after Siyit was apprehended and interrogated by Beijing authorities who inevitably complained they couldn’t understand his Mandarin. Despite these little idiosyncrasies caused by Siyit’s Uyghur-ness, however, this petitioner’s saga to Beijing regrettably ends in a pretty textbook manner.

What is significant, however, is that as a part of his petitioning journey, Siyit created media content, specifically a documentary-style video and a recorded poem, as a more poignant way to make his point. And so, despite the failure of his petition when using official channels, Siyit’s fairly unprecedented decision to film Uyghurs about a pressing social problem created a powerful alternative to the petitioning process, allowing Uyghurs to speak directly to any willing audiences about the problems they were facing. And so rather than going into detail at this blog about what grievance Siyit was putting forward, I must, in deference to Siyit’s courage and insightfulness in making this documentary, point you straight to the video and allow Siyit and his farmer compatriots speak to you directly. Here’s the video I’ve embedded from its source at Radio Free Asia. Based on a picture of Siyit included in the RFA article I’m pretty certain Siyit himself is the guy that starts talking at 2:09.

The story told here can be rounded out by reading the RFA article itself, where Siyit goes into more detail about the local party’s extremely unintelligent decisions regarding which crops the Uyghur farmers in the region were to plant. And I must encourage Uyghur language learners to listen to the poem Siyit has recordered regarding the situation, “Just a Plain Farmer.” RFA has already translated it into English which can be read alongside the recording here.

I have to admit, I’m pretty stoked about what Siyit has done.

Continue reading →

The Congressional-Executive Commission on China has just released its latest newsletter.  This issue includes four excellent pieces on topics of interest to Xinjiang watchers:

• The PRC is promoting a new program of  “ethnic unity education“.
• There has been a surge in cases involving charges of “endangering state security” in Xinjiang, with regional numbers (1,295 arrests on that charge between January-November 2008) almost as high as national totals.
• A critical analysis of the “Opinion on deepening the promotion of rural reform and development” promulgated in December highlights both economic plans for improving economic equity between North and South Xinjiang, including exporting workers to the Chinese Intetior, and the political programs that accompany it, including “bilingual” education.
• Two young Uyghurs were arrested back in December for distributing leaflets calling for an anti-tobacco and -alcohol protest.

If you haven’t already subscribed to CECC’s newsletter, I would recommend it.  They have lately expanded their focus on Xinjiang, and their policy analysis has been increasingly balanced and insightful, much more so than most policy work on Xinjiang.

Just yesterday, I was flipping through an old photocopy of Dr. Jay Dautcher’s Berkeley PhD dissertation in Anthropology, “Folklore and identity in a Uighur community in Xinjiang China”. It’s an excellent read, and it’s based on, I would say, by far the most extensive and perceptive ethnographic fieldwork undertaken in Xinjiang by a non-native scholar of which I am aware. The dissertation concerns, broadly, life in a Uyghur mähällä “neighborhood” in Ghulja, with a special focus on social organization.  Alongside detailed discussion of topics ranging from family life to magical practices, Dautcher picks out the marketplace as not only a locus of everyday interaction for male members of the community, the place where people meet people, but as the engine of social change, as well.  All in all, it is a remarkable piece of anthropological research and a must-read for anyone who honestly wants to understand Uyghur culture and society.

I would go into greater detail, but, as I found out just today, you will soon be able to read it yourself. Dr. Dautcher’s dissertation will soon appear in print under the title Down a Narrow Road: Identity and Masculinity in a Uyghur Community in Xinjiang China.  The book, published by Harvard University’s Asia Center, will be released on 15 March.  In the meantime, you can pre-order it on Amazon or from Harvard University Press.

You can count on seeing a review on this site sometime late next month.

Update: This book has a website!

It’s the beginning of a new year, and that means it’s time for Xinhua to publish statistics. Most interesting to me are some new figures on the PRC’s efforts to promote “bilingual” education. “Bilingual” education here refers to “type two bilingual education” 第二類雙語教育/教學, the program to gradually replace non-Chinese-language education with strictly Mandarin-medium education. That is to say, parents are losing their established options, in place since the 1980s, in regard to choosing their children’s linguistic medium of education. The goal of education for minority children has become, simply, learning Mandarin. This policy is not, I should note, exclusive to Xinjiang, but could be seen as a logical extension of campaigns to displace local varieties of Chinese in the East.

In the autumn of 2004, upon the implementation of this program, which required all teachers to have attained a certain level of proficiency in Mandarin, many minority teachers lost their jobs. At the time, Xinjiang already had a shortage of teachers, and there have never been enough qualified teachers of Mandarin. These are problems reported in Chinese academic journals and books and the Xinjiang Daily. Late in 2005, and especially since 2006, the Xinjiang and national governments have made efforts to train non-Chinese teachers in Mandarin, usually by sending teachers selected by local ministries of education to major universities for 18-month courses and teaching practica. In light of this, the report on Xinhua’s site announcing plans to train 16,000 more “bilingual” teachers
over the next six years seems slightly disingenuous, since it emphasizes the preservation of “culture” along with the promotion of Mandarin as a national standard. However, the acknowledgement that this policy has a long way to go before it can be implemented properly is refreshing and shows a certain realism. The government is clearly interested in establishing Mandarin proficiency among the next generation of non-Han Xinjiang people, and the renewed investment in this program demonstrates that they are dedicated to a more permanent implementation to what was basically a poorly-considered, political policy.

Xinhua further report plans for 1,237 new bilingual kindergartens in accordance with the “National ethnic minority ‘bilingual’ kindergarten construction project”. Under this project, the government has also raised rural bilingual kindergarten teachers’ salaries to 800 RMB/month. The PRC has dedicated 3.8 billion RMB to this project, with 1.7 billion RMB going to bilingual kindergarten teacher training. The goal is to have 80% of Xinjiang kindergarten-age children in bilingual schools by 2012.

The bilingual education program will make a special effort in southern Xinjiang, where 1,111 pre-school teachers and 575 students are already in two-year programs, as part of the “Xinjiang Poor Areas Pre-School ‘Bilingual’ Teacher Cultivation and Training Plan”. It is estimated that 5,600 teachers will be trained under this plan over the next three years.

Late in January, Tianshan.net also published a lengthy article concerning a visit to a bilingual school in a village near Kashgar. The author’s observations, although strongly colored by clear political leanings and a sickly-sweet adulation for bilingual education, make for interesting reading. Among points of interest: Teachers of Mandarin include local teachers who have studied the language themselves, graduates of Mandarin courses, and students sent from universities for practica. In bilingual kindergarten classes for children with the least Mandarin language, there are two teachers, one who speaks in Mandarin, and another who translates. The article pays special attention to the opportunity some Xinjiang students have to study in high schools in the interior of the country, an experience that many find more alienating than enlightening. (For more on Xinjiang students in the Interior, see a recent book by a Chinese author… the title escapes me.)