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China's own 'wild West'
tale unfolds
Posted 10/6/2004 11:52 PM
Updated 10/7/2004 1:27 AM
By David J. Lynch, USA TODAY
KASHGAR, China — Not long ago, this city's commercial
heart was an open-air bazaar where butchers hacked at
sides of beef, vendors measured purchases with
hand-held scales, and braying donkeys joined the blare
of car horns in an unruly bedlam.
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A modern mall in Kashgar, in remote western China,
has replaced an older neighborhood.
By David Lynch, USA TODAY |
Then, from all over mainland China,
the Han Chinese started arriving. Some members of the
Han — China's majority ethnic group — came to Muslim
Xinjiang Province to pick cotton, others to escape
increasingly fierce competition in the country's more
developed areas. Either way, they are changing the
face of one of China's most remote and restive regions.
Aided by lavish government pump-priming, the Han
influx has made this unlikely backwater the richest
province outside of China's coastal capitalist belt.
The Chinese coming here by airplane, or via the
4-year-old railway, are building new lives in a
hauntingly beautiful land of snow-dusted mountains,
wind-blown deserts and lush oasis towns. (Photo
gallery:The changing face of China)
"This is a place that's newly developed, so there are
more opportunities. ... It's easier to make money here,"
says Wang Changgao, 23, who moved here last year from
Zhejiang Province in southeastern China to open a shoe
store.
Like the 19th century American pioneers who heeded
Horace Greeley's call to "Go west, young man," the Han
Chinese believe they are bringing civilization and
prosperity to a less-developed native population. And
as in the Wild West, the natives don't see it that
way. In fact, in an area with a long history of ethnic
conflict, the Uighur Muslims, Xinjiang's largest group,
say they're being marginalized in the march to
modernize. The good jobs and desperately needed credit
are monopolized by newly arriving Han, they say,
leaving them with economic scraps.
Distinctly different peoples
When the Communists won control of China in 1949,
Xinjiang was populated almost exclusively by Uighur
Muslims, Kazahks and Hui ethnic minorities. Only 6% of
the residents were Han Chinese. As late as 1960, the
Han remained scarce. "One day, there was this meeting
for the Han, and they couldn't even fill the room,"
says Huo Futian, 78, who first came to Xinjiang as a
soldier in China's People's Liberation Army.
Today, the Uighurs and Han share Chinese nationality,
but they remain distinctly different peoples. They
look different, wear different clothes, worship
different gods and eat different foods. (The Uighurs'
diet is heavy on lamb kebabs and round nan bread. The
Han Chinese prefer rice and the pork that is forbidden
by the Uighurs' Muslim religion.) The Uighurs, one of
Central Asia's Turkic peoples, use an Arabic writing
script rather than Chinese characters.
For decades, China's rulers have encouraged Han
migration to solidify their control over this distant
province.
In recent years, public-sector inducement has been
supplemented by private-sector attraction. "It's more
of a pull than a push. The government's not forcing
anyone to go. It's more a sense of attraction to
perceived opportunities," says Dru Gladney, a Xinjiang
expert at the University of Hawaii.
In the 1990s, up to 2 million Han settled in sparsely
populated Xinjiang, says Nicolas Becquelin, a Xinjiang
expert with Human Rights in China. That shift is akin
to a surge of more than 30 million people into the
USA.
Today, the Han officially make up 40% of Xinjiang's 19
million residents. The actual figure is certainly
higher, because Chinese officials routinely understate
the Han migration to avoid inflaming Uighur
sensibilities.
Until the past few years, most new Chinese settlers
clustered in northern Xinjiang, especially in the
boomtown capital of Urumqi. Kashgar remained a place
with sights, sounds and smells distinctively different
from the rest of China.
But in the past few years, the Han have pushed deeper
into areas in southern Xinjiang that traditionally
were almost exclusively Uighur, such as Kashgar. Abdul
Ghani, a local municipal official, insists the Han
still make up less than 10% of the city's population.
But a more reasonable estimate is that one-third of
Kashgar's 340,000 residents are now Han Chinese,
according to Becquelin.
Many of the new arrivals, including shoe store owner
Wang, hail from Wenzhou, a commercial center in
southeastern China. Kashgar's central Renmin Xi Lu
street is like a little bit of Wenzhou transplanted to
the Chinese frontier. A hotel called Wenzhou Mansion,
adjacent to a string of Han-owned retail shops,
dominates the street. "We have a community of Wenzhou
people here. Maybe 70% of the shops are owned by
people from Wenzhou," says Wang. "If I have some
difficulty, they help me."
