Farewell, old friend.

Hello, beautiful.

Wang initially came to office following the 10-year tenure of Song Hanliang (宋汉良 1934-2000, in office 1985-1995), a long-time Party member from Shaoxing, Zhejiang who had worked in Xinjiang’s oil industry since 1954. Song was appointed not only Party Secretary of the XUAR, but also the First Secretary and First Political Commissar of the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps (XPCC). Wang (1944-), himself from Shandong province, arrived in Xinjiang in 1992 after a long career in the Party and government of Shandong. He was appointed Acting Secretary in 1994 before receiving both of Song’s appointments the following year. In 2002, Wang was appointed to the Politburo, reflecting both Hu Jintao’s confidence in him and the increasing importance of the Northwest in the Party’s plans for China.

Zhang Chunxian (1953-), for his part, is portrayed as a good communicator, perhaps what Xinjiang needs after 15 years of tough posturing and insulting propaganda. Vice President Xi Jinping traveled to Urumchi in person on the morning of 24 April to announce Zhang’s new appointment and praise his skills and “liberated” and “creative” ideas. Indeed, as Party leader in Hunan, he succeeded in using the Web to encourage communication between the provincial government and its citizens. The Party established an on-line government forum, and Zhang himself offered New Year’s greetings to web users on a message board. He became known as a Party Secretary who focused on people, both in the administration and in policies that aimed at strengthening Hunan with “culture.”

Like his predecessors, Zhang has a background in engineering, but he also holds a degree in management from the Harbin Institute of Technology. He has also served as the PRC’s Minister of Communications (2002-2005). This, however, is in itself no indicator of his mastery of media, since the Ministry, both then and in its new identity as the Ministry of Transportation, was concerned not with telecommunications, but with shipping, the postal service, and public transport. Zhang’s most obvious credentials in this respect are his smiling, clean visage, which should help him avoid the “Ratzinger effect” that accompanies Wang’s tough, authoritarian, and somewhat toad-like image, and his rumored marriage to CCTV newscaster Li Xiuping, which may bring a rare dash of celebrity to the position. It is uncertain whether Zhang will also take Wang’s place as Commissar of the XPCC.

Some journalists outside of China see Zhang’s apparent focus on the economy as a contrast to Wang’s insistence on stability through strict limitations on non-Han culture and language. There is nothing new, however, about the rhetoric of economic development in Xinjiang. Song Hanliang, back in March 1992, “described economic construction as the Party’s central task for the 1990s,” including developing close ties with newly-independent Central Asian states. (Harris 1993: 123) Only a month beforehand, however, he and other Xinjiang party and government leaders had engaged in the usual rhetoric about ethnic and religious “splittism.” (119) These two policies continued throughout Wang’s time in office, and economic development and trade with Central Asia have been tied with increasing intimacy to security cooperation. (Becquelin 2000: 70) Certainly, Wang Lequan also oversaw the push for strictly Mandarin-medium education for minorities in Xinjiang and supported it with ridiculous statements, most amusingly, “minority languages in Xinjiang contain only limited amounts of information.” (Dwyer 2005: 37) This policy, however, is part of a broader drive for standardization on the national level that has been going since the early 1990s. Certainly, Wang has paired these strict ethnic policies with Strike Hard campaigns. Xinjiang, then, has been on a tight leash, and policies on “culture” and “development” have gone hand-in-hand. So, it is difficult to say whether the appointment of Zhang, photogenic and media-savvy though he may be, will signal a real change in that way Xinjiang is managed.

Some citations:

Becquelin, Nicolas. “Xinjiang in the nineties” in The China Journal No. 44 (July 2000), pp. 65-90.

Becquelin, Nicolas. “Staged development in Xinjiang” in The China Quarterly No. 128 (July 2004), pp. 358-378.

Dwyer, Arienne M. The Xinjiang conflict: Uyghur identity, language policy, and political discourse. (Policy Studies 15). Washington: East-West Center, 2005.

