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Made in China:
Letter from Kashgar
It's never easy being a
Uighur in today's China
BY MATTHEW FORNEY
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GREG BURKE/AP
Uighur Muslims try to keep their identity in
the face of aggressive Chinese assimilation |
Thursday, Oct. 18, 2001
The Chinese Communist Party sends its best sloganeers
to the Muslim province of Xinjiang. None of the usual
fog about "Building a Socialist Spiritual Civilization
is Everybody's Responsibility." In Xinjiang, the
propagandists issue clear messages, over and over.
I recently visited Kashgar, the ancient Silk Road
oasis. Today it's a segregated town. The Uighurs,
Muslims who once ran Kashgar as their own, control the
cobbled maze of courtyard homes in the center. The Han
Chinese control the broad asphalt boulevards that
radiate from it.
As if to keep the two groups apart, the roads change
names frequently and are virtually without signs. I
found them navigable by their slogans. Looking for the
main north-south avenue? It passes under a billboard
of People's Liberation Army soldiers goose-stepping
with fixed bayonets toward a red horizon. The words
above them read, "Warmly Congratulate the Successful
Military Maneuvers." This refers to recent exercises
that dispatched helicopters low over the town to churn
up dust from the Taklimakan desert and blot out Uighur
aspirations for meaningful self-rule.
For those unable to make the connection, a neighboring
sign warns that "Splittism is the Cause of Doom." It
shows a line of Uighurs in their colorful hats playing
teardrop-shaped instruments and singing joyfully. The
Uighurs are superimposed over the Great Wall; the
monument was designed to keep people like the Uighurs
out.
The nearby business district, a row of 10-storied
buildings with smoked windows, bears a billboard
erected as a lesson in historical continuity. It
depicts the three people most loathed by the Uighurs I
met: Chairman Mao, Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zemin,
China's leaders of past and present. Their portraits
tower over the rest of the billboard -- Kashgar's
future, a cityscape of gleaming skyscrapers and no
people.
The business district is a short walk from the poorest
neighborhood, where dirty children run barefoot and
women beggars obscure their faces with brown shawls.
It lies on the outskirts of the Uighur section. A
sewer line had broken when I visited and a stream of
excrement flowed down the narrow street. Above the
effluent was another fantasy cityscape accompanied by
the words of Deng Xiaoping: "Prosperity is a solid
principle."
The Uighur neighborhood itself is devoid of slogans.
Instead, it carries notices written in the Uighur
language and posted by neighborhood committees, the
lowest rung of the Communist hierarchy. One carried
lines of black Uighur script. Red hash marks over some
passages provided the only color. I asked an old man
with stupendous Islamic whiskers what the red hash
marks meant. "Boom boom," he said, motioning with his
fingers like a gun. The hash marks obliterated the
names of executed Uighurs.
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