Xinjiang Part 1: History, Culture and the People.
A series of interviews with Jahangir on Xinjiang: its people, culture and politics.
The growing strategic competition between the United States and China which started with the Obama administration's Pivot to Asia has created many changes in the international system, one being a stronger China that is willing to assert itself. A stark departure from China's early behavior of hiding strength and biding time, under Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao.
Many have blamed this shift on Xi Jinping and his rise to power as China's paramount leader. Xi unlike his predecessors will be a man who has a lasting impact on China and the world as a whole. The ideological framework he has laid out for China, known as "Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a new Era" is now enshrined in the CCP's constitution which has put him on the same league as Chairman Mao and Chairman Deng.
When it comes to global geopolitics Xi's impact will be felt due to the One Belt One Road Initiative which aims to connect China's western province of Xinjiang to Europe though central Asia, reviving the old Silk Road and bypassing the major choke points like the straits of Malacca that Chinese exports have to travel through. The belt and road in many ways is an ambitious project that has the potential to change geopolitics by brining prosperity back to the land based trade networks according to Chinese public intellectuals like Prof. Zhang WeiWei. This new found importance of Xinjiang the gateway to Europe through Central Asia has attracted the attention of many.
The United States and its allies who are now trying to contain China’s rise have started pointing out large scale human rights violations and mass interment of Uyghur Muslims in Re-education camps and allege that China is trying to conduct a cultural genocide. The media reporting on this issue has been a very simple portrayal of Xinjiang as a province with a different ethnic group that the Chinese government is now oppressing.
Many in India have started urging the government to condemn China's human rights abuses based on the limited and mostly misleading picture that is being presented in the western mainstream media.
In order to better deal with China and its rise what we need is more honest reporting that is based on facts and ground realities, the best way to know what’s really going on in Xinjiang is by talking to someone who has lived in there and knows the inner workings of the region.
Jahangir is an ethnic Uyghur who currently lives in the United States; he has lived in Xinjiang and Kazakhstan for a considerable part of his life before moving to the United States and has even represented the Kazakh Under-19 international wrestling team. He is also the man I consider as my guru and from who I learned a lot about military affairs and geopolitics.
With this series of interviews I hope to present the readers a better picture of Xinjiang, the politics of the region and what actually happens on ground. In the first part of this series we will be discussing the history, culture and the people of Xinjiang.
Transcript
1. Please give us a brief overview of your time in Xinjiang and how was it growing up there.
A. It was interesting, so people don’t really understand this about Xinjiang; It is not the same as other diverse places like the Balkans for example where you have distinct ethnic groups. All of the Muslim ethnic groups in Xinjiang are very intermixed, Kazaks, Hui and Uighurs being the main 3. I am mostly Uighur, I was raised to be a Uighur but we had members of our family that were Kazakh, that were Hui.
I mostly grew up in the city of Turpan. So Turpan is in North Xinjiang, It is actually the Northen most Uighur majority city in Xinjiang, so very multicultural. Growing up there, it was mostly between Xinjiang and Kazakhstan for most of my childhood. Xinjiang is where I went to primary school and then for secondary school I went to Kazakhstan, to wrestle there. I was part of the national youth wrestling team.
Wrestling is big in Xinjiang but the Chinese government does not care about the sport so there is no training infrastructure once you get to international competition level. My parents sent me to relatives in Kazakhstan to further my wrestling career, so Turpan most of my life is there but I also went to primary school for 2 years in Altai City, which is a Kazakh city, so I’ve basically seen all the ethnic groups of Xinjiang.
Xinjiang is basically 2 provinces, Southern Xinjiang is theoretically Uighur autonomous zone but it is actually run by Han Chinese and Hui but North Xinjiang is almost completely autonomous part of China run by Kazakhs, it’s a very very different experience being there and I used to visit every time I could until 2017, which was the last time I was there.
2. How Does the Society work, with so many ethnic groups where there are members of the same family that belong to different ethnicities?
A. It depends, so there’s a scale. Urumqi is one of the most diverse places in the world it’s like… People say Kashgar is the Uyghur heartland; it’s the center of the Silk Road, that is just something Uyghur say for bragging rights, but Urumqi is like the real Silk Road city. There’s everybody there, from Han, Uyghur, Hui, Tartars, who are like a Russian ethnic group but there are some in China and there is still Manchus in Xinjiang, people do not know this, they are called Sibe. Then there are Kyrgyz, there’s Tajiks, Kazakhs, Mongols and there’s everybody in Urumqi, so that is one extreme.