Economic migrants from across China
Like so many of the migrants, Wang learned of the
opportunities in this near-virgin land from a
relative. That's the customary pattern: A migrant
comes here, does well and sends word back to his
hometown.
Economic migrants are coming here from all over what
the Uighurs refer to as naidi, meaning elsewhere in
China. Down the street from Wang's shoe story is a
gleaming new mall, which perhaps more than anything
else serves as the physical embodiment of the Han
influx.
A venerable Uighur neighborhood here was razed last
year to make room for hundreds of new shops and
restaurants, which are almost exclusively owned and
staffed by Han Chinese. On a recent visit, the only
Uighurs in evidence were a pair of musicians playing
traditional instruments at the foot of an escalator.
Nearby stores offering clothes, shoes, eyeglasses, tea
and DVDs are all staffed by Han. At the rear of the
mall, a food court of perhaps two dozen restaurants
also is exclusively Chinese.
Inside a first-floor DVD shop, Cao Wenying, 52, is
waiting on one of a steady stream of customers. In
July, she moved back to Kashgar after 17 years in
Henan Province, about 2,000 miles east of here, to
help her son run his new business. "Great changes have
taken place. The roads are wider. There are more big
buildings and, of course, there are more Han people
coming to do business," she says.
They are coming to a place that bears little
resemblance to the popular image of China's economic
juggernaut, which ingests huge amounts of foreign
capital and sends out into the world enormous volumes
of exports.
Elsewhere, private businesses account for close to
half the economy. Here, more than 80% of industrial
assets are controlled by state-owned companies,
according to Becquelin. Much of Xinjiang's economic
activity, in fact, resembles traditional colonial
relationships. Raw materials, including oil and
natural gas, are extracted from the province and
shipped east to feed China's economic engine.
Landlocked Xinjiang's exports are insignificant.
The amount of foreign direct investment in Xinjiang
would be considered almost a rounding error in the
national accounts. Of the $33.9 billion in foreign
cash China attracted in the first six months of this
year, just $10.7 million landed in Xinjiang. Foreign
companies are deterred by Xinjiang's isolated location
and its history of what Beijing calls
separatist-inspired terrorism.
Hard to attract skilled workers
For some Xinjiang companies, the tyranny of geography
makes it difficult to attract needed talent. "We lie
in a desert area far from the eastern region," says Li
Chunsheng, board chairman of San Daoling coal mine. "Many
people don't want to come to this place."
Yet, many do. Each year, an estimated 1 million
temporary workers come from inland provinces such as
Gansu, Sichuan and Anhui for Xinjiang's cotton harvest,
according to L.C. Chui, general manager of shirt maker
Turpan Esquel. Over a four-month period, the men,
mostly farmers filling the time between harvest and
planting, can earn about 6,000 yuan (about $725) —
almost as much as they'd make in three years back home.
They stay for the same reason that Wan Ling, 23, left
rural Gansu Province to work as a clerk in the West
Shoes Superstore. Every month, she earns about 650
yuan ($78.50), more than three times what she'd make
farming back home. "We're from the countryside. The
economy in our hometown is not very developed," she
says.
Construction workers also flood into the province,
drawn by the government's massive investment in
infrastructure. Near the 15th century Id Kah Mosque,
Kashgar's most important place of worship,
construction crews on jobs along both sides of the
mosque are entirely Han — in defiance of a local law
requiring half the jobs to go to ethnic minorities.
Some analysts look to prejudice as a contributor to
the Uighurs' high level of unemployment. Chinese
companies have a perception that "local people are
lazy or can't speak Chinese," Gladney says.
Many Uighurs do speak only their native Turkic tongue.
One local man, a 21-year-old who uses only one name,
Migit, says he was unable to find work for two years
because he couldn't speak Chinese.
Under a long-term program announced in 1999 to develop
the west, Beijing poured $30.7 billion into Xinjiang.
The current five-year plan calls for an additional $51
billion in central government spending.
The largesse is evidence that China's rulers are
betting economic development will solve all their
problems here. Some experts aren't so sure.
"Many government officials feel economic growth is a
panacea for social, religious and other problems. The
reality is that economic growth often exacerbates
tensions, particularly if some groups feel left behind,"
Gladney says. "If the Chinese can't close the gap
between rich and poor ... in the future, I worry they
may have real problems."
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