The New Dominion

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.

Learning about “what’s happening” in Xinjiang is, a majority of the time, an exercise inweeding out overt and covert biases in secondhand reports from a variety of sources, usually media organizations, from Xinhua to the New York Times to, yes, Radio Free Asia (and snarky blogs too, heh heh). Readers who bother to trudge through my posts are I’m sure, by this point, tired of me consistently putting forward the theme of studies of modern Xinjiang as a “meta”-scholarship which discusses discussions rather than facts, that we are dealing with filtered, censored, and re-filtered information that indeed has its own inherent value but nonetheless clouds the “facts on the ground” which remain vital in piecing together a coherent and actionable image of the state of affairs in Xinjiang.

What excites me about Siyit’s work is that I perceive it as an extraordinarily rare ray of sunlight that pierces through the thick fog and connects the information consumers–including us, of course–almost directly to the scene of the action. Incompetent local officials are forcing Uyghur farmers to plant long beans, against the logic of the farmers themselves, and as a consequence are grounding them into poverty. Siyit’s telling me, and so are his buddies. There they are, standing right there in the fields of totally worthless long beans in question and telling it to me, almost straight from their mouth to my ear. No, they didn’t tell Edward Wong of the New York Times who took his interview notes, sculpted it to fit the editors’ and readers’ standards and expectations, and then produce an article. No, they didn’t tell it to the local Xinhua reporters who then posted an article about how Uyghur farmers are prospering like never before under the wisdom of the local party leadership. They told it to us.

Now I know there are a dozen of potential objections to this interpretation I’m putting forward. I know, for example, that Siyit himself is a mediator of the information, he’s the one holding the camcorder and asking the questions. I know, for example, that Siyit and his fellow villagers have a specific agenda to accomplish by making this video, just like the New York Times and the Xinhua New Network have their agendas. I know, also, that I got this video through Radio Free Asia which is media organization whose content, I freely admit, I also try to hold to close scrutiny in light of its agenda and its sources of funding.

Nonetheless, I feel the value, significance, and uniqueness of what Siyit has done can be acknowledged if we admit that Siyit’s video is far closer to the topic of scrutiny than an RFA broadcast or a Xinhua Article or a New York Times piece. Would I, for example, completely trust Siyit to give me totally accurate data about long bean crop yields and market prices? Perhaps not, because he has an agenda to fix his situation just like Xinhua has to defend the status quo and NYT has to sell papers. However, if you’re like me and this “topic of scrutiny” is not the price of long beans in Yengisar but, rather, how Uyghurs live in Xinjiang, then the buck stops with Siyit. He’s a Uyghur. In Xinjiang. Which can’t be said of a Han Xinhua reporter, an NYT writer based in China, or even a Uyghur correspondent working for RFA in DC.

Anyways, Siyit, I salute you. You took advantage of a unique combination of factors – your camcorder, your fellow villagers, a sympathetic audience, and the Internet – and you did what few Uyghurs are able to do: reach out past the figurative fog that lounges over Xinjiang and told people directly – from the Uyghur teenager in Urumqi with a proxy server to the Dutch human rights activist who reads RFA – whats’ going on in your neck of the woods. I can only hope that by posting your video on TND we can spread your message a little further – if only to another two or three people – and that you and your friends won’t bear the wrath of the local authorities for getting your word out. Hopefully many other Uyghurs down the road will follow suit.