Turpan is somewhat mixed, most cities are somewhat mixed but then you have the enclaves. So North West Xinjiang, it’s like going back to the days of Genghis Khan. These Kazakh horse herders who just keep to themselves very very… what’s the word… esoteric place, very strange to someone who’s grown up in normal society.
South West Xinjiang is almost a 100 per cent Uyghur, so you do have these enclaves and in the enclaves people can be quite bigoted. It’s one of those things where every ethnic group in Xinjiang has a different story of Xinjiang and when we are in diverse cities like Urumqi we learn to live together and have friends of every ethnic groups but when we are among our own we start talking shit.
Interviewer: So it’s like every diverse country in a sense.
Yes exactly, there are the boondocks and there are the cities, but you know the rednecks in Xinjiang are a degree different than the rednecks in western world, there are more extreme for sure.
3. What influences have contributed in creating the Uyghur culture and culture of Xinjiang as a whole?
A. Primarily Persian. There are 3 types of Turks, Uyghurs are Turks but there’s Kipchak Turks, they include Kazakhs, Kyrgyz and we will get to in a second. Kazakh in Xinjiang at least is an invented phrase as most Xinjiang Kazakhs will not call themselves Kazakhs, they would call themselves Kipchaks.
Then there is the Oghuz Turks, they include the Turkmens, Azeris and the Turkish people (Anatolian Turks) and then there’s the Karluk Turks which includes the Uzbeks and Uyghurs. We Karluk Turks are the most Persianized Turks, we have Persian food which is the same as Uyghur food, we have Persian music which has greatly influenced Uyghur music and the reason for this is that we are the sedentary ones. Traditionally the Kipchaks and the Oghuz were nomadic and Karluks were sedentary so we took on a lot of Persian culture and this is why Karluk Turks look the whitest of any of the Central Asian people because originally we were Iranic people who assimilated into Turkish culture because of conquests, mainly by Kipchak Turks.
Interviewer: That’s an entirely different picture than what the western media likes to portray, in which Xinjiang is just a region of China with a different ethnic minority group that the Chinese are oppressing and nobody knows about the complexities on ground. This has been a really interesting perspective and one which most people don’t get.
Definitely, the situation on ground is very complicated.
4. How is the CCP perceived in Xinjiang?
A. There’s two visions of the CCP, well I’d say 3. There’s an ethnic nationalist vision which is almost always negative. There’s a different ethno-nationalist vision for the Kazakhs and for the Uyghurs, the Kazakh one is quite positive for a strange reason. The second one is an Asian nationalist perspective, an Anti-Colonial perspective to be precise and this one is a bit positive and it is the basis of CCP support. It also merges nicely with the Kazakh nationalist vision.
Then there’s a progressive vision of the CCP, so generally the supporters of the CCP will be from the latter two categories and the opponents of the CCP will always be from the first category. There’s this fake news that there is Islamic extremist opposition to the CCP. I have never met an Islamic extremist growing up, Xinjiang is a very cosmopolitan place and it’s not the kind of place where you’d see Al-Qaida.
There’s a very few actual Islamists in Xinjiang and most of them are nationalists who have been branded as Islamic extremists by the CCP with complicity with of the West for a very long time. They are nationalists and not Islamists; nobody wants Sharia law in Xinjiang. So in these 3 perspectives the Uyghur nationalist perspective is the simplest, it’s based on the East Turkistan republic which briefly existed during the interwar years which was crushed by evil nationalist CCP and this is Uyghur homeland and we must get independence.
The Kazakh Nationalist vision is very different, as I already mentioned Kazakhs in Xinjiang don’t even call themselves Kazakhs, they say they are Kipchaks or Kyrgyz. If they are calling themselves Kazakhs, it is simply so that you can understand and they privately will never say they are Kazakhs. This is the only Turkic people who have maintained nomadic traditions; they are still living like in the days of Attila the Hun but they have modernized to a certain degree. They have motorcycles and guns; they don’t use bows anymore. It is Radios and phones these days. The reception is bad but it’s getting better.