Harris, Lillian Craig. “Xinjiang, Central Asia and the implications for China’s policy in the Islamic world” in The China Quarterly No. 133 (March 1993), pp. 111-129.

Echoing the assertions made by Xinjiang Chairman Nur Bekri in a televised and delayed speech just an hour ago, the demonstrations were a criminal action organized by outside forces, in particular Rebiya Kadeer and the World Uyghur Congress. Nur Bekri went on to assert that QQ, social messaging software popular in China, and other forms of unrestricted on-line communication helped to organize the actions. He also discussed the clash in Shaoguan, suggesting that the incident is at the forefront of the leadership’s minds, right now, and that they want very much to control information about what happened there and convince Uyghurs that the government is on their side.

Unfortunately, the immediate media and official response to the clash in Shaoguan, in which Han workers attacked and killed Uyghur workers until riot police showed up several hours later, was surprisingly nationalistic and hostile to the Uyghur workers. Officials and the media began to show sympathy only after it was revealed that the riots were triggered in part by false rumors spread by a former employee.

Meanwhile, the Urumqi municipal government has issued a notice restricting traffic through unspecified parts of the city. Automobiles are not permitted in certain areas. I suspect that those areas are those in which rioting occurred and where workers will be cleaning up (or covering up) the damage.

Sources:

6 July 2009, Xinhua: 乌鲁木齐市人民政府关于维护社会正常秩序的紧急通告

6 July 2009, Xinhua: 乌鲁木齐发生打砸抢烧严重暴力犯罪事件

On 15 June 2009, around 10:30 AM local time, wrecking crews working on the “renewal” of Kashgar’s Old City demolished the Xanliq Madrasa. Eyewitnesses report that the medieval Islamic college, listed as an Autonomous Region-level protected cultural site, was knocked down without any protest or ceremony. According to speculation, the “royal” madrasa, apparently located in the yard of Kashgar No. 1 Elementary School, may have been torn down to make room for an athletic field.

Mahmud al-Kashgari, the 11^th-century scholar who compiled the Dīwānu l-Luġat al-Turk, is said to have studied at the Xanliq Madrasa in its heyday. In the 1860s, following a lengthy period of decline at the Xanliq Madrasa and in the Islamic scholarly community in East Turkestan in general, a wealthy merchant from Atush named Abdurusulbay funded its renovation. In exchange, the Xanliq Madrasa was to host primary schools funded by local luminaries. In 1883, it became home to the first experimental school in Xinjiang to mix Islamic and “scientific” curricula. This was founded by Abdurusulbay’s grandsons, Bawudunbay and Hüsäyinbay Musabayov. Although that school was short-lived, its successor, Atush’s Hüsäyniyä School, produced generations of students educated using modern methods. It also spawned a broad-reaching network of similar schools that played a major organizing role in pre-1949 social and political movements. Many of today’s Uyghur intelligentsia can trace their philosophical, political, and sometimes family roots back to the educational efforts that began at the Xanliq Madrasa. The ideology that arose from these movements still resonates today, often in opposition to official communism.

Judging from online message boards, reactions to the destruction have been a mix of righteous anger and self-criticism. Having heard that the Xanliq Madrasa was torn down, many Uyghurs have expressed resentment towards the PRC government. Those who have spoken out feel that the destruction is part of a government “plan” to destroy physical vestiges of Uyghur history and “rewrite” it. This is connected closely to a sense that the government favors Han Chinese development over Uyghur industry and Han Chinese historical sites over Uyghur ones. These feelings of ethnic repression and conspiracy are reinforced by the knowledge that the Xanliq Madrasa was recognized as a protected historical and cultural site, a status that, in this case, clearly afforded it no special status or opportunity for preservation. Many have invoked the destruction of the Cultural Revolution, when many such sites were torn down all across the PRC. Some look back even before 1949 to a historical disregard for Xinjiang culture on the part of “those foreigners” – the Han.

