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.

I would go into greater detail, but, as I found out just today, you will soon be able to read it yourself. Dr. Dautcher’s dissertation will soon appear in print under the title Down a Narrow Road: Identity and Masculinity in a Uyghur Community in Xinjiang China.  The book, published by Harvard University’s Asia Center, will be released on 15 March.  In the meantime, you can pre-order it on Amazon or from Harvard University Press.

You can count on seeing a review on this site sometime late next month.

Update: This book has a website!

Some of you may have noticed about a week ago an article in the New York Times by correspondent Edward Wong titled, “The Dead Tell a Tale China Doesn’t Care to Listen To,” about the famous preserved corpse uncovered in the Tarim Basin and dubbed the “Loulan Beauty.” So the Loulan Beauty looks European and this doesn’t jive well with the continual and enthusiastic insistence on behalf of the Chinese government that Xinjiang has always been a part of Chinese territory. Like almost all the articles written about Xinjiang in mainstream media outlets there was nothing strikingly new about the content and the article itself relied mostly on the “wow” factor one usually can get from telling your average Joe how weird Xinjiang is. Michael over at The Opposite End of China made a great post recently on the eye-rolling factor of the article and we just let the article slip by all together here at The New Dominion.

However, while those of us who have gone a little beyond the surface here in Xinjiang may just roll our eyes and sigh at Wong’s cliche observations, it of course is inevitable that legions of Chinese who lay their eyes on the article would get their feelings hurt and begin the nationalistic backlash. Spearheading the effort is the Global Times, a simmering, sensationalist tabloid that has a reputation for being sentimental and patriotic. Their article titled “American Media Dares to Use Loulan Beauty to Cast Doubt on Chinese Sovereignty” was too much to not write about.

The American newspaper “The New York Times” recently had the gall to publish an article absurdly using the “Loulan Beauty” to speculate that Xinjiang is not a part of the territory of China. That article states that since the “Loulan Beauty’s” appearance is evidence of her not being Chinese and also since her arrival to modern-day Xinjiang vastly predated emissary Zhang Qian’s arrival to the Western Regions, this constitutes proof that Xinjiang is not part of the territory of China.

The article is a short one. It gets right to the point by incredulously stating the NYT article’s goal of proving via the Loulan Beauty that Xinjiang is not a part of the territory of China, then picks a few choice quotes from the original article to display to the disgust of the Chinese readers. Finally, the author brings in two experts, a historian and the head of the Central Asia Research Institute in Xinjiang, to deal the killing blows to Wong’s thesis. The head of the institute, Pan Zhipang, observes that solid control over Xinjiang by a Chinese government was established in Xinjiang as early as 60 B.C. and Zhang Qian was only a part of that effort – a thousands year old mummy is irrelevant to that historical establishment. Historian Zhang Wei invokes international law, remarking that China’s continuous and effective rule over Xinjiang today fits in with the agreed upon definition of sovereignty and renders the origins of a 3800 year old mummy irrelevant. If thousands year old claims rather than effective governance defines sovereignty, the Global Times writer snarkily quips, then Americans should give America back to the Indians. And thus the article ends.

After supping on  this delightful buffet of sarcasm and righteous indignation for a little bit I found myself choking and gagging on one little chicken bone – namely,  nowhere in the article does Edward Wong argue that Xinjiang is not a part of the territory of China.

Sure, Wong’s article undeniably is soaked in a skeptical tone aimed at the current Chinese government, but while Wong makes a number of arguments, Xinjiang not being a part of China is clearly not one of them. For example, the title of the Times article – “a story that China doesn’t want to hear.” China obviously means the Chinese government, but is the story “Xinjiang is not a part of China?” Not quite.

An exhibit on the first floor of the museum here gives the government’s unambiguous take on the history of this border region: “Xinjiang has been an inalienable part of the territory of China,” says one prominent sign.

But walk upstairs to the second floor, and the ancient corpses on display seem to tell a different story.

