The New Dominion

Alright then, so in the last post I talked about what I perceived to be a media blitz by Xinhua and its ilk to sort of compensate for Nur Bekri’s gloomy forecasting last Friday. Xinjiang, these articles seemed to say, is a nice place. Everybody gets along, everything’s developing along pretty nicely, and, economic crisis, what economic crisis? Come on up to sunny Xinjiang.

They almost had me convinced, of course, and then today word got out that He Weifang, a renowned legal scholar at Beijing University Law School, has been essentially exiled to Xinjiang in what clearly is a punishment for "dissident activities."

He Weifang is acclaimed (or notorious, depending on your point of view) for being a lead signatory of Charter 08, a forceful manifesto released in December calling for further democratization and liberalization. Charter 08′s unequivocal demands attracted a lot of attention (but not signatures, sadly, for evident reasons) both domestically and abroad, enough to prompt the Chinese authorities to track down and "talk with" the scholars and intellectuals responsible for the charter’s conception, Professor He included. Even before his involvement with Charter 08, He was known for giving speeches and writing papers calling for sweeping legal and judicial reforms. Now, in what many analysts and acquaintances of He are calling a politically motivated punishment, He has been transferred to Xinjiang, far from China’s political heart, where he will teach for two years at Shihezi University. So despite the protestations coming from Xinhua, Xinjiang is not that nice of a place…

Xinjiang actually has a long and decorated history of being the final destination for disgraced officials, intellectuals, and rogues.

Of course, it’s not that Xinjiang really is that bad, but it has much more to do with the fact that Xinjiang was often the most "non-Chinese" part under Chinese dominion – a vast wasteland beyond the Great Wall’s final pass in Gansu, where the creature comforts of the civilized interior would be much harder to come by. This harsh reality bore down so heavily on those exiled to Xinjiang that they would often compose melancholic poems on the utter desolation that came with exile.

Hong Liangji was an official for the Qing Dynasty during the reign of the Jiaqing Emperor who eventually mustered the audacity to criticize the Emperor for his failure to weed out corruption and initiate bureaucratic reforms. Initially he was sentenced to be decapitated but eventually was given the slightly lesser punishment of banishment to Xinjiang. While in Xinjiang, he mused:

For half a lifetime, never one idle stride.
Scaling the Five Peaks left my temples hoary white.
But now, oustide the wall, for ten thousand li,
East, west, north, south — Heaven’s Mountains all I see.

Similarly, Lin Zexu, a civil servant under the next emperor, Daoguang, was exiled to Xinjiang after he orchestrated the destruction of opium brought in by British merchants and was made a scapegoat when Jiangsu and Zhejiang fell to retaliatory British forces (Lin had successfully warded off the attacks on his province of Liangguang; he sent warnings to the governors of Jiangsu and Zhejiang which were duly ignored). On reaching Jiayuguan, the fortress guarding the Western extreme of the Great Wall and the cultural "point of no return," Lin was said to have etched a poem on the wall capturing his sentiment:

Where the fortress scrapes the clouds
With its powerful battlements,
I rein up my horse by the border wall
And gaze back on the road I traversed.

The practice of exiling undesirables to Xinjiang continued even after the fall of the Qing Dynasty, which was essentially the principle behind the founding of the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, also known as the XPCC or simply the bingtuan. Faced with the problem of dealing with tens of thousands of former guomindang soldiers, Muslim soldiers who formerly served the ill-fated East Turkestan Republic , and other political personas non grata, the CCP rounded everyone up, dubbed them the XPCC, and sent them off to industrialize and civilize Xinjiang. Like Hong Liangji they were allowed to live but at the cost of having to live out the rest of their lives in *duh dun duuuuh!* the Western borderlands. Anyway, I’m obligated to add that the children and grandchildren of these unfortunate exiles inherited the reins of what is now Xinjiang’s largest and almost completely autonomous political and economic unit, and actually are living pretty comfortably relative to the local population. Among the people swept up and dispatched to Xinjiang was Ai Qing, a revolutionary poet who feel victim to the Anti-Rightist campaign in the 60s.

There’s also Mao Zemin, Mao Zedong’s younger brother who was sent to Xinjiang to do work on behalf of the communists and was eventually executed by the ruling warlord, Sheng Shicai. Though as far as I can tell no records indicate that Mao Zemin’s dispatch to Xinjiang was anything more than a typical assignment for a Communist operative, one can’t help but wonder of Chairman Mao had any feelings of sibling rivalry to vent on his little brother when the decision was made.

While I find it disheartening that such an outspoken dissident like Professor He is being punished by being forcefully sent to a region that I am quite endeared to, I still hope that a lot of good can come out of this. After all, Lin Zexu, while in Xinjiang, did some research on the Muslim population and made improvements to the prevailing conception that the locals were a bunch of savage mystical barbarians. We can hope that He has not been entirely cowed by intimidation and authorities and may spread his legal reform message to Xinjiang where it is sorely, sorely needed. Anyway, to conclude, what was the downcast, evocative poem sighed by He as he prepared to depart to the Western Regions?

It’s okay, is not that bad there. I can go experience the life and culture there in Xinjiang."

Okay, so He’s parting gasps are pretty contrived. Nonetheless, I wish the best for Professor He and hope his time in Xinjiang will be as formative to his worldview as my time there was.