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.

Most of the placemarks on this map are bars and restaurants — I don’t, personally, know much about Urumchi’s hotels, and I haven’t got the personal capital to investigate. There should be more hotels marked in the future. I have also endeavored to mark points of interest to both tourists and residents, though several sites from recent history are still missing. Currently, of city services, only the main police station is marked, but I will get down to adding a couple of reliable hospitals in the near future. Several main traffic arteries are also marked off using yellow lines; if you click on them, you will get the pinyin for the Chinese name of the road. Markets, including night markets, are blue squares, as are some other pleasant places to sit around outside. As always, I welcome reader input on the content of this map! If there is anything that should be added, please don’t hesitate to mention.

I have used GoogleDitu, by the way, because GoogleMaps and GoogleEarth just don’t have Chinese roads, yet. If you try to port this map to either, it won’t line up properly with the satellite data. Oh, and I’m sorry this is so small — we’re working on it.

在较大的地图中查看Urumchi Tourism Map

Xinhua Network News Xinjiang Channel 新华网新疆频道

• 24 December 2007: Over 100 thousand farmers and herders in remote regions have received benefits from the “Electricity for Every Household Project” and are now able to bid farewell to oil lamps and wood-burning heating. The “Electricity for Every Household Project” was started jointly by the XUAR People’s Government and the National Power Network Company in 2006. Since its inauguration, the project has been implemented far ahead of schedule, with a current total of 336 million yuan having been invested in the construction of power converters and power lines necessary to provide electricity to remote regions.
• 25 December 2007: A certain Mr. Xu was sentenced to two years in prison on December 24th for attempting to extort the Urumqi Carrefour for 50 thousand yuan two months previously. On the 5th of September, Xu called the Carrefour to tell them to deposit 50 thousand yuan in a designated bank account without informing the police, otherwise he would detonate a bomb he had planted in the storage room via remote control. The Carrefour administration immediately evacuated the store and informed the authorities, causing a swarm of armed police and explosives specialists to descend on the abandoned supermarket. No explosives were found, and detectives of the Urumqi police department arrested Xu at an Internet bar the next day.
• 25 December 2007: From January to the end of November, Xinjiang saw 400 thousand foreign tourists and received 148 million American dollars worth of tourism revenue. At 34%, Russians constitute the largest portion of foreign tourist.
• 25 December 2007: The economic efficiency of state-owned enterprise increased by a substantial margin from January to November of this year. Total sales revenues for SOEs reached 25.3 billion yuan, a 20.1% increase since last year. The metal, coal, chemical engineering, foodstuffs, textiles, and trade industries saw the most significant improvements.
• 25 December 2007: From the beginning of this year to the 24th ofDecember the Qaramay oilfields produced a total of 11.5 million tons of crue oil. This years total is higher than last year, and thus adds the 27th year to a continual changing of increasing oil output.
• 26 December 2007: The Xinjiang software company Sarka has developed a software that can recognize Uyghur, Kazakh, and Kyrgyz text from image files and convert them into text. With this software, an individual can scan documents written in these languages or take photographs of texts and then convert them into editable text files. The program was the product of a join effort between the company, the Information Science and Engineering Institute of Xinjiang University, and Qinghua University’s Electrical Engineering Department.
• 26 December 2007: The Disaster Relief Office of the regional Civil Affairs Department has allocated 42 million kuai to aid residents stricken by natural calamities to make it through the winter. This winter a large number of Xinjiang residents are affected by natural disasters such as abnormally high snowfall, torrential rain, hailstorms, floods, landslides, mudslides, strong winds, droughts, and low temperature conditions. The disaster relief aid will be used to provide affected residents with food rations, clothes, and coal.
• 26 December 2007: By 2008, all agricultural and pastoral regions in Xinjiang will be covered by the New Model
  Cooperative Medical Treatment system. In acknowledgment of this complete coverage, the central and regional governments have decided to increase financial support for the program, which involves both financial subsidies to support those with illnesses and providing special training to residents so that emergencies and illnesses can be treated locally.