So as we begin reading Wong’s article, he’s trying to get us to cast doubt on the statement, “Xinjiang has been an inalienable part of the territory of China.” Here’s where things get a little messy – when we’re looking at the predicate “has been” the tense implies a kind of permanence and uninterruptedness, whereas the Global Times author starts of by quoting this quote of a translation of a quote (yeesh), writing in Chinese, 新疆是中国领土不可分割的一部分, in which the subtlety of the tense “has been” gets sucked into Chinese grammar as the verb 是 which will inevitably be interpreted by native language readers as “China is an inalienable part of the territory of China.”

For a moment let’s ignore the stupidity of a sentence that was conceived in Mandarin, turned into a standardized policy statement, translated into English to be placed on a museum sign, was seen by a Chinese-American reporter, was quoted in an American newspaper, and then was seen by a Chinese reporter who took the phrase and translated it back into Chinese. Ha ha.

The difference between calling doubt upon “has been an inalienable part” and calling doubt upon “is an inalienable part” is pretty huge. The first one questions a long, unbroken claim of authority that snakes deep into the past without a clear end. The second one questions a sovereign nation’s right to rule its own territory today. When we acknowledge this difference we actually can find some common ground between Wong and the indignant expert interviewed in the Global Times article.

“As early as 60 B.C., China’s Western Han government had already established a protectorate in Xinjiang, the highest level administrative structure established by the Han dynasty in the Western Regions.” says Pan, “That China had established a local government there is proof that Xinjiang has since ancient times been a part of China’s territory.” Basically Pan is blasting what he is told Wong is claiming about the Loulan beauty by astutely pointing out that indeed there is a beginning boundary to Chinese rule over Xinjiang -the establishment of a protectorate there during the Han dynasty – and what happened before then is irrelevant to Chinese rule today. In this sense, Pan and Wong can both agree – imagining Chinese sovereignty into the 2nd millennium BC would be kind of absurd.

However, it’s not Chinese sovereignty that Wong is questioning, and that makes the Global Times’ impassioned criticism a big, smelly red herring, completely irrelevant. Instead what Wong is questioning is the more subtle idea that a “Chinese identity” could be projected beyond the first Han protectorate, far beyond 1st century BC; that regardless of the presence or absence of Han Chinese control in the region, the individuals were Chinese at heart – not “China” the ethnic Han cultural body, but “China” the multiethnic nation-state. This idea is insidious in its own way, because it depicts a people predating Chinese rule who nonetheless were clamoring in their hearts to be members of the great minzu family, an desire which was fulfilled when the Han dynasty came in the 1st century BC – an Eastern twist to the “heathens need Jesus” rationale that provided the spiritual and social impetus for colonization by European nations.

Does this idea exist in the Chinese leadership? I think it does. We can look back to Pan’s own words. While on one hand he quite correctly, in my opinion, stresses the difference between the concepts of “ethnicity” and “country,” right afterwards he strangely goes on to say, “Westerners often conceive China only to be composed of Han Chinese, but in reality China is an integrated, multiethnic country, and even though the “Loulan Beauty” is not Han, she still may be Chinese” [Emphasis mine]. Furthermore, one of the central writing points of Wong’s article is the befuddling insecurity on behalf of Chinese scientists preventing them from allowing genetic analysis by international scholars of the Loulan Beauty and other Xinjiang mummies. Beyond that, anyone who has visited the Autonomous Regional Museum and Urumqi can tell you much of it is a grand exercise in insecurity, with constant reminders in multiple languages to museum-goers that Xinjiang, no matter from what angle you’re looking at it, is a part of China and don’t even bother to question that axiom in front of all this overwhelming historical evidence.

