Razing Kashgar

One of the major supporters of the latest resolution from the UN Human Rights Council, describing the suffering of the Tamils in Sri Lanka as a “domestic matter that doesn’t warrant outside interference”, was, unsurprisingly, China. The huge area of Xinjiang, north of Tibet, is less well known as a site of ethnic and political conflict than its southern neighbour, but it's the same story of an indigenous people and culture being smothered under the embrace of the motherland, using a one-sided reading of history to justify the repression. Whereas with Tibet the Dalai Lama and the apparatus of Tibetan Buddhism are the main ideological enemy, Xinjiang has a largely Muslim culture, providing an ready excuse for crackdowns on any dissent. 

I've posted about Xinjiang a few times already. Wikipedia has a detailed history, plus an entry on the East Turkestan independence movement.

Now (via) comes news of Chinese plans to raze the old Uighur city of Kashgar, "the best-preserved example of a traditional Islamic city to be found anywhere in central Asia":

A thousand years ago, the northern and southern branches of the Silk Road converged at this oasis town near the western edge of the Taklamakan Desert. Traders from Delhi and Samarkand, wearied by frigid treks through the world’s most daunting mountain ranges, unloaded their pack horses here and sold saffron and lutes along the city’s cramped streets. Chinese traders, their camels laden with silk and porcelain, did the same.

The traders are now joined by tourists exploring the donkey-cart alleys and mud-and-straw buildings once window-shopped, then sacked, by Tamerlane and Genghis Khan.

Now, Kashgar is about to be sacked again.

Nine hundred families already have been moved from Kashgar’s Old City, “the best-preserved example of a traditional Islamic city to be found anywhere in central Asia,” as the architect and historian George Michell wrote in the 2008 book “Kashgar: Oasis City on China’s Old Silk Road.”

Over the next few years, city officials say, they will demolish at least 85 percent of this warren of picturesque, if run-down homes and shops. Many of its 13,000 families, Muslims from a Turkic ethnic group called the Uighurs (pronounced WEE-gurs), will be moved.

In its place will rise a new Old City, a mix of midrise apartments, plazas, alleys widened into avenues and reproductions of ancient Islamic architecture “to preserve the Uighur culture,” Kashgar’s vice mayor, Xu Jianrong, said in a phone interview.

Demolition is deemed an urgent necessity because an earthquake could strike at any time, collapsing centuries-old buildings and killing thousands....

To preserve the Uighur culture. I think the word we're looking for here is "Orwellian". And the structures that were so badly damaged in the recent Sichuan earthquake were in the main precisely those party-built modern schools and flats, rather than the old buildings that have survived through the centuries.

Urban reconstruction during China’s long boom has razed many old city centers, including most of the ancient alleyways and courtyard homes of the capital, Beijing.

Kashgar, though, is not a typical Chinese city. Chinese security officials consider it a breeding ground for a small but resilient movement of Uighur separatists who Beijing claims have ties to international jihadis. So redevelopment of this ancient center of Islamic culture comes with a tinge of forced conformity.

Chinese officials have offered somewhat befuddling explanations for their plans. Mr. Xu calls Kashgar “a prime example of rich cultural history and at the same time a major tourism city in China.” Yet the demolition plan would reduce to rubble Kashgar’s principal tourist attraction, a magnet for many of the million-plus people who visit each year.

China supports an international plan to designate major Silk Road landmarks as United Nations World Heritage sites — a powerful draw for tourists, and a powerful incentive for governments to preserve historical areas.

But Kashgar is missing from China’s list of proposed sites. One foreign official who refused to be identified for fear of damaging relations with Beijing said the Old City project had unusually strong backing high in the government....

The city says the Uighur residents have been consulted at every step of planning. Residents mostly say they are summoned to meetings at which eviction timetables and compensation sums are announced.

Remember, though, this is a domestic matter that doesn't warrant outside interference.

On Kashgar television, a nightly 15-minute infomercial hawks the project like ginsu knives, mixing dire statistics on seismic activity with scenes of happy Uighurs dancing in front of their new concrete apartments.

“Never has such a great event, such a major event happened to Kashgar,” the announcer intones. He boasts that the new buildings “will be difficult to match in the world” and that citizens will “completely experience the care and warmth of the party” toward the Uighur ethnic minority.

The infomercial also notes that Communist Party officials from Kashgar to Beijing are so edgy over the prospect of an earthquake “that it is disturbing their rest.”

[Check out the Google map to get an idea of the geography: Kashgar is right at the western tip of Xinjiang, far nearer to Afghanistan say, or even Tehran, than it is to Beijing]

Comments

[DaninVan]

“completely experience the care and warmth of the party” Hell yeh! The 'Party', any Party, always has the best interests of the citizens as its guiding principle.../sarc off

[Alcuin]

I am rather depressed to realise how little I care about this. The destruction of any culture should be a cause for regret, but as Muslims have done more than their fair share of such destruction, one feels it merely amounts to long overdue payback. I shouldn't feel like this, I know, but the battle lines are being drawn up between Islam and everyone else at the moment, and most of us have had quite enough of Islam, its faux victimhoods, its deceptions, its excuses for its opression and poverty and its utter lack of contrition for anything.

So these people may not have been responsible for the excesses of their co-religionists. But neither are Jews responsible for the hatred of Muslims and (some) Christians, nor any other group antipathies this planet is rife with. I guess I am just fatigued with the endless streams of opressions that keep coming up, and feeling that there are many (most) others who are more deserving of our compassion

Sorry.

[brian]

"The destruction of any culture should be a cause for regret, but as Muslims have done more than their fair share of such destruction, one feels it merely amounts to long overdue payback."

What a load of vindictive bullshit.