The remote, rebellious western provinces of Tibet and Xinjiang are China’s poorest, but they hold vast natural wealth which Beijing is determined to control. On a 3,000-mile trek I saw how far the government is bending the whole central Asian region to its will
The final stretch on the road to Yarkand, about 125 miles from China’s border with Pakistan, feels like the middle east. Each village is a collage of single-storey mud-brick homes with turquoise door-gates. People travel by donkey cart or scooter-rickshaw. Men greet each other the Muslim way (palm to the chest and a slight bow); women wear headscarves. In small villages many signs are still in Uighur, the local language. But for how much longer?
The absorption of China’s far west begins with renaming cities—Yarkand, once a regional capital, to Yecheng, Kashgar to Kashi, Urumqi to Wulumuqi—followed by building a new city around the local population. From three miles outside the bustling tree-lined city of Yarkand, huge gated communities for Chinese army officers flank either side of the road. Propaganda posters depict happily resettled Han, the ethnic majority from eastern China—who are squeezing Uighurs into the ever tighter space around the central mosque and bazaar.
The town of Yarkand was about the halfway point of a 3,000-mile journey I made recently from Lhasa in Tibet through the Chinese border zones with Kashmir, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan all the way to Urumqi near Mongolia. There is no better way to view China’s combination of hard and soft power at work—from the People’s Liberation Army to high-altitude railroads to the sprightly “Han pioneers”—stretching out towards the energy-rich Caspian basin. The west also seeks control here, via Nato and Texaco. But in central Asia, the west must catch up with the east.
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Tags: China