They’re living a traditional lifestyle and don’t see Kazakhs from Kazakhstan as real Kazakhs, they don’t see Kyrgyz from Kyrgyzstan as real Kyrgyz. For them they are the real Turks and they are well aware that they are only allowed to preserve their tradition because China unlike Russia and other Colonist powers never tried to settle the nomads.
Weirdly enough these people, they are aware of Native American history and really relate to the Native Americans for some reason. It is very very strange and they see the Chinese government as like the best option for them as it preserves their way of life and actually the Uyghurs to their leadership are the real enemies because we are the ones who are encroaching upon their pastoral lands, we are the ones who are trying to advance a different system. To them we are Sarts, a derogatory term for sedentary Turks, we are advocating for a different life and they are convinced that if there was independence and Xinjiang ruled by the Uyghurs then they would be forcibly settled and assimilated.
They are protective of their way of life and in their nationalist vision links in very closely with the second viewpoint, which is the Asian nationalist/Anti-Colonial viewpoint. The media has portrayed the Xinjiang issues as “The Chinese are terrible, imperialists who are destroying everything in Xinjiang”.
The consensus of the majority of the people living in Xinjiang is that China is either not a colonialist power or is the best colonialist power ever. Because Kazakhs in Xinjiang are the only Kazakhs that still write in Arabic. Uyghurs, unlike our cousins the Uzbeks still write in Arabic. Mongols in Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia still write in Mongolian script while Mongols in Mongolia write in Cyrillic script. Compared to the treatment that the Africans got or any other colonized people got like in South America or India this is like barely colonialism. It’s just China saying “You are our subjects and you will fight for us if the Russians come. We will leave you alone and you will be okay.”
There are actually these ethnic politicians in Xinjiang who will call China the anti-imperialist HQ. What you have to understand is that the interwar years were a very traumatic time for the Turkic people and people descended from nomads because we went from ruling the world to seeing the entirely of our homelands being swallowed up, it’s a very big change and it was a time of crisis for this part of the world and there was a lot of bitterness to Russia so lot of people in Xinjiang see China as the vanguard against imperialism. This is where most support for the CCP comes from.
The third vision of the CCP is the progressive vision. The Chinese media, because they are imposing Han Chinese values on the minorities in the same way that Americans impose their own values, like they assume everyone thinks like them. They (Chinese media) always advertise the economic development because that’s what Han people care about. I hate to be stereotypical but they like money.
They are imposing this on us, but really the third category of support is like made up of women, gay people, which there are many gay people in Xinjiang most don’t know this but they exist; progressives are another group and by that I mean people who are not that interested in even moderate Islamic law and people who like to live in cities, hipsters, fans of k-pop and the like. Mostly young people like the CCP because Han Chinese are more progressive than local people in Xinjiang. The CCP is not starting to be this way in a very strange sense; it’s starting to be very… how do I say this… The western concept is promoting toxic masculinity increasingly. They are banning femboys( effeminate men) from TV and stuff like this; they’re starting to be more conservative. But for most of their reign they have been very progressive by Xinjiang standards.
5. You mentioned that there are other ethnicities in Xinjiang, please give us a brief overview on how they fit into the larger picture.
There are many other ethnicities in Xinjiang besides Kazakhs and Uyghurs such as Mongols, Hui, Tajiks and Sibe. There are multiple categories of Mongols, the Torghut Mongols which are the same as Kalmyks in Russia, then there are others like Oriat Mongols and then there’s the Altai Mongols who are a very weird group.
The Altai Mountain is like the Holy Mountain of the Turks, so the Altai Turks, they don’t want to pick a category, so if you ask them
“Are you Tatar?”
“No we are not Tatar”
“Are you Kazakh?”
“No we are not Kazakh”
“Are you Kipchak?
“No we are not Kipchak”
For them they are better than everyone else. They’re just a very small group of few thousands living in the Altai Mountain. Great Skiing, good place to visit but terrible people hahah.
So these smaller groups don’t have nationalism.
Now coming to the Hui, they are numerous but their nationalism is tied into Chinese nationalism as they see themselves as the warrior/martial race of China that will fight for the country. They have a very long history of being, according to them the best soldiers of China.
During the Boxer rebellion, most of the Qing armies sided with the westerners but the ones that did not were the Kansu units or the Hui units, the western troops were very afraid of them and they were quite competent actually. Their loss ratio was favourable against the 8 nation alliance troops.
