China Off Center

NORTHWEST

NORTHWEST At present, China’s northwest is arguably one of the most intriguing areas of the nation, for it is here that cultural tensions have recently spilled over into violence against the Chinese government. In February 1997, the Uighur minority peoples staged a demonstration in the city of Yining in northwestern Xinjiang to protest government intervention in local religious and cultural practices; police fatally shot two Uighur men. Uighurs retaliated shortly thereafter by detonating a bomb on a crowded Beijing bus. The considerable and growing presence of Hui, Chinese Muslims, in the northwest where China abuts the Muslim countries of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan makes the ethnic politics of the region thicker and potentially more ominous. The capital of the province, Urumqi, is little more than a thousand miles from the activist Muslim centers of Islamabad (Pakistan ) and Kabul (Afghanistan) but fifteen hundred miles from Beijing. As a region, the northwest is massive, representing an area in excess of 2 million square kilometers. It includes the provinces of Qinghai, Gansu, and Shaanxi plus the Xinjiang Uighur autonomous region and the Ningxia Hui autonomous region; some geographers might also include Inner Mongolia (the Mongolian autonomous region). Shaanxi and Gansu have been part of China for millennia, while the other areas have been included fairly recently. These parts of the continent connect China along the northern Silk Road to Central Asia. Their climate includes loesslands (areas of yellow dust blown from the desert), desert, arid mountains, oases, and snowcapped peaks. Much of the area has been unpopulated or has been populated only sparsely by nomadic pastoralists. The northwest, specifically Xinjiang or “New Territories ,” did not become part of China proper until the first decades of the eighteenth century following aggressive annexation by the imperial armies of the Qing dynasty. Still, much like Tibet, which was also forcibly drawn into the Qing imperial orbit and has since been identified as part of China, Xinjiang and the rest of the northwest is a region rich in history both ancient and modern and remains critical (perhaps because of this meaningful past, Xinjiang’s surfeit of 69 natural resources, and its role as a testing ground for China’s nuclear arsenal) to contemporary political identity. The complex cultural, religious, and political portraits offered by Barnett (chap. 5) and Gladney (chap. 6) richly depict the variety and vibrance of this remote outpost of the Chinese nation and help the reader grasp those conditions that move the Hui and Uighurs to agitate for religious and political freedoms discouraged by the Chinese government. With these readings, a substantial geographic space provides the contrastive margin for the definition of the center.—Eds. 70 ...