The West’s admiration for China’s rush for wealth is becoming like the left’s interwar praise for Josef Stalin’s Soviet Union. It is a triumph of materialism over humanity. If there is one place on earth I have long wanted to visit, it is old Kashgar, fulcrum of the silk road, author Peter Fleming’s “oasis of civilization” hovering between the Pamir mountains and the Taklamakan desert. It was used for the Afghan movie The Kite Runner, NATO having rendered the real location, Kabul, too dangerous for filming. Now the old city is to be systematically demolished. The steamroller of destruction that is China’s rush for wealth is claiming yet another casualty for world culture.
Reports from Beijing indicate that 65,000 houses, dating in layers back over two millennia, are decrepit and at risk from earthquakes. They will be cleared and their native Uighur inhabitants forcibly removed from the maze of alleys, mud-brick walls, courtyard houses and 40 mosques to new estates 8km from the city. Already the city walls and moat have gone. Now the old city itself is coming down, with only a zone to be rebuilt “in Uighur style” for the million tourists who visit Kashgar in search of silk road romance. They will be shown what a local official calls “an international heritage scenery.”
Kashgar was deliberately omitted from Beijing’s list of candidates for World Heritage status. As in Tibet’s Lhasa, Han Chinese are expected to replace the original Uighur citizens in the new city. The message is that minorities will not only have their political aspirations repressed but their cultural inheritance wiped out as well. The Washington Post quoted a bold Beijing architectural professor, Wu Dianting (吳殿廷), to commend the old mud buildings of Kashgar and warn that “if they are torn down their affiliated culture is destroyed.”
Western lobbyists rightly championed civil rights in China during the brief (and mostly sycophantic) period of the Olympics, to scant obvious effect. It is tempting to say that civil rights command headlines, but cultural heritage — where foreign pressure can sometimes shame a regime into caution — goes by the board. The monuments of the silk road, their oases, caravanserais, bazaars and towns, were not just memorials of old Asia but of Europe and Asia combined, a true entrepot of civilizations.
Visiting Chengdu in Sichuan in 1982, I was taken to see how the authorities were bulldozing the last remaining sector of “rice-paper houses,” an ancient area of delicate overhanging properties and courts with persimmon-lined streets, kept immaculate by residents for whom house and communal street were one living space. Desperate people were frantically packing their belongings in advance of the invader.
I pathetically pleaded with my guides to stop, if only because they were destroying what would one day be a tourist jewel of the city. They seemed utterly mystified, as might Romania’s dictator, Ceausescu, to pleas for the salvation of old Bucharest or, I suppose, the Greater London Council to pleas to save Covent Garden. To those in power, old is always past and new is always good. Demolition is potency and rebuilding is glory.
To prepare for the obscenity of extravagant chauvinism that is the Olympics, the Chinese promised the International Olympic Committee that they would spend US$30 billion redesigning an entire quarter of Beijing and build a dozen pavilions and a new thoroughfare, Jinbao Avenue. The avenue alone consumed 22 hectares and evaporated the homes of 2,100 families.
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