I am pleased to have my very own copy of Invisible China, a remarkable travelogue just recently published. The authors, Colin Legerton and Jacob Rawson, both current postgraduate students, have produced a worthwhile and very readable narrative of their journeys through China’s minority ethnic communities. This informative but entertaining and accessible book recounts their journeys in 2006 and 2007 while providing valuable and accurate background information to the lay reader and remaining sensitive to the realities of life for the people they met along the way. The book consists primarily of a series of mini-ethnographies, eleven in all covering fourteen contemporary minority groups, plus two narratives of visits to peculiar sites of ethnic tourism. Legerton and Rawson spent more time than most travel writers among their communities of interest, but they have distilled their visits into short and easily digestible snapshots of minority life accompanied by insightful commentary on wisely-chosen topics. Here, as this is The New Dominion, I will focus on their pieces on China’s Northwest, including their two chapters on Xinjiang.

The book opens with a scene familiar to almost anyone who has lived in China since the 1980s: On a busy street corner under a hazy night sky, as a swirling mass of superficial human sameness throngs in and out of Mr. Li’s and KFC, a lone Xinjiang Uyghur man, doppa and all, tends his kebabs as they sizzle on a smoky and jerry-rigged grill. Here, the authors make an awful fuss about the man’s skin color and that of the Han Chinese around him. At first blush, this seems almost racist, as the authors use the man’s physical differences to emphasize the invisible cultural wall between him and his customers. In fact, this is an honest depiction of a moment shared by many Westerners who venture beyond the Green Zones in Beijing and Shanghai: This is the instant when, in some smoky and anonymous town, you meet someone who looks different, whose Chinese is almost as bad as yours, and who feels isolated and homesick – just like you! The outside Other and the inside Other share a secret wink, and sometimes a career is born. Kudos to the authors for communicating this sense of alienation, achieved elsewhere in the movie “Lost in Translation,” and of the discovery of an imagined new chosen people. This self-consciousness, perhaps the mark of a new generation of writers on Asia, pervades the book and lends it both a measured sensitivity to the voices of the “natives” and a self-reflective honesty about the author’s own perspective. Appropriately for a book about people who inhabit a nationalizing state and who only find a political voice through a system of regional autonomy, Legerton and Rawson set the tone by bringing into focus the truth of the awkward and the disjointed.

Legerton and Rawson’s work, as a travelogue, is a work of journalism. They achieve, however, much that most journalists writing in English do not or cannot when reporting on China by informing their assertions and observations with their educated understanding of the country and of the issues at hand and sensitivity born of experience. Before beginning their journeys, both authors spoke good Chinese, as well as Uyghur and Korean, and both boast backgrounds in China studies. As such, they are far more qualified commentators than most journalists or even diplomatic staff. They have also done their homework, as is apparent from the very accessible potted histories of each region they visit and group they encounter. These gloss over messy details, but do not oversimplify or misrepresent. Each chapter is careful and deliberate and avoids factual error, which shows both respect for the subject and a disciplined approach to research and writing.

This preparation allows them to better protect the identities of their informants and also to tell effective stories. Most journalists, turning a brief visit and a half-dozen conversations into a lengthy piece, depict the story of today’s Xinjiang simply as one of conflict between ethnic monoliths, one backed by the new Evil Empire. It is relatively easy to identify their few informants, who are naturally depicted as angry young separatists or unquestioning tools of the state. In contrast, the characters who appear in Invisible China are rarely caricatures, certainly no more so than some very real people. Legerton and Rawson may too readily project onto the people they met their desire to find the individuals in the machine. They describe one old and loquacious man as someone with “individual” opinions all his own (a social and psychological impossibility) in a country with claims to homogeneity.

Invisible China‘s chapters, although bite-sized, are each based on at least several days of intensive interaction in a given community. The chapters are divided roughly into two parts: The first hooks the reader in, while the second seeks to make a more nuanced polemical point about minority life through a narrative of encounters and conversations. The authors cram nothing down the reader’s throat, but instead try to stay out of the way of their interviewees’ stories, editorializing sparingly and appropriately.

Take, for example, Legerton and Rawson’s lengthy interactions with a pair of Tajik restaurateurs in Chapter 11. Here, the authors build up an honest and sympathetic depiction of their newfound friends, then draw on their own understanding to relate these individuals’ lives to questions of place, culture, and language in a believable and uncaricatured way. When interviewees are quoted in relation to more sensitive political problems, as in Chapter 10 on Uyghurs in Xinjiang, the authors wisely obscure their personal information and focus more on what those people say than how they can be classified or which side they are on. In Invisible China, people may be members of minority groups, but they do not simply represent them. This, and the authors’ clear concern for their interlocutors, as expressed in the afterword, demonstrate that Invisible China is informed by more than a thirst for adventure or profit or a well-intentioned Western concern for the rights of the oppressed Other.