Others, while angered by what has happened, have expressed frustration over Uyghurs’ own lack of initiative in protecting what they see as their history. A frequent refrain is, “If only we had held a protest, maybe we could have stopped this.” Such complaints are typical of those gripes found on message boards all over the Web. Others have pointed out that the very lack of a protest shows that Uyghurs, while mourning for the squandered legacy of their “Grandpa Mahmud,” actually possess a very weak sense of history. Certainly, no one seems to have bothered photographing the madrasa before, during, or following its destruction, and no one on the Web seems to know anything about it, save for Mahmud al-Kashgari’s having studied there.

Perhaps the kindest conclusion we can draw is that there is no real institutional mechanism in place for dealing with ethnic and cultural grievances or, for that matter, for reporting problems of interest to a specifically ethnic audience. The Chinese system of regional autonomy does not allow for official organization by or on behalf of ethnic groups per se. While the Xanliq Madrasa, an institution that should resonate with all Xinjiang Muslims, has been claimed both by everyday Uyghurs and by official narratives specifically as an artifact of Uyghur history and culture, there was no clear way for someone who might have seen the demolition order to publicize it to Uyghurs. Even if word got out, there was no obvious way to organize on behalf of the madrasa’s preservation. All the same, any protest or other actions would certainly have been stunted by a pervasive feeling of helplessness where the preservation of non-Chinese historical sites is concerned, as well as a lack of leadership.

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.”

As I’ve observed several times before, it’s always interesting to see how strategic media organizations are when releasing information about Xinjiang simultaneously both in English and in Chinese. Bekri’s words on the stability of Xinjiang were deemed worthy enough to translate into English by the folks over at China Daily, and their coverage can be found here where the writer spun the story as a concerned regional leader warning his constituents and the people of China that the worse is yet to come.

The security situation in China’s northwestern region Xinjiang will be “severer” this year, the regional governor said here Friday.

“The (security) situation will be more severe, the task more arduous, and the struggle more fierce in the region this year,” Nur Bekri, chairman of the Xinjiang regional government, said on the sidelines of the annual parliament session.

This characterization of course is not incorrect – “brace yourselves, people of Xinjiang” is certainly part of the message here, and it doesn’t take a genius to ferret out the political advantages of constantly telling the populace that the menacing enemy is just around the corner and is this close to ruining your lives. Rather, this English version of Bekri’s words is a tad incomplete. The China Daily does insert one quote of Bekri’s thoughts on the origins of these seditious activities.

The “three forces” have foreign backings, he said, adding they could not survive without foreign support.

“They don’t want to see Xinjiang’s prosperity,” he said.

However, missing from this English version of events us Nur Bekri’s unambiguous declaration that Western hostile forces are what everyone should be worrying about here. Over at Tian Shan Net, you can read a more complete account of what Nur Bekri told reporters.

现在的新疆经济发展、民族团结、社会稳定、边防巩固，呈现出令人鼓舞的大好局面。但是，西方敌对势力一刻都没有放松和停止对我进行分裂破坏活动。今年是新中国成立60周年，也是新疆和平解放60周年，“三股势力”决不会善罢甘休，我们面临的反分裂形势更加严峻，任务更加繁重，斗争形势将更为激烈。

Today’s Xinjiang has seen encouraging developments in economic growth, ethnic unity, societal stability, and the strengthening of border defense. Nonetheless, Western hostile forces have not spared a single moment in carrying out splittest, destructive activities against us. This year is the 60th anniversary of the founding of New China, and is also the 60th anniversary of Xinjiang’s peaceful liberation, the “Three Forces” will certainly not stand idly by, and the anti-splittest situation we face will be more severe, the task more arduous, and the struggle more fierce.