If there’s no disputing that territorial integrity and sovereignty is all about who is effectively administering a region at a given time, why is there this shroud of paranoia and insecurity around the Loulan Beauty? Why are scientists so protective about her genetic makeup, and why do Chinese social scholars have to qualify their statements about her with “She still may be Chinese?” It’s because the issue runs deeper than sovereignty. As an unelected government, the CCP and even the autonomous regional government are obsessed with rationales, and justifiably so. Without the stamp of popular approval bestowed by elections, the CCP instead has to convince its modern-day subjects that it knows what’s good for them anyways and is providing that – for example, the unending stream of rhetoric about stability and economic prosperity, which, to be fair, in many cases, is not untrue. Ethnic regions that are historically less “Han” but are part of the PRC play a special role in this self-justification. If the titular minorities of these autonomous regions not only desire benevolent Han rule, but also are entitled to it with their long history as “proto-Chinese” peoples, then the non-elected government of, say, Xinjiang, is legitimate, even if real power lies mostly with the party organs consisting primarily of appointed Han Chinese.

As a private individual with a strong interest in Xinjiang, I do not have any objections to the PRC’s territorial integrity and sovereignty over Xinjiang. It’s a fact, just as historian Zhang Wei observes. What I do object to, however, is the sustained educational drive (including things like the Regional Museum in Urumqi) to to depict pre-Han dynasty peoples of Xinjiang as somehow belonging to the multiethnic “Chinese” identity. In addition to displaying the traditional insecurity of the Communist Party and being pretty unnecessary in light of international conventions regarding sovereignty, I consider this stubborn belief contributing to the “you were made for this and you asked for this” narrative that places the “big brother Han” on far higher ground than the other, ostensibly equal minorities of China. Wong is a journalist. His interest in the novelty of Xinjiang, Uyghurs, and the Loulan Beauty is strictly business and he’s writing for a broad audience, and so his article doesn’t delve deeply into the challenges the Loulan Beauty present to the idea of a pan-ethnic primordial Chinese identity. That, however, is still what he’s doing – not suggesting Xinjiang is entitled to become its own nation because a 3800 year old mummy looks European.

What really needs to be acknowledged by all sides is that when something is almost four millenia distant from the present, modern day concepts such as ethnic identity or national identity are completely irrelevant. Professor Pan, as far as the article went, gets close to this understanding – but not close enough. To turn the Global Times reporter’s misguided sarcasm on its head, claiming that the Loulan Beauty could retroactively be considered a member of the multiethnic Chinese nation state is as illogical as claiming the pueblo Indians of the 10th century were dyed in the wool red white and blue members of the United States of America melting pot eight centuries before the USA even existed. The Loulan Beauty beauty isn’t “Chinese” because “Chinese” didn’t exist back then, nor, it must be said, is she Uyghur. She should be nothing more than a representative of prehistoric life in Xinjiang that can be appreciated by the young, the old, Han, Uyghur, and foreigner – without any devaluing political baggage.

***

If you can read Chinese, I also recommend you peruse the comments section to the Global Times article for a nice sampling of typical angry youth (愤青) rage. Lots of amusing yet red herring remarks on giving Alaska back to Russia and America back to the Indians. If there are any intelligent comments that do more than just illustrate angry youth contempt it may merit a future post.

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Full translation of the Global Times Article below:

Global Times Special Correspondent Shang Bin

The American newspaper “The New York Times” recently had the gall to publish an article absurdly using the “Loulan Beauty” to speculate that Xinjiang is not a part of the territory of China. That article states that since the “Loulan Beauty’s” appearance is evidence of her not being Chinese and also since her arrival to modern-day Xinjiang vastly predated emissary Zhang Qian’s arrival to the Western Regions, this constitutes proof that Xinjiang is not part of the territory of China.
The “Loulan Beauty” the article mentions refers to a preserved body unearthed in the Lop Nur region of Xinjiang, China, discovered by Chinese archaeologist Mu Shunying in 1980. At approximately 3800 years old, it is the oldest body uncovered in Xinjiang to date.

