The Pioneer > Online Edition : >> China pays for its past
China pays for its past
Ashok Malik
How timid and amnesiac India’s intelligentsia has become. The violence in Xinjiang has evoked little more than anodyne comment about how the province to China’s west is ‘Beijing’s Kashmir’ and the latest theatre of the Osama bin Laden inspired global jihad. There have been naive hopes that China will now recognise the folly of Islamist terrorism and quickly show sympathy for India’s struggle against terror groups based in Pakistan.
Such perceptions are bunk. **To equate India’s conduct in Kashmir with China’s oppression of Xinjiang is an act of monstrous self-loathing. Successive Governments in New Delhi have not always been fair to Kashmiris. Yet, the treatment of Xinjiang by the predominantly Han Chinese establishment in Beijing simply cannot compare.
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**Over 60 years, China has massacred populations, brutalised cities and communities and resorted to large-scale demographic transformation. Only a month ago, bulldozers drove into Kashgar’s old city, allegedly to make its landscape earthquake resistant. Kashgar is a heritage city. To destroy it is to be no different from the barbarians who brought down the Bamiyan Buddhas.
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***In 1949, Xinjiang was dominated by Uighurs (a Central Asian people who speak Turki and claim a kinship with Turks), with only a sprinkling (about five per cent) of Hans. Today, the ratio is roughly 50:50. India has done nothing even remotely similar in the Kashmir Valley.
Beijing now says Al Qaeda is backing Uighur “splittists” who want an independent country. This may be true, but the fact is Xinjiang was seething well before bin Laden was born. Some Uighurs may be Islamist terrorists but an entire society and its cause cannot be wished away. Every Muslim grievance is not a jihad.
Why is Xinjiang so crucial to China? It is a massive province, occupying a sixth of the country’s land mass. With 5,400 km of international frontier, Xinjiang — or the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region to give it its official name — is China’s most porous zone. It shares borders with Mongolia, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, India (Leh district), Pakistan-occupied Kashmir and Tibet.
Xinjiang has enormous gas and oil reserves. Lop Nor, China’s nuclear testing site, is located here. Most important, this province keeps China in the reckoning in Central Asia.
In the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s collapse, Central Asia saw an Islamist upsurge. While many of its neighbours suffered, China sought to buy its way out of trouble. As far back as 1999, it was talking to the Taliban, hoping to pacify it and prevent that regime from arming Uighur insurgents.
Ironically, the spectacular Karakoram Highway — running from Xinjiang to the Northern Areas that are now in Pakistani control, and built by the Chinese — was the suspected route for cross-border movement of weapons by terror groups. China was unbothered if the weapons were headed out — in the direction of, say, Srinagar. It was only concerned that the jihad roadway shouldn’t see two-way traffic.
Xinjiang has a non-Han heritage far greater than Beijing would care to admit. It was part of the ancient Silk Route, which carried silk and much else from the very heart of Asia to the Mediterranean coast, to ships waiting to sail for Rome.
Yarkand, Kashgar, Khotan, Aksu, Yili, and, the most compelling of all, the terrifying desert of Taklamakan (it means “go in and you won’t come out” in Turki): Xinjiang has more evocative place names per square mile than almost any other territory.
India’s principal contribution to this civilisation’s oases-cities was culture: Buddhism, Hinduism, Kharoshti, Sanskrit all thrived here. Sir Aurel Stein, the archaeologist, called the region Serindia, Seres being an old word for China. Over centuries India and China have rarely cross-fertilised. At two points, they did intersect — Xinjiang (Serindia) in the west and the Vietnam-Cambodia region (Indochina) in the east.
The Indian presence is there for all to see. To this day relics and artefacts and monuments that can only be of Indian origin exist in, for instance, Turfan, two hours from the provincial capital of Urumqi. Kanishka, the Kushan king, came from Xinjiang and his empire eventually extended to Mathura, at the doorstep of Delhi.
In the late 19th century, Xinjiang became a battleground of empires — the Great Game was played here between Russia and Britain/British India, and a declining Chinese empire. The nomenclature of that contest still survives. Uighur nationalists claim they are fighting to set up the Republic of East Turkestan. Two political experiments, one in the 1930s and the other a decade later, in the midst of World War II, used this name. Both were client states of the Soviet Union.
The tragedy is Xinjiang nationalism, if there is such an animal, never matured. It had a small chance in the mid-19th century, when the warrior Yakub Beg — who claimed descent from Timur — became the powerful ruler of Kashgar and East Turkestan, and a bulwark against Russian expansionism. He concluded a treaty with the British, one of the legacies of which was an embassy in Kashgar. Till the 1950s, this remained as the Indian consulate.
By then, much had changed, Yakub Beg was long dead, defeated by a Chinese army in the 1870s and killed soon thereafter. The British had gone home and had no more need for a buffer state. The loss of Pakistan-occupied Kashmir and the Northern Areas meant free India too receded from the strategic heights of Central Asia. Geography defeated history.
In 1949, Stalin recognised East Turkestan was in the Chinese sphere of interest and didn’t resist a fellow Communist regime’s invasion. The Great Game was finally over.
In 2000, this writer visited Urumqi and Turfan, and experienced, as it were, Chandni Chowk in China. Much of Urumqi was a shining Han Chinese city, with glitzy malls, car manufacturing plants and skyscrapers. There were also isolated Uighur neighbourhoods: Obviously Muslim men and women sitting on the roadside, meats and kebabs on skewers — no, they didn’t have the spices and the taste of India — minarets and mosques at hand; and a deathly silence.
The Uighurs also had their little shops. Some of them were selling CDs with covers that looked familiar — Shah Rukh Khan and Akshay Kumar; Hindi films. This was contraband, brought by Pakistani truck drivers who used the Karakoram Highway. The Uighurs didn’t understand a word of Hindi, but related to the movies and the music, preferring it to what was available. In a sense, the soft power of India had triumphed over the hard power of the Chinese state. May it always do so.