Assuming that the English-language publications of the China Daily are meant for Western readers, it appears that the editors did us all the favor of tastefully removing the phrase “Western hostile forces” to spare us from the rather alarming accusation Bekri is making.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but the modern Chinese conception of “the West” does not include international Islamist terrorist networks such as Al-Qaeda. Since the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York, the government’s outward strategy in regard to local discontent in Xinjiang was to paint the whole thing as a part of global Islamic extremism, culminating the successful persuasion of the US State Department to designate the East Turkestan Islamic Movement as a terrorist group. Many Xinjiang scholars and academics mark this domestic characterization of discontent in Xinjiang as a sort of paradigm shift, since before 2001, when by objective measures violent activities were far more numerous, the governmental strategy was to simply hide the incidents as much as possible and claim total peace and stability as the norm in Xinjiang.

This, however, marks the second time since his ascension to the chairmanship of Xinjiang that Nur Bekri either sloppily or intentionally peppers his discussion of violent incidents in Xinjiang with the phrase “Western hostile forces” (西方敌对势力). The first time was back in September when Bekri delivered a massive speech to party officials in which he again identified “Western hostile forces” as the origin and financial backers of the “three forces” (of terrorism, separatism, and religious extremism) within Xinjiang, which, in turn, are what brought about the violent criminal acts Xinjiang saw before and during the Olympics. In it, “Western forces”, the “Three Forces”, and international Islamic organizations like Al-Qaeda were mentioned with equal fervor and frequency; this time, as Bekri spoke briefly with reporters no mention of Al-Qaeda and the like occurred at all.

It certainly is up in the air how representative Bekri’s speeches and interviews are of general thinking among party leadership in Xinjiang, and certainly two instances do not by any means constitute a trend, but nonetheless I find it interesting how much polemic flak “Western forces” receive in Bekri’s rhetoric as opposed to extremist Islam which since 2001 has been identified by the government as the origin and backer of violence in Xinjiang. At the very least we may be seeing a tendency on the part of one high ranking Xinjiang official to – again, either because of semantic sloppiness or because of a deliberate agenda – blur the boundary between diasporic Uyghur organizations such as the World Uyghur Congress and individuals such as Rebiya Kadeer, which belong to the “Western hostile forces” rubric, and organizations such as the East Turkestan Islamic Movement which, according to the government, are Islamic extremists with ties to Al Qaeda. To Bekri it appears that “Western hostile forces” take precedence over Islamic extremist ideology infiltrating from Central and Southern Asia. At the most, we could possibly be seeing another gradual shift in the way governmental officials think about discontent in Xinjiang – though, of course, before I can take my speculation that far we’ll simply  have to wait and see more of what Nur Bekri and other governmental leaders have to say about the issue.

In the autumn of 2004, upon the implementation of this program, which required all teachers to have attained a certain level of proficiency in Mandarin, many minority teachers lost their jobs. At the time, Xinjiang already had a shortage of teachers, and there have never been enough qualified teachers of Mandarin. These are problems reported in Chinese academic journals and books and the Xinjiang Daily. Late in 2005, and especially since 2006, the Xinjiang and national governments have made efforts to train non-Chinese teachers in Mandarin, usually by sending teachers selected by local ministries of education to major universities for 18-month courses and teaching practica. In light of this, the report on Xinhua’s site announcing plans to train 16,000 more “bilingual” teachers
over the next six years seems slightly disingenuous, since it emphasizes the preservation of “culture” along with the promotion of Mandarin as a national standard. However, the acknowledgement that this policy has a long way to go before it can be implemented properly is refreshing and shows a certain realism. The government is clearly interested in establishing Mandarin proficiency among the next generation of non-Han Xinjiang people, and the renewed investment in this program demonstrates that they are dedicated to a more permanent implementation to what was basically a poorly-considered, political policy.

