High tech and hot pot, p.21
High Tech and Hot Pot, page 21
“Are you also careful when you use your cell phone?”
“When my friends in Shanghai call I never say anything negative about the situation here. I always write: ‘Everything is fine.’ They don’t know what really happens in Xinjiang.”
Mei Li then tells me about a new government project titled “United as a Family” that organizes visits by Han Chinese to Uyghurs. “The government calls us relatives. If you don’t get along well with your host, you can just call the police and they take them away to a camp.”
What a corruption of the idea of cultural exchange and hospitality—with state approval, propagandists and potential informers come to your own home. The people are sure to have a great time together.
An elderly local with a doppa cap and an illegal long beard (“abnormal beards” are against the law in Xinjiang, as are head-scarves for women) saunters by our table and stops to ask Mei Li where I’m from.
“Ah, German! Fascists!” he shouts, and wanders off.
My conversation partner feels that her opinions have just been validated. “You see! They know nothing. It’s best never to speak to them.”
“You just told me you were on vacation with a Uyghur colleague in Malaysia.”
Mei Li laughs. “That’s different. She is super!”
• • • • • •
IN TWO LINES, sixteen policemen dressed completely in black march through the pedestrian zone. This is the evening patrol between pomegranate sellers and kebab grills. They are all wearing helmets and have shields; some of them have machine guns.
Today is June 4, the anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre, and when a little girl on a red tricycle pedals towards the patrol, I can’t help but think of the iconic photo from that time—of a protester standing alone in the path of a row of tanks. Here, coincidence has created a kind of homage, an instant in which a child in a floral dress and the two armed soldiers in the front row are directly face-to-face. The group of police slows slightly and the child pedals unhurriedly past them with her head held high, without taking her eyes off the men in black, as if she were trying to memorize their faces. The tricycle passes less than a couple of feet from the heavy boots; nobody else dares to come as close. Will the little girl remember this day later, or are such encounters simply routine in a city that feels like a war zone?
In the faces all around I can read fear, which is only natural when confronted by the serious faces of the young policemen, some with Han features and some Uyghur. The local population are deliberately recruited for the security forces with the goal of making China seem like less of an occupying power while at the same time guiding young people away from religion and towards patriotism. The slogan “A son in the army means prosperity for the whole family” can be seen on a recruiting poster on the main road.
As the patrol halts at a checkpoint to guard all cardinal points, another interesting image is created. Directly in front of them is a metal sign with a smiling cartoon figure depicting a policeman as “Officer Friendly.” The grim reality right next to it transforms the illustration into a caricature.
Kashgar is a high-security zone, with metal detectors in front of every restaurant, shopping center and hotel, police stations and police cars on every corner, an enormous Mao statue in the center and the national flag in almost every doorway (people who don’t display it are likely to run into trouble). Should the Chinese presence in Xinjiang be viewed as an occupation or a defense against terrorism? Or a mixture of the two? Whatever is the correct answer, the situation in Xinjiang reveals Chinas capability for ruthlessness. The Uyghurs have no choice—either they abandon their culture or face the fury of state authority.
• • • • • •
HORROR AND BEAUTY are often found close together, particularly in Xinjiang. For the first and only time on this trip, I book a tour: two days along the Karakoram Highway with an overnight stay at Tashkurgan, not far from the Pakistan border. With me in the minibus are a couple from the U.S. who work in Chengdu, three Chinese women and another German. The driver is from Hunan province and came here years ago as a soldier but switched to the less dangerous field of tourism.
Five of the Author’s Favorite Places in China
1The artist village of Dafen, Shenzhen. Here you can buy inexpensive yet perfect hand-painted reproductions of van Goghs and the Mona Lisa, or a portrait oil painting for less than thirty dollars.
2The plank walk on Huashan, near Xi’an. The ascent up the mountain includes sections where the daring can discover whether they suffer from vertigo.