Of course, a travel writer has the freedom to create composite characters or even fashion them out of whole cloth. As such, travelogues have a problem of credibility, and there is really no telling the degree to which Legerton and Rawson’s characters, who are in any case depicted very believably, actually exist. This is not academic work, and so the authors were not fettered in their research by those constraints placed upon scholars. This gave them the freedom to pursue, however superficially, topics otherwise unavailable to research, such as Arabic literacy and the central role of Mosque culture (and even the Old and New Teachings!) among the Dongxiang in Chapter 8. This piece acts as an interesting commentary on Chinese measures of literacy. In my opinion, Legerton and Rawson’s insistence on inserting parenthetical facts at appropriate moments in their narratives gives their work a certain credibility, as well as a scope beyond the strictly nominalist, and I look forward to the results of both authors’ current postgraduate work.

Invisible China is not free from tired tropes of the exotic. As with any old piece of Xinjiang travel writing, for example, exotic smells and colors abound, and cute little kids feature prominently. They compare Tashkurghan and its inhabitants to Europe and the Europeans. Mostly, however, the authors concentrate on lampooning or deflating the depictions of minorities found in Chinese media, as in Chapter 3, which focuses on the Mongols, and Chapter 6, on the Naxi. To their credit, they seem consciously to try to avoid making use of those same representations. Indeed, when a group exhibits some peculiarity, they usually leave it up to the members of that group to explain or comment upon it. Actually, the authors try very hard to avoid adopting anything like “flexible positional superiority,” with regard to anything but the PRC government and its representatives.

Invisible China closes with a thoughtful afterword, composed after the Beijing Olympics in 2008. Legerton and Rawson’s journeys in 2006 and 2007 had shown them China, and especially Xinjiang and Tibet, before the riots of 2008 and before the attacks in Xinjiang. I agree with their final conclusion that, for all of the talk of ethnic unity and the image of far-reaching state control, Beijing has yet to really approach its minority problems in a well-informed and constructive way, and that they might even lack the understanding and wherewithal to begin to do so. Throughout the book, the reader sees China in its odd little pockets, where the foreigner’s feeling of oppressive sameness begins to seem trivial and new old worlds flourish. Legerton and Rawson have chosen to focus on something that could easily be facilely political. They could have written a screed about minority oppression. They could have depicted the billboards and the propaganda as the ubiquitous signs of the omnipotent and malevolent state, but, in the villages on China’s borderlands, they seem like the laughable gestures of a distant power no longer interested in its neediest subjects. Of course, this is not the whole story – one need only look at Eric Mueggler’s The Age of Wild Ghosts, for one example, to see the hand of the state in borderland life – but the authors’ moderate and considered point is well-taken. There is more to minorities than ethnic conflict, and the state is often more blundering than it is malicious.

Translation:

“On the Pakistani and Chinese media full of nonsense”

Abdullah Mansur

29/4/2009

[Arabic]

In the Name of God the Most Merciful, the Most Kind

Praise be to God, and Prayers and Salutations to the Prophet of God. But now,

[Uyghur]

In order to achieve its own political goals, the Chinese government, a habitual braggart who is always making up ridiculous things, has in recent times changed its methods, and having taught this game to Pakistan and other of its lackeys, has begun to play it together.

To people of sound mind, this is not something secret.

In this unsightly political game, where the second list of terrorism suspects came to nothing, the Chinese government had conducted itself in a way not befitting the government of a state, and had been disgraced before the people of the world.

In Afghanistan, the American government, in need of help in today’s difficult circumstances where they cannot do without a crutch, made China happy by labeling the Turkistan Islamic Party as terrorists and obtained China’s economic, political, and some military assistance.

In this situation, the Chinese government happily stained its lips and once again set about playing with the government of Pakistan internationally. According to what is known of this game, nine Uyghur members of the Turkistan Islamic Party, which has organized attacks on the Pakistani Security Forces, were supposedly arrested and handed over to China.

The Chinese government, which has all the time been imprisoning the people of Eastern Turkistan without reason, making false accusations and deceiving people, had in recent months, through the hands of its concubine Pakistan, arrested several Eastern Turkistanis occupied with their own private studies and business in Lahore and other cities.