Xinhua further report plans for 1,237 new bilingual kindergartens in accordance with the “National ethnic minority ‘bilingual’ kindergarten construction project”. Under this project, the government has also raised rural bilingual kindergarten teachers’ salaries to 800 RMB/month. The PRC has dedicated 3.8 billion RMB to this project, with 1.7 billion RMB going to bilingual kindergarten teacher training. The goal is to have 80% of Xinjiang kindergarten-age children in bilingual schools by 2012.

The bilingual education program will make a special effort in southern Xinjiang, where 1,111 pre-school teachers and 575 students are already in two-year programs, as part of the “Xinjiang Poor Areas Pre-School ‘Bilingual’ Teacher Cultivation and Training Plan”. It is estimated that 5,600 teachers will be trained under this plan over the next three years.

Late in January, Tianshan.net also published a lengthy article concerning a visit to a bilingual school in a village near Kashgar. The author’s observations, although strongly colored by clear political leanings and a sickly-sweet adulation for bilingual education, make for interesting reading. Among points of interest: Teachers of Mandarin include local teachers who have studied the language themselves, graduates of Mandarin courses, and students sent from universities for practica. In bilingual kindergarten classes for children with the least Mandarin language, there are two teachers, one who speaks in Mandarin, and another who translates. The article pays special attention to the opportunity some Xinjiang students have to study in high schools in the interior of the country, an experience that many find more alienating than enlightening. (For more on Xinjiang students in the Interior, see a recent book by a Chinese author… the title escapes me.)

See, though, this peculiar quote in a BBC article from John B. Bellinger III, legal advisor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice:

“[The Uighurs] were properly detained, they were in training camps… but they wanted to fight the Chinese. So there’s no question that we had the proper authority to detain them,” he told the BBC in an interview.

“Since we determined who they were, and that they were not intent on fighting us, we’ve been trying to release them. But China is the only country that wants them back,” he added. [...]

Mr Bellinger said American immigration laws were such that it would be extremely difficult to resettle them in the US, so he welcomed the “first breaking of the ice in European resistance in trying to help out”.

Who, exactly, is “we,” here, as in “we’ve been trying to release them?”  Judge Urbina made it pretty clear back in October that he and the judicial system think they should be out.  It’s the Bush administration, where this guy works, that’s been blocking their release by appealing Urbina’s ruling.  Come to think of it, this is the same administration responsible for locking them up seven years ago, the same people who wanted to throw away the key.  Since they’ve been cleared of all charges now for several years, shouldn’t this administration have started making an effort to resettle them even then?

Granted, I am no expert in US immigration law.  I am sure that settling a military detainee is difficult.  However, it’s not true that only “China” wants these men.  Several Uyghur families in the US have agreed to house the detainees as they adjust to life in the land of the free.  Is it possible that the US has been waiting for a European country (besides Albania) to clean up its mess?

This does make me wonder, where was Sweden in all of this?  Where was the Uyghur community in Germany?  Canada?  Honestly, I couldn’t blame them for considering this an American problem.  The US — my country — detained these men, locked them up, processed them, gripped them tight, kept them firmly inside.  Since they were imprisoned in the American realm, their place in America gained a certain naturalness.  When a country tries to hard to hold onto something, why would it want to give it away?

Then we have the question of US-China relations.  First off, I honestly have no way of knowing under which circumstances exactly the remaining Uyghur detainees were captured and delivered to the US.  It is my suspicion that they were not receiving any sort of military or paramilitary training.  In light of Bellinger’s comments, however, I wonder: Did he just say that the United States tolerates armed insurgency against the People’s Republic of China?  “[T]hey wanted to fight the Chinese … they were not intent on fighting us.”  Does that make them any less of a threat to human life?

To my mind, this can mean one of three things.  1. The United States government wants Uyghurs (and others) to be armed and angry and ready to disrupt the PRC presence in Xinjiang.  2. The US, having declared the men enemy combatants, has found a compromise for them, an identity that makes them insurgents but also prevents their return to China.  3. This is an acceptable story for media consumption, one that draws on preestablished ideas of Muslims in China and that obscures a more complex and bureaucratically byzantine truth.

