The New Dominion

Word of Old Kashgar’s imminent destruction has reached The New York Times. The story broke in the American media back in March with the Washington Post, was picked up by the Emirati The National, and has been bouncing around the Web for a while, though it has received little attention in the Chinese media.

This plan to demolish 85% of the area of the Old City of Kashgar and to relocate its population, a project with “unusually strong backing” from the upper echelons of the central government, has actually been in motion for quite some time. The incentives mentioned in the NYT – which, frankly, are a pretty paltry sum even in Kashgar – have been offered before to Old City families whose houses have collapsed, sometimes as a result of the occasional earthquakes that do affect the region. (See last week’s quake in Qarghiliq.) To my knowledge, not many had taken up the government’s offer of a new apartment on the outskirts of town, and the city even helped some build new houses in the Old City. Back then, the city was making money charging admission to parts of the Old City, which I suspect comprises the 15% to be left behind or “rebuilt” as a sort of theme park or minority zoo.

Now, no more. The bulldozers have begun to roll. Like the rest of China’s loveliest old places, such as UNESCO World Heritage Site Pingyao, whatever is left of Old Kashgar will fall to excessive and thoughtless commercialization, a trend mourned today, ironically, on Xinhua’s Xinjiang front page. At least they have left Pingyao intact, with the addition of plumbing, which officials apparently consider an impossibility for Kashgar.

Before I say anything else, please note that there is some effort within the PRC to save what may be saved of Old Kashgar under the Beijing Cultural Heritage Protection Center, though they are more concerned with projects elsewhere.  See their appeal here.

There is little to be said that Josh at Far West China has not already said. Yes, it is silly to think that Uyghur heritage is made of mud and straw, and we know that the people of Xinjiang are stronger than any construction project. This is not the end.

This is, however, a crude and transparent attempt to forcefully remake a social order by altering the place that its members live in. The government of the PRC is overtly concerned with the spaces that people inhabit, both symbolic and physical, as tools of statecraft and social engineering. The crackdown on mäshräp in Ghulja in 1997 demonstrated the PRC’s fear of unauthorized social movements, of varieties of organization and association that it cannot read or understand. The state’s insistence on maintaining an institution of both administrative and spatial ethnic segregation in the educational system even while working to culturally and linguistically assimilate minorities into mainstream Chinese society demonstrates that it has trouble understanding social orders that it has not itself brought into being, social orders that it could perhaps otherwise co-opt for political purposes.

The Old City of Kashgar is not just a warren of beautiful architecture expressive of a certain culture of building, as the Western media emphasizes, but a malleable concrete manifestation of a tightly-woven and long-standing social order undergoing constant evolution. Its alleys and courtyards mark memories, both personal and collective, that build community in an internally coherent way. I do not think that this is necessarily a breeding ground for Islamic terrorism, as the Chinese state is likely to claim. Indeed, terrorism may spring more readily from the impersonal apartment blocks brought about by the same modernism that inspires fundamentalism. Rather, I think that this is a place where a separate community and perhaps even a burgeoning civil society to rival the influence of PRC officialdom persist. This is a place where old families with old connections carry memories reflected in the streetcorner mosques, places they pass every morning and evening. Old Kashgar is not full of culture – it is full of lives.

Over time, after these families move into their new apartments, with just enough room for two parents and one child, with water in the toilet, with no private family courtyard where a woman may go unveiled, they will rework the space to their own purposes. Anyone who has visited a non-Chinese family in Ürümchi has seen an example of this reconfiguration. Although the urban landscape of Ürümchi has seen the hand of state planning since as early as the 1890s, and urban planning in the 1930s largely determined the boundaries of today’s ethnic neighborhoods, the city’s residents continue to remake even the most carefully planned spaces. Old work units have become high- or low-class neighborhoods, and merchants at the Grand Bazaar build little tearooms in the back of their stalls. Perhaps because of the social atomization that apartment life brings, even when the built environment is meant to create a particular kind of community, no set of uniform apartment blocks remains as planned for long – see the city of New York, where asymmetrical neighborhoods have arisen from a perfectly “logical” grid. Inhabitation brings its own social order. This, too, shall pass.

As someone who loves old things, I am comforted by the knowledge that, even as the state and the corporations that support it impose a new and uniform geography, unexpected things that people find important tend to stay standing. Even where jungles are clear-cut in favor of pastures or coffee plantations, a scattering of old and sacred trees remains. In fact, right beside my own apartment block where I once lived in Ürümchi, in a complex razed and recreated by the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, where everything was evenly paved and smelled of paint and plaster, there stood an old and wizened poplar tree. What once happened there, I wonder? Will this, then be the fate of Old Kashgar?

Suggested further reading:

Scott, James C. Seeing like a state: how certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999.

Bovingdon, Gardner. “The history of the history of Xinjiang” in Twentieth Century China 26, No. 2 (2001),

Bovingdon, Gardner and Näbijan Tursun. “Contested histories” in S. Frederick Starr, ed. Xinjiang: China’s Muslim borderland. Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, 2004, pp. 353-374.

Dautcher, Jay. Down a narrow road: identity and masculinity in a Uyghur community in Xinjiang China. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009. See especially Part I on “space and place.”