3The Great Wall, near Chenjiapu. This is an unrestored section that is only ninety minutes from Beijing. Getting there is tricky, but you can find information at greatwallfresh.com.
4Tagong. This small Tibetan town in Sichuan has plenty of hiking options for visiting the temples on the steppes.
5Huaxi. China’s richest village is seventy-five miles west of Shanghai. People who like quirky places should spend a couple of nights at the central luxury hotel in a 1,076-foot-high skyscraper in the middle of the village.
At a checkpoint on the outskirts of the city we are sent back; the rules have recently changed and foreigners must be registered at a different exit, where we are summoned to a building with eight parallel security scanners. We have to place our passports on a scanner, and then press our thumb on a fingerprint sensor while looking into a camera. The technology works with Chinese passports but fails with mine, even though I try several times. So at one of the counters a heavily armed security official scans our documents by hand and asks about our jobs and what we are planning to do on our trip. I keep quiet about my journalist activities, saying that I’m a teacher, which isn’t a complete lie, since I’ve visited so many schools. Eventually, we are allowed to continue.
Half an hour later, we come to another checkpoint, where again the technology fails and the same procedure follows. Next to me, an Uyghur woman is being frisked thoroughly, and an official connects a cable to her cell phone presumably to check her apps, chats and contacts. If they searched mine, they would find the New York Times app, Wikipedia, VPN programs, and Iranian and Turkish contacts. If I were Uyghur, I would be in a camp tomorrow. It’s a pretty bad feeling, seeing the woman sitting there and, for a moment, being glad I’m not Uyghur.
As our journey continues, the mountains get bigger, some of the rock faces shimmering red in the sunlight, and the villages get smaller. At the roadside we see, one after the other, yaks, sheep and camels. All of a sudden, the snow-capped peak of Kongur Tagh, the highest mountain in the Pamir range at 25,095 feet, emerges from the mist. We are at an altitude of roughly 10,000 feet, and I can hardly believe the height. The summit, above steep slopes, seems considerably closer and deceives the senses, probably because of the perspective, because we are so near to it.
How far can I trust my perceptions? To what extent is my trip an accurate reflection of today’s China? How many facets have I left out? Which encounters revealed deeper truths? And which judgments can I allow myself?
Naturally, the people I met don’t represent a complete cross section of Chinese society—through couchsurfing, I meet up with neither the richest nor the poorest people but mostly the middle class ones who are cosmopolitan and exceptionally hospitable. But far, far more is hidden behind what I can discover in a few months. For a comprehensive trip to China you’d be better off taking three years than three months, but then again, things change so quickly here that many insights from the first years would no longer be applicable by the end. Despite all the miles I’ve traveled on trains and planes, I still feel like I’ve gotten just a few glimpses into this complex society. Even so, a picture has emerged, something as visible as the giant mountain in front of me, even though the dimensions might not always be correct.
We round the next corner and the summit already disappears for the rest of the day. In its place is the massive Muztagh Ata, another giant, of 24,636 feet, that occupies the whole horizon. The outline of the summit is so rounded and broad that only with great difficulty can you see the actual highest point with the naked eye. There is a huge diagonal channel etched onto the mountain, as if it ruptured many thousands of years ago.
Directly below the mountain is Karakul Lake, where our driver stops for a short break. Soldiers are pitching a couple of tents on the lakeshore and indicate that we are not to take photos, but why on earth do they have to set up camp here, directly in front of this fantastic panorama? The souvenir sellers are friendlier, offering jade jewelry, white felt hats and fennel tea from their yurts. We don’t buy anything and travel on.
The spectacle gets even grander at the Tagharma viewing deck, a platform that really deserves its name—a river snakes through the green plain, a few yaks graze on the lakeshore and on the horizon sits the jagged outline of the mountain range, looking like the teeth of a predator, repellent and dangerous and magnificent.