The warlord era is where the Hui Military Ethos really started, because most people don’t know this, the Hui revolted against the Qing Government in the 1860s and 70s. After they came back they wanted to redeem themselves, there are no books on this even in Chinese. It’s a very under investigated part of history, how like this invented tradition of Hui Militarism came about. I think they got really famous during the late Qing and Warlord Era where all the competent generals were Hui people.
Interviewer: The Hui were the ones leading the Kuomintang Islamic Insurgency, if I’m not mistaken.
Yes they led the insurgency and even had their own Clique, the Ma. For some reason all the Hui are named Ma. All the leaders of the Ma clique had the name Ma like Ma Bufang, Ma Hongkui and Ma Hongbing. I’m not sure if they are related but according to them they are because they claim descent from Arab merchants that came to China. It is not true but this is what they believe.
6. How much of an influence does Islamism and radical forms of Islam such as Salafism and Wahhabism have in Xinjiang?
The influence is almost non-existent except in the rural Uyghur areas where there is Islamism.
Interviewer: So the Syrian Civil War was a blessing in disguise for the CCP, as the radicals managed to get out of China and are no longer the CCP’s problem.
Yes, Wars in the Middle East has been great for the CCP as all the nutcases have gone to the Middle East to fight. But not all those who were nutcases, the Turkistan Islamic Party for example is considered as an Islamic terror group but I would say majority of its members are probably just Uyghur nationalists who went to Syria to get combat experience.
Nobody knows how or what way it will happen, that is the eventual return to China and the fight for independence. Also all Turkic people are very… how do I put this… the culture is very…
Interviewer: Militaristic?
Ah militaristic, yes. But not everyone wants to fight for the PLA, so this is just their way of living military life without serving the Chinese government.
Interviewer: So it is like the political contradictions that they have in their personal ideological beliefs.
Yes, this is why there is no Kazakh equivalent of the Uyghur army. They are part of the reason but, the Kazakhs have their own thing going on in China. Most people don’t know this but Kazakhs are the only ethnic group in China that have their own militia, which is a way they get to experience military life without having to serve the PLA.
Interviewer: So what purpose does this militia serve?
In theory it is supposed to resist Soviet invasion, but the Soviet Union is not around anymore so now they smuggle drugs, ride horses and look cool.
This unit has a very interesting history and is one topic that’s not covered at all, the Kazakhs in China and their militia in particular. The Militia started very early on, 1870s was when it was legalised but obviously they’ve been there for a very long time. There’s this little known fact that Russia had actually conquered Northern Xinjiang and then the Kazakhs there along with the Qing General Zou Zongtang joined hands to defeat the Tsar’s army in the 1870s and from then on the Kazakhs were seen as the most reliable western ethnic group of the Qing Empire and the later People’s Republic of China.
Kazakhs in Xinjiang are the most ridiculously conservative group in China and their way of life is in no way sustainable. North Xinjiang is a very big place but there are millions of them and they have 10s of millions of animals grazing.
If you go to North Xinjiang it is like a desert at this point as the cattle have eaten everything so it is not sustainable. They have tried to bring some policy changes to deal with this but the Kazakhs still cling on to their traditions because most of their people in the 20s and 30s were… they like to say forced by the Russians to industrialize and give up their nomadic lifestyle but actually their own Kazakh leadership decided to do it.
The Xinjiang Kazakhs are mostly from the Naiman tribe; this tribe was having none of it so even more of them came to China in the 20s and 30s which was at the time when East Turkistan was a state so they basically invaded. They came to the North of Xinjiang to get away from the Russians so they are seen by the PLA as people, if the Russians came would wage guerrilla war against them.
So they never got rid of the militia and the militia holds some political influence but its decreasing and recently the Chinese government cracked down on Kazakh Drug trade in China. Their influence is decreasing but even then there’s this understanding between the Xinjiang party branch and the Kazakhs as the party branch knows that without the cooperation of the… well not the naiman tribe but this clan within it called the Tol’Gotai which controls the political affairs of North Xinjiang. So there’s this idea in the Xinjiang CCP that without the cooperation of the Tol’Gotai it is impossible to govern North Xinjiang. So this is why the Militia is still around.
With this part 1 of the Xinjiang Series ends, in the next part we will focus on the Drug trade, the crackdown and recent developments in the region.