Colonialism in China

Western China is not Bruce Lee country. People there don’t even look like Bruce Lee. I – we – have a well-established idea in mind of what “Chinese people” look like. If you try and imagine China, the Chinese person will quickly manifest themselves in your imagination. I think that I need not describe the characteristics of such Chinese people. Our image is not hazy. In fact, the image of the Chinese is quite the same image that most Americans refer to with the simple word Asian. Either way, such people are whom I expected to encounter. Enter China; meet Chinese people, right?

Incorrect. In fact, my assumption was as incorrect as would have been sailing to Peru in 1600 and expecting to see the streets bustling with obvious European Spaniards – white skin, beards, black hair, collared shirts, etc., living their lives beneath the Spanish flag. In reality, our hypothetical 17^th century sailor would encounter the populous throngs of the native American people, Inca, in this case, completely unrepresented by the flag of Spain. Similarly, I entered China to find a nationless nation of Central Asian Muslim people populating the vast majority of all the region (as far as I could see).

 The place harkened a sentiment more like my image of Arabia than China. The people of this land are called Uighurs (WEE-goors) and once lived out the exquisite legend of traders on the Silk Road (Local legend says that Marco Polo passed through these towns of southern Xinjiang province). Their land is one of date palms and desert scrub clustered amidst the seemingly endless expanse of dry and lifeless sand dunes. Some days before, on the Western side of the great Tian Shan Mountains, herders sat atop horses to drive their clamorous flocks of sheep through the lush green river valleys or up and down the rolling slopes carpeted in thick vegetation. Now, two-wheeled carts drawn by a donkey seemed to be the solid preference for animal-powered transportation, and wild camels moped around the expanses of rock and sand, seemingly asking themselves eternally why they had to be a camel in the desert and not a monkey in the jungle or a fish in the sea.

In the faces of the Uighur I see (or possibly imagine) a hefty resemblance to the Iranians, or maybe the Turks. Either way, they do not resemble the Chinese. Here is one thing I learned quickly in China:

To describe someone as Chinese is ambiguous, because the word may describe two characteristics of a person: nationality or race. By the first meaning, everyone within the borders of this great Eastern empire is Chinese, simply because they fall under the authority, for good or for ill, of the Chinese government and the bureaucracy established to organize and orchestrate such a hefty magnitude of people and commerce. But, by the other meaning, only about 9 in 10 Chinese are really Chinese  (which, in an empire of 1.6 billion people, leaves a significant population aside). Racially, this word describes the Han people, known more often as the Han Chinese. This is the race responsible for 5000 years of Chinese civilization, and to it belong such people as Confucius, Lao Tzu, Mao Tse-tung, and Bruce Lee.

But, the ten percent (160,000,000) people remaining, for the most part, didn’t take part in that history and don’t identify anymore with the Han Chinese than the French do with the Russians. In fact, I find this place to reek of contemporary colonialism. Of all the Central Asian peoples, the Uighurs got left without sovereignty. The Kazakhs got Kazakhstan, the Kyrgyz got Kyrgyzstan, the Tajiks got Tajikistan, the Uzbeks got Uzbekistan, and the Turkmens got Turkmenistan, but, unfortunately, China got Uighurstan. Amidst the beautiful gold and turquoise mosques, the sprawling market bazaars, and the heaping mounds in the old town of thousands and thousands of years of human constructions atop one another, Han Chinese military police patrol the streets with bullet-proof vests, automatic weapons, battering rams, plastic shields, and helmets. The entire province, like many under colonial rule, has had a recent history of violence against its foreign government, and the Eastern police maintain a strong presence here to send the message: We will always beat you.

The Uighurs have their own language which is now written in Arabic script. From my observations trying to show them Chinese characters for ‘bathroom’ or ‘bus’ in my guidebook, I have inconclusively inferred that many Uighurs don’t even speak Mandarin, and I vaguely remember an NPR report about the region in which the Chinese government mandated that schools in this region teach less in Uighur language and more in Mandarin. Yet, it seems to be by law that every sign, every big of publicly posted literature, whether it be for a shop, a restaurant, a warning, a bathroom – anything, be written in both Uighur and Mandarin languages.  

 But, the most colonial of all are the massive settlements being constructed as overflow storage for Han Chinese people, who are pouring out of the Far East, ballooning its walls with their sheer numbers. In Kashgar, the westernmost city in China, large parts of the old town had already been bulldozed to make room for new concrete towers. For my readers at the UT community, I will relate that this process is something similar to what’s happening now in West Campus, with some key differences. First and foremost, the constructions being demolished in West Campus to make room for the new Soviet-style living blocks are between 150 and 50 years old, most of the time. The old towns of the Silk Road area are between 2 and 4 thousand years old. Indeed, the archaeological term for these types of ‘towns’ is “civilization mound.” Imagine a small town inhabited by several hundred or maybe a thousand people. As time goes on, every generation is constructing new things – new rooms, new roofs, new shops, etc. With time, as the population grows larger and large, the city expands outward in all directions, but also begins to expand upwards. I don’t mean high rise towers; were still in 1000 CE, I mean a pile of construction rubble that has well been worked into the foundation of the city. The entire settlement, after some thousands of years, sets itself atop its very own man-made hill, created by the continuous process of human cutting resources outside of town (brick, mud, rocks, wood) and taking them into town. Through this construction, in the very style of humanity’s oldest surviving cities, the Chinese government cuts, in order to allow space for more efficient housing.

But, outside the cities, the projects are immense. The government is building cities from scratch. Forty cranes all labor simultaneously to raise dozens of concrete towers. The streets are built in orderly square blocks around master-planned centers for shops, restaurants, bus stations, banks, and so on. Nice gardens line the streets and building entrances. But, not a single person lives there yet, in any of the numerous new super-settlements. They are constructions projects taken up in the barren desert and worked until a shiny new city punctuates the natural beauty. Then, like many empires facing problems with population, the Chinese government will likely fund the voyages of many Han Chinese into Uighur land.

It’s a sad story to hear how a people loses their land, their autonomy, their identity, and ultimately their livelihood and lives, but this story is not uncommon in our era. In the Western hemisphere, our idea of colonialism is based on the notion of white people traveling thousands of miles to pillage resources from another land and enslave its people.  Colonialism in Asia, it seems, is a bit different, because the people sit on the largest landmass on Earth, so no ocean crossing ever proved necessary in order to find lesser peoples to steal from. The relationship between the Han and the Uighur is something similar to that between the Europeans and the native American people around the early 1800’s. The Europeans had to keep expanding, and rather than building cities on top of the oceans to the East, the build cities on top of the other people to the West. If this trend continues in China as it did in the Americas, the Uighur people will someday be lost to history, made irrelevant; all of their thousands of years of history shared in their stories and their dress, their prayers and their general way of being will be condensed into a couple of paragraphs in the voluminous text books on Chinese history.