In this way, the Chinese government has sought to show that it is a powerful country can challenge the Turkistan Islamic Party and to
break the spirit of pious Muslims living inside and outside the motherland. The Pakistani government has made this empty disclosure aiming to show its collaboration with the Chinese government against the Turkistan Islamic Party through concrete actions, and that it is reducing the pressure on both sides by blocking the flow of Eastern Turkistani Muslims to the jihad region of Pakistan and Afghanistan with the goal of preparing for jihad.

In recent times, the Pakistan government has not captured or handed over to China a single member of the Turkistan Islamic Party.

A state with the slightest sense of honor would of course not take pride in such falsification. Thus it would be best for the Pakistan and Chinese governments to tidy up this foolish propaganda which is now exposed. Likewise, the world’s news agencies would save themselves embarrassment if they more carefully relayed the propaganda of these states who go around making atom bombs out of “hot air.”

We would like to openly warn you: If any country captures a member of the Turkistan Islamic Party and hands them over to China, they will definitely receive a concrete response. This response, of course, will not be something for them to hear, but to see.

It will be most beneficial for the people of the world, among them the people of Eastern Turkistan, to clearly comprehend that, in the view of the Chinese, each
Eastern Turkistani living abroad, no matter who they are, is an enemy and terrorist. Their strongest desire is to seize them one by one, or group by group if possible, not leaving a single one, and imprison them and their land Eastern Turkistan.

For this reason, we honestly recommend that all the oppressed people of Eastern Turkistan living in exile stand alert on full guard against this viciousness of the Chinese government.

Commentary:

I feel very strongly that the speaker has Yarkand accent. The “r”s are a giveaway, as they are sometimes American and sometimes palatal glides. Note also his raised vowels and some odd moments where he seems to palatalize what would be a stop consonant in standard Uyghur, i.e. äjiship instead of ägiship. This may be immaterial. The last time we saw a video like this was when TIP spokesman Sayfullah threatened the Olympic Games. It was difficult to make much out, but he certainly rolled his “r”s.

On another linguistic note, this video uses, for the first time in my experience, the term hijrät to refer to the Uyghur diaspora. Hijrät, from Arabic, means “flight,” as in the hijra, when Muhammed fled from Mecca to Medina. This is an interesting cue, doubtless employed self-consciously, to emphasize Islamic, rather than ethnic or national, kinship. A brief, unscientific survey of secular Uyghurs shows me that this usage is highly marked, creative, and clearly charged with Islamic symbolism.

Similarly, the speaker only uses the word “Uyghur” once, preferring “East Turkestani.” As I noted in a recent post on an interview with Rabiyä Qadir, this is language that makes the problems in Xinjiang more than Uyghur issues. While Rabiyä Qadir reaches beyond Uyghurs to anyone living in the region, emphasizing cooperation with non-Muslims for the sake of national self-determination, the TIP plays up the Muslim angle. This is more likely to inspire violence within Xinjiang, but Islam could be a much better catalyst for action in Xinjiang, especially among rural Turkic Muslims who have not completely internalized the idea of an ethnonational identity.

Finally, catch the last line of the speech. “…stand alert on full guard…” If you’re a terrorist, scaring the people for whom you claim to struggle, putting them on “alert,” is a great way to get them to do your job for you.

与人民为敌的，最终结果是自取灭亡！！！

For those against the people, the end result is to bring annihilation upon oneself!

向烈士致敬，一路走好

I salute the martyrs, and bid them farewell!

向死难的官兵表示最沉痛的哀悼,
恐怖行为，必须采取非常手段严厉镇压.

To those officers who died during the incident, I express my deepest sorrow.

As for the terrorist activities, we must implement extreme measures to thoroughly suppress them.

唉~~~缠头干的事。

Yeah… the towelheads did this.

恐怖行为越来越猖狂了，必须采取非常手段严厉镇压

Terrorist activities are getting even more savage, we must implement extreme measures to thoroughly suppress them.

哎~~~瞅瞅,咱中国办个奥运容易嘛…

Ah… can’t we Chinese host the Olympics in peace?