From now on, we could stop at each bend in the road—the landscape is simply that spectacular. At a few places, we can spot the ruins of old forts and mausoleums. I feel insignificantly small in this raw alternative to the bamboo groves and idyllic pagodas of ancient Chinese landscape art.
We spend the night in Tashkurgan, a dusty outpost whose name means “stone tower” in Turkic languages. From here, it is another eighty miles to the Pakistan border, and to the southwest we can almost see into Tajikistan and Afghanistan. The name of the cozy hostel is K2, as it is also not far from the second-highest mountain in the world.
Quiz question: How many of the fourteen highest mountains in the world are partly on Chinese territory? The answer is nine, which is more than in any other country. It’s funny somehow that we don’t associate China with high mountains, but then, there are other topics that sideline geographical superlatives.
The next day we drive back to the grim reality of racial profiling, checkpoints and “reeducation” camps.
• • • • • •
WHAT IS KNOWN about the massive project that aims to make dutiful Chinese citizens out of supposedly dangerous Muslims? A few years ago I had a discussion with a university professor in Beijing who said, “China is not stupid enough to maltreat believers in Islam. After all, we do business with Islamic states throughout the world. How would that look?” Now, it actually looks like the worst form of racial profiling, but the outcry, even in Islamic countries, is rather mild. There are important business ties with China, after all.
For a long time, Beijing denied running “reeducation” camps in Xinjiang, but at the same time, it was advertising for workers to build the camps and for supervisors with job experience in the penal system. Then, slowly, eyewitness reports began to trickle out that presented an increasingly clear picture of what was going on. Roughly 1 million of the 10 million Uyghur population have already been interned, and according to information from the United Nations, it could be considerably more. After satellite images provided pretty convincing evidence, China eventually owned up to running “vocational skills centers,” where Uyghurs were provided with “free training.”
Since 2016, Chen Quanguo is the provincial governor of Xinjiang. Before that, he was responsible for law and order in Tibet. An out-and-out hard-liner with vast expertise in establishing a police state, he was the perfect person to take over the proclaimed Strike Hard Campaign Against Violent Terrorism that started in 2014. He made things happen, as shown by the economic data: in 2017, expenditures on security technology in Xinjiang almost doubled compared to the previous year—up to 58 billion yuan, or US$8.2 billion.
Reports by Human Rights Watch concluded that the number of human rights abuses in Xinjiang is greater than at any time since the Cultural Revolution. They also claimed that there are severe limitations on freedom of expression, rights of privacy, religious expression and the right to a fair trial. In the camps, there are unexplained deaths and suicide attempts, and obligatory lessons in civics and languages. Internees are forced to sing songs wishing Xi Jinping a life of ten thousand years, and they have to learn rules, rules specifically for Uyghurs in Xinjiang—for example, they must say ni hao, not salaam alaikum, because no Uyghur language is to be spoken in public, and they must support the Communist Party.
Orders like that remind me a bit of Yangwei, the young car dealer in Foshan, and his Rules for Sales Staff. But the difference is that the consequences for not following the rules in Xinjiang are deadly serious. People who don’t study diligently are beaten and have to remain in the camps longer. The New York Times came to the conclusion that Xinjiang is a police state that resembles North Korea, with a kind of formalized racism similar to apartheid South Africa.16
The Human Rights Watch report contains a telling sentence: “China’s global influence has largely spared it from public criticism.”17 The country has considerably more leeway than ten years ago, and the limits continue to be tested.
ÜRÜMQI
Population: 3.5 million
Province: Xinjiang
FORTY PERCENT
ALIM, WHO LIVES in the capital city of Ürümqi, knows from experience what it is like to be watched constantly. First, because he is Uyghur and, second, because he works for the government, in the “social security” department that monitors citizens to establish whether they are dangers to public order. This department decides who is sentenced to “studying” in a “reeducation” camp.