(All GoogleDitu maps now automatically focus at the all-China level. Please scroll west.)

According to sparse reports from the international press, a police station was assaulted last week in Sangong Hui Village by a group of Uyghurs. The Uyghurs are said to have used rocks and gasoline bombs in their attack. Several dozen people may have been arrested in connection with the attack. The attackers may have been protesting crackdowns on civil liberties in the run-up to the Olympic Games to be held in Beijing in August. No more details are known at this time. Although the incident has not been reported upon in the Chinese press, the Epoch Times, which I cannot for the life of me access from China, appears to have picked up the story. Michael Manning’s The Opposite End of China has some commentary.

Sangong Hui Village (三公回族乡) is a small village, encompassing nearby Upper and Lower Sangong Villages in Huocheng (霍城) County, 53 kilometers from Ghulja (Yining) and near the border with Kazakhstan. It is situated between the 218 and 312 highways, the latter of which leads west to Qorghos and Kazakhstan.

Thus far, the only source of this information has been Dilxat Raxit, spokesman for the World Uyghur Congress. If the story receives further press, we will comment on it here.

The idea that Uyghurs lashed out in protest over an increasingly harsh pre-Olympic crackdown makes some sense. Indeed, the restrictions imposed on life in Xinjiang, especially since the Khotan (Xotän) protests in March, have been sudden and without a satisfactory explanation: curfews of 11/9:00 PM have been imposed in many towns, especially in the South. It is now illegal to remove a knife from Khotan (and only Khotan) by post, bus, or plane, a law in effect since March but only under active enforcement in the last few weeks. Identification checkpoints and roadblocks are ubiquitous. For the last three weeks, the passports of non-Han citizens in Xinjiang (with, of course, certain exceptions for well-placed individuals) have been collected by government officials, to be returned after the Olympics are over. Supposedly, these are being held so that their possessors “will not lose them”. In some areas of Urumchi, including very “safe” neighborhoods, I have myself witnessed groups of “community volunteer police” (社区义务治安联防): ten to thirteen middle-aged, mostly Han, men walking in a bored single file, waving nightsticks. Besides their volunteer arm bands, they wear a uniform of a red Olympic hat and a t-shirt emblazoned with the Beijing Olympics logo on the front and the words “Welcome the Olympics, protect safety” (迎奥运，保平安) on the back. Given that Xinjiang hasn’t seen an ethnic riot on the scale of those seen in most of the rest of the world for many years – except, perhaps, for the skirmish between Han and Uyghur police academy students some time back – the sudden switch to a bunker mentality has left many law-abiding private citizens more than a little upset, and the explanation “It’s because of the Olympics” does not seem satisfactory. The implication, it seems, is that this is just what you do when there’s a hint of political jitters on the air: make things feel a little tenser in Xinjiang.

If I may editorialize further, it seems to me that, first of all, there is no large and active threat to public security and safety in Xinjiang. Ethnic and religious tensions are rampant and tangible in the everyday, but they are not, for the majority of people, violent, organized hatreds equipped with hair triggers. To lump, to take a hypothetical example, a law-abiding, China-loving ethnic Kazakh businessperson planning a business trip to Almaty in with a suspected sympathizer of the Islamic Party of Turkestan and revoke both their passports (how did the latter individual get a passport to begin with?) is to undo some of the work that economic development in Xinjiang has done to create a class of wealthy non-Han loyal to China. In the case of my Kazakh example, the better life to be had on the Chinese side of the border is what keeps such a person from asking for – and certainly receiving – a Kazakhstani passport. The sullen men with their big, black sticks just put the people around them on edge. The net result of all of this is an increasingly cynical attitude, as I see it, towards the Olympics out in Xinjiang, largely among non-Han who previously either did not care about the event or who held some hope that its light might shine out West. Suddenly, “One World, One Dream” sounds less inspiring when accompanied by jeeploads of angry young men in forest camouflage, a peculiar and jarring sight in the quieter corners of a grey city. It seems that China is having a dinner party, and non-Han are to be made to sit in their rooms upstairs and listen, the unwanted and twisted children. It is unwise to nurture resentment. Does the Chinese government want to make its own people angry?

