On the road with China’s Foreign Ministry
by Mary Kay Magistad, The World’s East Asia Correspondent
Follow along with Mary Kay Magistad’s special dispatches on her trip to the Uighur Autonomous Region of Xinjiang, in China’s far west and the historically ethnic Tibetan province of Qinghai.
It used to be in China that the only way foreign correspondents could legally travel in the provinces was with government minders – or, if you will, facilitators. As time went on, China became more open, and more and more foreign correspondents bent or flouted the rules, the rules eventually changed. Since January 2007, foreign journalists have officially been allowed to go (almost) anywhere in China, and talk to anyone who’s willing to be interviewed. Almost anywhere – except Tibet. And local areas that make up their own rules – like, certain parts of Sichuan after the 2008 earthquake, or the southern Xinjiang city of Kashgar, or many places that have just put down a demonstration.
Still, when the rules on the books say you can go somewhere to report on your own, why would you, as a foreign correspondent, choose to go on a trip organized by the Foreign Ministry? My answer – it not only gives you access to people and places that would sometimes not be easy to visit on your own, it can also provide vivid insights into both how the Chinese government is dealing with a particular thorny issue, and the image it would like to project to the outside world about it – not always the same thing.
Case in point: the trip I’m on this week to the Uighur Autonomous Region of Xinjiang, in China’s far west and, starting tomorrow, the historically ethnic Tibetan province of Qinghai. What do these two places have in common? The takeaway message of the trip is supposed to be that both are benefitting from the central government’s generous spending to reduce poverty, improve infrastructure and jump-start the local economies into new growth engines. Both, we’re told, are places where people of all ethnicities work together and deeply appreciate the help of the Communist Party.
Of course, there’s another part of the story. And that is that both Uighurs, who are Turkic Muslims, and Tibetans, contest the Han Chinese narrative – that the land that is now Xinjiang and Tibet (and ethnic Tibetan areas) were always part of China, that Uighurs and Tibetans have always been Chinese. They argue that they have their own language and culture, and had their own independent countries – with only intermittent occupation by Chinese forces until the last imperial dynasty, the Qing, which was really Manchu rather than Chinese anyway – and then, independence again until the Communists took power in 1949.
Since then, dueling narratives have been told. From the Chinese government – a story of courageous and patriotic settlers, enduring hardship to tame the wild western frontier. From the Uighurs and Tibetans – an invasion by Han Chinese troops and then waves of Han Chinese migrants, taking land, resources and jobs away from the local people, forcing (under Mao) or coercing (more recently) them to learn Mandarin, give up their old ways and assimilate into the dominant (Han) culture.
And yet – even many of those who do learn the language and accept current realities find these days they’re still often treated with suspicion. Hotels in Beijing often turn them away. At home, in Xinjiang, companies have been known to add lines to their “help wanted” signs that say, basically, “Uighurs need not apply.”
On this trip, I asked the manager of a huge cotton farm managed by the Production & Construction Corps – which started as a sort of para-military “tame the wild frontier” unit – how many of the thousands of workers on the farm are Uighurs. Less than one percent, he replied. And why?, I asked. Because, he said, Uighurs aren’t used to doing this kind of work, and anyway, we have enough people here. We don’t need outsiders. He was polite throughout – but the underlying tone of incredulity struck me as what you’d have gotten if you’d asked an American pioneer in the 19th century why he wasn’t getting more Native Americans to help him build his log cabin and plant his crops.
The two realities live side by side here – Han pride at the taming and development of the wild West, Uighur and Tibetan resentment about what was theirs being taken from them, with considerable loss of life, freedom and dignity along the way. Over the past couple of years, that resentment has erupted in violence – in Tibet, and ethnic Tibetan areas of Qinghai, Gansu, Sichuan and Yunnan provinces (which were all part of the historic Tibetan kingdom), in the Spring of 2008, in Xinjiang in July last year. Crackdowns have ensued in both places since, with Tibetans and Uighurs getting stiff prison sentences even for posting details online or talking publicly about the crackdown. In one case, a Uighur journalist got a sentence of 15 years for talking to a foreign journalist.
The Chinese government was stung by the foreign outcry over both crackdowns. It cried bias and nefarious intent. China’s state-run television, just after the Tibetan riots, verbally attacked foreign journalists for reports that included the Tibetan point of view. The names, phone numbers and addresses of some foreign journalists were even leaked online – and several got death threats as a result. That didn’t exactly help China’s image, and the government seems to have learned from the experience. Last year, the Xinjiang government won points by allowing foreign journalists in to report freely in the capital of Urumqi (though, not in the southern, mostly Uighur, city of Kashgar, where several were held under hotel arrest and then put on planes out of town).
This week’s trip is yet another part of the government’s effort to improve its international image, to show “the real situation” in previously restive areas to foreign journalists, and thus the world. But old habits die hard here when it comes to pulling together this kind of trip for foreign journalists, sometimes to comic effect. More on that in my next dispatch.
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