• 26 December 2007: Three Xinjiang gold mining companies will receive a total of 7.6 million yuan of funding from the national government, to be used for gold exploration and for environmental protection. Xinjiang’s gold mining industry has been receiving governmental funding since 2004, and this year’s addition pins the government’s total investment in the regional mining industry to 15.7 million yuan. Xinjiang is considered one of China’s most important gold industry bases; this year’s gold production statistics put Xinjiang at 8th place in China’s national gold mining industry.
• 26 December 2007: Urumqi International Airport was closed for the first time this winter due to heavy snowfall on the 26th from 11am to 6pm.
• 27 December 2007: In order to improve business relations between the XPCC and its clients and to promote even faster and better economic development through the Bingtuan’s myriad industries, Huaxia Bank has signed a comprehensive strategic cooperation agreement with Bingtuan officials which will grant XPCC controlled industries and XPCC work unit employees greater and smoother access to the bank’s resources, including loans, account management, and other financial services.
• 28 December 2007: This year the total value of Xinjiang foreign trade was substantially hire than the national average. The total value of imports and exports from January to November of this year reached 12.3 billion American dollars, a 50% increase compared with the same period last year and a 26.5 percentage points higher than the national average.
• 28 December 2007: The safe landing of a China Southern Airlines Boeing 757 airliner marked the official opening of Korla’s new airport. The construction of a new, larger airport to replace Korla’s previous one was a national level project aimed at consolidating Korla’s role as a hub between Northern and Southern Xinjiang and between Xinjiang and the rest of the country. A total of 630.3 million yuan was invested in the project.
• 28 December 2007: The XPCC Health Department announced plans to begin construction next year of comprehensive health archive which within three years will contain the basic medical information and statistics of all 2.58 million members of the XPCC. Upon completion of this medical archive, XPCC health services will be able to provide quicker outpatient services, develop more efficient immunization plans, improve health education, better monitor epidemic and contagious diseases, and give better recover and rehabilitation programs to XPCC patients.
• 29 December 2007: This year 1025 kilometers of highways were opened for use, an increase of about 136% compared to high construction over the previous five years. Before the 1990s, Xinjiang didn’t have even one kilometer of highway, now, the XUAR Transportation Department has managed to connect Urumqi with every prefecture and every prefecture-level capital with all of its internal counties. In all there are 145 thousand kilometers of highway in Xinjiang.
• 29 December 2007: Masses of people from Kuche, Xinhe, Baicheng, and as far away as Korla saw a massive fireball in the sky on the night of the 27th. At around 8:50PM, Beijing time, witnesses saw an object in the sky so bright that in some places it seemed like daylight. One witness described the object as a “red-hot chunk of iron” that left a bright trail in the sky similar to the contrails of an airplane. The object was visible for about 10 seconds, then, 5 seconds after the fireball disappeared witnesses report hearing a loud boom. Police from the Xinhe PSB dispatched two expeditions to find any trace of the object but none was found. Meteorite? Likely. Alien invaders? Well, let’s just say if I were an alien overlord I’d definitely choose Xinjiang as a nice, remote, resource-rich, sparsely populated, spacious base of operations to begin my nefarious conquest. I suppose time will tell.
• 29 December 2007: From the beginning of its operation to the 25th of this month, the China-Kazakhstan crude oil pipeline has transported 4.7 million tons of oil, worth 2.4 billion American dollars.
• 29 December 2007: The 20th and final meeting of the 9th Regional People’s Political Consultative Conference ended on the afternoon of the 28th. The primary goal of the meeting was to elect delegates for the 10th Regional People’s Political Consultative Conference, whose first meeting will be held on the 13th of next year. The members of the 10th RPPCC can be found here.

Other News

•  26 December 2007: The People’s Daily Online provides some English language coverage on the recent closure of Urumqi airport.
• 26 December 2007: China View provides a picture gallery to celebrate the completion of the renovation of Kashgar’s old town.
• 28 December 2007: China Daily runs an article on Pimo, a small town on the southern edge of the Taklamakan Desert and home to some miraculous desert reclamation efforts.