Recently, The New Dominion commented on a report regarding a video of an attack on three Chinese men, one apparently produced or packaged with the intent to rally Xinjiang Uyghur Muslims against Chinese rule. Venkatesan Vambu at India’s Daily News & Analysis (DNA) has published an article on the video. His article tracks the discovery of the video by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) and intelligently discusses its possible significance.

We at The New Dominion have also been privileged to view the short video. This is a description of what it shows:

About ten seconds in, the video opens with the Uyghur passage pakistanning pishawur shähiridä xitay jallatlirigha berilgän zärbä, meaning “A blow to the Chinese(pejorative) butchers in the city of Peshawar, Pakistan.” This is the only Uyghur in the entire video; the rest, what little is spoken, appears to be in Urdu, with music in Arabic. There are also a few short words of Arabic displayed at the beginning and end of the video.

Next, we see some clips of three men, apparently Chinese, in their underwear, standing in a doorway in a bare apartment at night. A man holding a gun, his face off-screen, forces them to line up in the doorway. They seem confused and unaware of what is about to happen. One of them is shown yelling at his assailant, though not in Chinese, and possibly in Urdu.

Then, the man holding the gun, wearing what appears to be Pakistani dress (shalwar kameez), is seen more fully. He shoots one of the Chinese men, who falls. One crouches down and turns to his companion. The other jumps off to the left. The one kneeling is shot next. The one who ran is shot less than a moment afterward. Where he falls, a dog runs out of the way. The man with the gun keeps shooting the fallen men. All through this section, the handheld camera zips around, and the individual holding it runs up behind the gunman to record the executions in more detail. What we see next is a montage of newspapers, apparently in Urdu, concerning the shooting of three men in Peshawar. These newspapers show photographs of the dead men and one other injured man who is not seen in the video.

The video appears to be connected with – though how is unclear – the shooting of three Chinese citizens in Peshawar, Pakistan in July 2007, following the massacre at the Lal Mosque in Islamabad. The exact connection is uncertain. If this is the video of the shooting of these men, why has it not been released until now? The newspaper clippings in the video also show an injured fourth man, reported by some media accounts of the Peshawar incident. Where was this man – possibly the father and uncle of the murdered men – and how was he injured and not killed, as were his companions?

Were three men shot to death just for the sake of stirring up dissent? I cannot think of another reason why someone would videotape a murder. Vambu’s article states that the video has since spread to several Uyghur-language websites. How is this being received, with disgust or with triumph? I feel that this is a gross manipulation, a somewhat unskilled and thuggish attempt at manipulating dissatisfied Uyghurs. I wonder how much on-the-ground impact it can really have and which audience, exactly, it is reaching. If angry young Uyghur men are seeing this, are they stirred to violence in the name of Islam, or might they at most enjoy it out of a guilty and immature racism? Could this even be part of an attempt to worsen Sino-Pakistani relations, which have been slightly uneasy since the election of the new government? All in all, it seems that Vambu’s conclusions are correct: this is not a Uyghur-made video. It is, at least, not a video of a Uyghur killing Chinese people. It is a video packaged to affect the politics of Xinjiang, China, and Pakistan. I sincerely hope that anyone who happens to view it will recognize the attempt at manipulation for what it is.