The article, published on November 18 in the New York Times, is titled “The Dead Tell a Tale China Doesn’t Care to Listen To.” The author notes the Chinese government’s assertion that “Xinjiang has been an inalienable part of the territory of China.” “However, the corpses seem to tell a different story.” He writes that from the appearance of the “Loulan Beauty” one can determine that “she does not look like what one thinks of is Chinese,” and that “the very first people to settle the area came from the west — down from the steppes of Central Asia and even farther afield — and not from the fertile plains and river valleys of the Chinese interior.”

The author also mentions that Chinese officials, when offering proof that Xinjiang is a part of Chinese territory, often mention Zhang Qian’s mission to the Western Regions, “but the mummies show, though, that humans entered the region thousands of years earlier, and almost certainly from the west.” The author says that the “Loulan Beauty” is 3800 years old, and that the time of Zhang Qian’s mission to the Wesern Reigions was during the Western Han dynasty, in the second century B.C.

The head of the Central Asia Research Institute at the Xinjiang Academy of Social Sciences, Pan Zhiping accepted an interview with a Global Times correspondent and said regarding this fallacy that the article has made a “conceptual error.” The concepts of “ethnicity” and “country”, he argues, are two completely different concepts. Westerners often conceive China only to be composed of Han Chinese, but in reality China is an integrated, multiethnic country, and even though the “Loulan Beauty” is not Han, she still may be Chinese. Furthermore, as early as 60 B.C., China’s Western Han government had already established a protectorate in Xinjiang, the highest level administrative structure established by the Han dynasty in the Western Regions. That China had established a local government there is proof that Xinjiang has since ancient times been a part of China’s territory; Zhang Qian served only as an emissary to the Western Regions, and his activities there are not considered the conclusive evidence that Xinjiang belongs to Chinese territory.

Historian Zhang Wei told a Global Times correspondent that what is determined by the history of territorial claims and what is determined by the present reality are also completely different concepts. According to international legal conventions, what determines a place’s status as “territory” is a  nation carrying out continuous and effective management of that place. The Western Han central government established a protectorate in the Western Regions in 60 BC, and for over 2000 years since that time the Chinese central government has basically maintained continuous and effective control over the Xinjiang reason. Zhang Wei states that the article’s comparison of the 3800 year old corpse of the Loulan Beauty with the Chinese government’s over 2000 years of continuous effective rule over Xinjiang is completely lacking in logic. Should the argument of the article be implemented, then American should be returned to the Native Americans.

I point any passersby to a most excellent interview with Kelly Hammond by Micki McCoy hosted at The China Beat, about a Pepsi commercial filmed in Xinjiang that required a motley crew of various ethnicities and nationalities to pull off. At the most basic level, this was nothing more than a Hong Kong production crew pulling some extras together to make an advertisement. But for Kelly, a scholar doing research in Xinjiang  who happened to be lassoed to play a foreigner extra on the huge set, the shoot was so much more. With an incredible eye for detail, Kelly describes the commercial shoot as an unprecedented cultural exchange. Western educated Hong Kong artists, technicians, and movie makers come to Xinjiang speaking English better than Mandarin, and ally with Pepsi, an American conglomerate, to produce a narrative about Chinese rallying behind a foreign drink into a single “Chinese” identity thus overcoming a vague foreign opponent in a football match – an opponent whose fans ironically are portrayed mostly by actual fellow Chinese, namely, Uyghurs employed for their “exotic-looks value.” In the process, we also learn about Chinese (or at least Cantonese) conceptions of Mexicans (sombreros), Brazilians (carnivalesque outfits which the Uyghur women didn’t take kindly to, to the befuddlement of the liberated Hongkongers), and Americans (scantily clad cheerleaders played of course by Kazakhs). Not to mention the high schoolers who were delighted to see the pop culture icon starring in the commercial but were appropriately angsty when recruited to portray Japanese. But enough talking on my part, Kelly’s observations are insightful and inspiring enough on their own. Check it out.

P.S. Yes, I pretentiously typed smorgasborg with all the Swedish character markings, but I did it because the spellcheck installed in the browser recommended that as a proper spelling and I found that to awesome to decline. Thanks, spellcheck.