The New Dominion

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. In Urumchi, unlike in other Chinese cities, residents have been told to stay inside and watch the torch relay on television, rather than watch from the barricades erected along the road. (Indeed, who is meant, then, to fill these barricades? Will government-organized cheering throngs fill the sidewalks? Will there be one token group of “ethnics”, smiling and sweating in nylon costumes? But I digress into cynicism.) Many foreigners staying in hotels, so it seems, have been told to stay inside all day “for their own safety”. Those staying in hotels along the route are meant to keep their windows shuttered, as well. This has not been reported, it seems, in any Chinese news sources, but the rumor seems highly pervasive and is backed up by (annoyed) personal testimony from locals and foreigners alike.

And so it seems that tomorrow will witness a Potemkin torch relay. Now, we should not kid ourselves by imagining that the Olympic torch, nor the Games themselves, have always been some symbol for global harmony, democracy, human rights, or any such thing. They are predicated, after all, upon the idea of the primordial nation-state, and they have often been used to advance some political purpose. However, the Olympics in Xinjiang, which I, for one, previously found merely chintzy and tacky with a cast of nationalism, have become downright Orwellianly creepy, and it is bothering a great many people, not just spoiled expatriates with internet access. Again, a random, last-minute bit of inconvenience has been unleashed on this city “because of the Olympics”, and it is getting somewhat farcical. I wonder how the workers who sweat day and night to build the shining new Youhao Lu ahead of schedule will feel when they cannot witness that event for which they labored so long.

Of course, they may not care at all either way. Urumchiliks seem to be of two minds about the Olympics. For the past few days, uniformed schoolchildren everywhere, it seems, have been running around carrying a little Chinese flag in one hand and a little Beijing Olympics flag in the other. They are excited, even if they do not fully understand what they celebrate. Adults seem rather less ready to cheer, though teenagers and students have been wearing Olympic gear with greater frequency. Most non-Han seem especially underwhelmed by the Olympics, which, despite their tremendous geographical and psychological distance, have been constantly invading everyday life here for the past several months. As noted in a previous post, the Games seem to be, at least partly, an excuse to make life more difficult out here.

I hope that the dear reader will forgive my anxiousness when it comes to the Olympics’ presence in Xinjiang. It seems that something meant to be fun for everyone — “One World, One Dream” and all — is being constantly politicized in one way or another, handled with the black leather kid gloves of an underconfident regime. I hope that the rumors are wrong, and that everyone who wants to and who can get off work will have the chance to go out and cheer for the torch. Since no one knows for sure when it will arrive, however, (despite the news) and since the route will be under lock-down, a fine opportunity to show off the genuine pride and enthusiasm that people all around the world feel for the Olympics, no matter where it is held, will be lost in favor of the world’s largest photo-op.