According to a report on the website of the Middle East Media Research Institute’s (MEMRI) “Islamist Websites Monitor Project”, a video of the execution of three Chinese hostages, allegedly produced by the “Islamic Party of Turkestan” (IPT), was posted on the website Al-Hesbah on 9 April 2008. We have thus far been unable to locate the video itself, despite having a fluent speaker of Arabic search through the Al-Hesbah site. However, we are left with the still image of three men, apparently stripped and photographed from the shoulders up, with the Uyghur word zärbä زەربە “a knock, blow” superimposed. This image has reappeared on a Uyghur-language site claiming to be that of the Islamic Party of Turkestan. (A much more complete site, possibly official, can be found here.) It seems to have appeared on that site in the last month.

The language on the IPT seal graphic, the word on the video still, and the IPT site – including Romanization, font, and other linguistic clues – suggest that these were all produced by Xinjiang Uyghurs. The IPT site features several photos of Hasan Mahsum, the alleged founder of the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM) Shärqiy Türkistan Islam Härikiti, the “Dongyiyun” blamed by the PRC government for many expressions of discontent. He was killed in Pakistan in October 2003.

The name “Islamic Party of Turkestan” is problematic. Some sources suggest that the IPT is the new face of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), an organization established in the summer of 1998 in opposition to Uzbekistan’s secular government, but which was active in Uzbek areas of Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, as well. One of its co-founders, Juma Namangani, is meant to have founded this new group, called Hezb-e Islami Turkestan in Persian, in Afghanistan in 2001. Since this new group’s focus includes all of Central Asia and Xinjiang, it may be an umbrella organization for the Islamic Movement groups that sprang from the IMU, such as the Islamic Movement of Tajikistan. Namangani died in 2001, and the IMU is believed to have fractured and mostly disintegrated.

The site and the seal associated with the video are clearly labeled IPT Türkistan Islamiy Partiyisi, rather than “Islamic Party of East Turkestan” Shärqiy Türkistan Islamiy Partiyisi or as a product of ETIM, either of which would suggest a specific concern for Uyghurs and Xinjiang. However, they maintain some of the same imagery as ETIM, focusing, at least visually, on Hasan Mahsum. If this really was produced (and recently) by the IPT, could this indicate an attempt to reach out more directly to discontented Uyghurs?

Recently, we reported on a Chinese press release asserting the involvement of Hizb ut-Tahrir (HUT), an Islamic movement with a largely Central Asian and Pakistani base, in the March protests in Khotan. Since the IPT, as originally formed, may now be a very weak and diffuse group, could it now be linked with HUT? HUT is known to have a slight “technological” bent, using the internet and various media to spread its beliefs. (The IPT website appears to be registered in Karachi, Pakistan.) However, HUT disavows violence.

Could we just be looking at a video from years before, recycled by another terrorist group, or even an individual (or government) with hidden aims? The “other” IPT website seems like an official face for their organization — so why doesn’t it have this video, or would they want it to? Also, MEMRI is an itinerant collector of Islamic media, but they have an apparent anti-Islamic bias and may make mountains out of electronic molehills. We encourage any readers, especially with a knowledge of Arabic, to look into the provenance of the video in question.

In the meantime, all we have is a seal, a video still, and a mostly-empty website. More importantly, perhaps, we have the suggestion of a video of Chinese people being killed in the name of Uyghur Muslims. This is a powerful image in the hands of anyone concerned.

Some sources consulted:

Fredholm, Michael. 2007. Islam and Modernity in Contemporary Central Asia: Religious Faith versus Way of Life: A Study of Four Radical Disruptions (Asian Cultures and Modernity: Research Report No. 14, January 2007). Stockholm: Stockholm University.

——. 2006. Islamic Extremism as a Political Force: A Comparative Study of Central Asian Extremist Movements (Asian Cultures and Modernity: Research Report No. 12, October 2006). Stockholm: Stockholm University.

Shichor, Yitzhak. 2006. “Fact and Fiction: A Chinese Documentary on East Turkestan Terrorism” in China and Eurasia Forum Quarterly, Volume 4, No. 2, pp. 89-109.