维吾尔族 的朋友们，我们都是同胞，我们都是中华民族，新疆自古以来就是中国的一部分，大部分的维族朋友们，是非常好客的，也是非常欢迎我们其他民族的，不过有极少 部分维族朋友，不满于现在的生活，不满于现在的政策。有时你们该想想，就算继续这样继续下去“继续100年200年还是这样“或者自取灭亡“`那又 是何必呢“知足常乐`！

My Uyghur friends, we are all fellow countrymen, we are all nationalities of China, Xinjiang has from ancient times remained a part of China, most Uyghurs are really friendly, and they genuinely welcome other nationalities, however, an extremely small amount of our Uyghur friends are unsatisfied with life today, are unsatisfied with current policies, sometimes they should think a bit, if things continue like this they’ll go on and on for 100 years or 200 years just like this, eventually bringing destruction upon themselves, or they can think “There’s no need for that!” and that’s enough to bring about real satisfaction.

早晚收拾他们

We should take care of them sooner or later.

我是新疆人“`
但我看到这些很伤心“`
这种极端的败类应该彻底消失“`
不然新疆永远都是一颗定时炸弹

I’m from Xinjiang

But when I see this it really gets to me

These kinds of extremist scum should really disappear

Otherwise Xinjiang will always be a time bomb

发生了那么大的事啊~快顶上首页给大家看~一定会是头条~奥运近了~危险近了~那些垃圾在作乱~

Something really big has happened… hurry and rate this video so it will reach the front page and everyone will see it… it really is a lead story… the Olympics are approaching… danger is near… those trash are blowing things up…

我是新疆人,当我早上看到这条新闻.我很震惊!
我是汉族,我有很多朋友是 维族 哈族. 他们跟我们一样都热爱伟大的祖国!
那只是少数的极端分子 蓄意破坏边疆的安宁与稳定.
我坚信少数极端分裂主义分子的阴谋不会得逞!
伟大的祖国只会越来越强大!
中国万岁!
中华民族万岁!

I’m from Xinjiang, when I saw the news this morning I was really shocked!

I’m Han, but I have many Uyghur and Kazakh friends. They’re just like us and really love the great motherland.

It’s only a small amount of extremists who plan on disrupting the peace and stability of the borderlands.

I firmly believe that the separatist ideology of this tiny minority will not succeed.

The mighty motherland will become more and more great!

Long live China!

Long live the people of China!

作为一个普通的维吾尔人，绝大多数维吾尔人是热爱祖国大家庭的，所以极少数分裂分子的阴谋是不会得逞的，我们反对分裂，维护统一；我为和平祈祷，为奥运的圆满举行祈祷。

As an ordinary Uyghur I can say, a large number of Uyghurs love the great family of the motherland, so the conspiracies of these few separatists will not succeed, we are against splittism, we are for unity, we pray for peace, and we pray for the success of the olympics.

奥运后，国家必须要采取强硬方法解决此类事件了，严惩不贷，彻底解决，还老百姓一安家和睦中国，中国加油！

After the Olympics, we must implement tough measures to resolve these types of incidents, we have to punish without excuses, completely resolve the problem, and give the ordinary people a calm and friendly China, go China!

And those are some of the interesting ones for now. Some themes: rapid unity over the death of the young officers, similar unity around fury towards the perpetrators. Note that although as of right now no news agency has made an explicit connection between Uyghurs and the attack, this is already a given in the discussion among the public. Several people have come forward urging calm among their (implied Han) countrymen, to not direct their anger in Uyghurs in general and repeating the mantra distributed by the state that the discontent is isolated among an extremely small majority, also, people coming forward and claiming themselves to be Uyghur while saying that the attackers do not represent the will of the majoriy (they invariably use the phrase 大家庭, or “great family” of which all the minorities are metaphorically a part of).

Also interesting are comments that state tough measures should be carried out after the Olympics. I find this fascinating. It seems to indicate to me that the ordinary citizens of China perceive all the tidying up that occurred before the games – including, one would imagine, the relaxation of censorship and the lip service to human rights – to only be temporary measures whereas analysts in the West have been praying (albeit with little hope) that the Olympics would be a catalyst for permanent changes. Instead, we can see here that even the 老百姓 ordinary Chinese are clearly aware that the stuff the government has been doing lately has been only for the Olympics and that the “normal Chinese way of doing things,” for example, harsh crackdowns, can return to the forefront when all the bleeding heart Westerners leave after the Olympics. Intriguing…

Of course, we can always count on some folks to throw in some comic relief…

杀死韩国猪

Kill the Korean pigs

喀什的事件 跟韩国猪什么关系？莫非你认为喀什和韩国相邻？你真的该学学地理了

What does the incident in Kashgar have to do with “Korean Pigs”? Could you possibly think that Kashgar is near Korea? You really should brush up on your geography