Visitors walking through the mud-brick rubble and yawning craters where close-packed houses and bazaars once stood could be forgiven for thinking that the ancient Silk Road city of Kashgar had been irrevocably lost to the wrecking ball. <\/p>\n
By DAN LEVINMARCH
March 5, 2014<\/p>\n
KASHGAR, China \u2014 Visitors walking through the mud-brick rubble and yawning craters where close-packed houses and bazaars once stood could be forgiven for thinking that the ancient Silk Road city of Kashgar had been irrevocably lost to the wrecking ball. A billboard looming over the ruins tries to counter that impression: \u201cInherit and preserve the historical culture to showcase a brand new Kashgar.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Chinese authorities set out five years ago to modernize Kashgar\u2019s fabled Old City district while promising to preserve its dense Casbah-like charms. But the results underscore the growing divide between the government and the ethnic minority that lives here \u2014 the Uighurs, a Muslim, Turkic-speaking people who have chafed at Beijing\u2019s rule since Communist troops took over their traditional homeland in 1949. The region, in China\u2019s far west, is now known as Xinjiang, a Mandarin term meaning \u201cnew frontier.\u201d<\/p>\n
The official narrative of the modernization project justified tearing down 65,000 homes and resettling 220,000 Uighur residents as crucial to improving their lives. \u201cHouses in the Old City of Kashgar are mostly old and dilapidated, extremely vulnerable to earthquakes and fire,\u201d said a 2010 report by Xinhua, the state news agency, that was widely republished in the Chinese government-controlled media. \u201cThe renovation of the Old City zone in Kashgar is a project that complied with the wishes of the people,\u201d the report claimed.<\/p>\n
But propaganda slogans posted across the Old City, like \u201cEveryone has the responsibility to create peace and security,\u201d hint at political tremors in Xinjiang that are much more worrying to the Chinese government than any natural disaster. Uighurs have protested discrimination, restrictive religious policies and suppression of Uighur-language education as people from the Han majority have settled in Xinjiang by the millions.<\/p>\n
The tensions have spilled over into increasingly violent clashes.<\/p>\n
On Saturday, violence spread to a railway station in a distant southwest Chinese city, Kunming, where a group of knife-wielding assailants killed at least 29 people and wounded 143. The Chinese authorities described the mass slaughter as a \u201cpremeditated, violent terrorist attack\u201d perpetrated by separatists from Xinjiang.<\/p>\n
For many Uighurs, the demolition of Kashgar\u2019s Old City is a physical symbol of the Chinese government\u2019s efforts to destroy their cultural identity. More than two-thirds of the centuries-old houses there have been razed and replaced with new buildings made to look old and equipped with central heating, indoor plumbing and electricity. The government pays for building a new house\u2019s first floor; residents must pay for everything else.<\/p>\n
Some residents are pleased. \u201cEven though the neighborhood has changed, we\u2019re much happier with our new house,\u201d said a dressmaker who identified herself only as Ayesha, standing in her new kitchen. Though none of the arabesque filigree details of her family\u2019s 500-year-old residence were preserved, she said, her family incorporated traditional design elements into the new doors and windows. \u201cIt\u2019s a lot safer,\u201d she added.<\/p>\n
But many of the former residents could not afford what is essentially gentrification by government fiat, and they have not returned to the neighborhood.<\/p>\n
The Uighurs who have come back tend to be the wealthier ones, government employees and successful merchants whose economic well-being depends on their cooperation with the Han-dominated authorities.<\/p>\n
The rest have been scattered to drab apartment blocks on the city\u2019s outskirts, far from their traditional way of life. Local officials silenced any complaints and introduced a so-called zero-tolerance system to keep residents from airing their grievances to higher authorities.<\/p>\n
Out of earshot of the tour guides and police minders who invariably follow visiting foreign reporters, some Uighurs say the government has shown little interest in preserving the city\u2019s architectural heritage.<\/p>\n
At the end of a dusty alley, an aging Uighur woman eagerly welcomed visitors into her 300-year-old courtyard home. Built by a wealthy silk-trading ancestor, the house has seen better days. In the main room, now used for storage, a naked bulb illuminated diamond-shaped mosaics of green and white tile, framing recessed antique shelves with foliated arches. But the raw logs propping up the ceiling were a more recent addition, installed after construction work by her neighbors caused long cracks in the room\u2019s walls.<\/p>\n