Alim is not his real name, and I will not describe him or how I got to know him. He is taking a great risk just meeting me. I am not quite sure what prompted him to do so, as he is critical of many developments in his province but is not a dissident. To an outside observer, our conversation would look like a chat between friends, but I think we are both a bit skeptical of the other.
With cardamom tea, cucumber salad and a hookah pipe, we sit in a booth in a restaurant with opulent carpet and rare wood interior, more in the style of Baghdad or Beirut than China. Occasionally, the waiter replaces the coal in the hookah, but we don’t appear to have any other witnesses. To begin, I tell Alim a bit about my travels, and he speaks about the difficulty of starting a business in Xinjiang. I guide the conversation towards his job and ask how he and his colleagues decide who has to go to a camp.
“The government can’t look into people’s minds, but there are certain red lines. If you touch them or cross them, then you will be sent to a camp, just to be sure.”
“But isn’t the government sometimes a bit too rigorous in doing so?”
“Sadly, that’s true. The mother of a friend was sent to a camp because she visited her daughter who lives in Turkey.”
“Even though she could prove that her daughter lived there?”
“It didn’t make any difference—it’s a Muslim country. If you look for information on foreign websites, you are sent to a camp. If you use Facebook or Twitter, you are sent to a camp. Also, if you take drugs or don’t pay tax. This only applies to Uyghurs, of course.”
Alim has a strong voice that radiates authority and pride—and resentment. I begin to suspect that one of the reasons that he is willing to speak to me is because he believes that nobody in the world should be able to stipulate who he is, and isn’t, allowed to meet.
“Are the people in the camps allowed to contact their families?”
“Nobody can visit you there. But recently, the rules were relaxed a bit, and now one telephone call a month to family is allowed. Yesterday, I was on the late shift and had to visit relatives of people in the camps.”
“That must be an unpleasant job.”
“I would love to quit tomorrow, because it is so sad. People cry the whole time. I try to tell them that everything will be okay, but of course, I don’t know if it’s true.”
He inhales the apple-flavored tobacco deeply, exhales a thick cloud of smoke and coughs. What an absurd job. But as long as he works for the system, he can feel safe. At the same time, people who work for the government have to abide by even stricter rules than regular citizens as far as religion is concerned. He could be fired if he is caught in a mosque even once.
“How do you explain the harsh government crackdown to those families?”
“Things have to move forward. Security and stability are important, and the Belt and Road initiative passes through Xinjiang. There can be no terrorism.”
“How many Uyghurs are in the camps?”
“Forty.”
“Forty?”
“Forty percent. You can’t imagine how many camps there are.”
Alim names an immense number. That would mean roughly 4 million people in prison, considerably more than the estimates by the UN or Human Rights Watch. Does he have better information? Or is he naming a target figure? Some reports say that 40 percent is the projected quota, but that doesn’t mean the government has reached it already.
I ask him how he, as an Uyghur person, feels about doing such a job.
“I’m somewhere in the middle,” says Alim. “I wouldn’t side with the Uyghurs or the government. There was a problem with extremism, and we had to do something about it. And we were never independent as a state. Now we belong to China, and we’d better accept it.”
But that is exactly what many people find difficult, particularly as for many decades, the Uyghurs have felt forcibly sidelined economically and culturally by the mass immigration of Han Chinese. In 2009, there was a mass brawl at a toy factory in Shaoguan in Guangdong province between Uyghur and Han Chinese workers in which at least two Uyghurs were killed.
As a result of the Shaoguan incident, a demonstration was held in Ürümqi. According to Alim, the mood was inflamed by a video that was doing the rounds on social media. The video shows a murder: an Uyghur-looking girl dances on the street and a man gets out of a car and attacks her, stoning her to death. The video went viral as apparent proof of how the Han Chinese treat the Uyghurs. As shocking as the deed was, however, it had nothing to do with China. In fact, the video was already a couple of years old and came from Uzbekistan, but what power do mere facts have when the content is so emotionally charged?