Officials offered to help finance repairs but refused to replicate the original craftsmanship. \u201cIf it was rebuilt, all the beautiful history would be lost,\u201d she said. Eventually they decided to leave the house in its current condition as a draw for tourists.<\/p>\n
Kashgar has been viewed as the jewel of Uighur civilization for centuries, a center of trade and Islamic learning on the caravan routes linking Europe and Persia with China. Marco Polo visited in the 13th century. Today, it is the westernmost sizable city in China, near the borders with Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India. Beijing gave it the privileged status of a Special Economic Zone in 2010 in the hope that a flood of investment and infrastructure projects would help quell political instability.<\/p>\n
But ethnic tensions in Xinjiang have increasingly boiled over into violence, most notably in deadly riots in Urumqi, the regional capital, in 2009. Clashes over the past year have claimed more than 100 lives, many of them Uighurs killed by security forces during what officials describe as terrorist attacks. Uighur exile groups put the blame for the bloodshed on paramilitary police officers they say have been given the green light to use deadly force against unarmed protesters.<\/p>\n
The first sign that the strife was metastasizing beyond Xinjiang appeared in October, when a vehicle carrying three Uighurs fatally plowed into two pedestrians near Tiananmen Square in Beijing and wounded 40 others before bursting into flames. The Chinese authorities said the attack was the work of the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, a militant Uighur group.<\/p>\n
In Kashgar, security forces standing guard with guns and shields are a familiar sight. They are particularly visible in People\u2019s Square, which is dominated by a statue of Mao waving toward the Han area of the city; his back is to the demolished Uighur quarter.<\/p>\n
What remains of the Old City is rapidly being turned into an ethnic theme park, with a $5 admission charge. The Beijing Zhongkun Investment Group has leased the area from the neighborhood Communist Party committee and is marketing it as a \u201cliving Uighur folk museum.\u201d<\/p>\n
According to Xu Lin, vice president of the company\u2019s Kashgar branch, 20 households have signed contracts to open up their homes for tourists, earning around $8,300 annually from the sale of food and trinkets. \u201cNow every family wants to join,\u201d Ms. Xu said. She added that the company hoped the Old City might one day be designated a World Heritage site by Unesco.<\/p>\n
Those hopes, though, have crumbled along with the old houses. Beatrice Kaldun, Unesco\u2019s cultural specialist in Beijing, called the redevelopment of Kashgar \u201cone of the black spots of heritage conservation.\u201d<\/p>\n
Recalling a mission to Kashgar in 2009 to meet officials and inspect the government\u2019s construction plans, Ms. Kaldun said she was shocked by the scale of destruction. \u201cIt was like a desert in the city,\u201d she said. Though she made delicate diplomatic requests that the authorities respect local people and building customs, Chinese officials used her trip in a propaganda campaign to imply that Unesco had endorsed the redevelopment.<\/p>\n
Ms. Kaldun rejected that assertion. She likened the razing of the Old City to the Taliban\u2019s demolition of the huge sixth-century Buddha statues in Bamian, Afghanistan, in 2001, saying it was too late to save either one. \u201cNothing can stop this train anymore.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Visitors walking through the mud-brick rubble and yawning craters where close-packed houses and bazaars once stood could be forgiven for thinking that the ancient Silk Road city of Kashgar had been irrevocably lost to the wrecking ball. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":427,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"topic":[],"class_list":["post-428","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/428","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=428"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/428\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/427"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=428"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=428"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=428"},{"taxonomy":"topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iuhrdf.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/topic?post=428"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}