Facing down a pack of snarling wolves — the symbol of the Uighur minority in China’s violence-wracked far west — businessman Yang Changsheng (陽長生) offered a sausage in friendship.
“I have a deep feeling for wolves. They will attack other people, but not me,” said Yang, who breeds the animals high in the snow-capped Tianshan mountains, in the vast border region of Xinjiang.
The area usually hits the headlines for violent clashes involving Uighurs which have killed hundreds in the past year, and which the government blames on organized separatist groups.
Photo: AFP
However, Yang’s breeding park seems a world away from the troubles, in a remote valley where shepherds on horseback trot alongside burbling mountain streams.
His parents, from poverty-stricken Henan more than 1,600km to the east, migrated to Xinjiang in the 1950s, among the millions of China’s ethnic Han majority who were resettled in minority border regions.
The process transformed the demographics of Xinjiang, where Uighurs, a mostly Muslim group with cultural ties to neighboring central Asia, made up more than 80 percent of its people in the 1940s, but now account for less than half.
The population has quadrupled in the last six decades, threatening the gray wolves which have roamed its grasslands for millennia, but increasingly fell victim to hunting as settlement spread.
Unlike the Han, Uighurs traditionally revere the animals, whose skin and bones are still considered to bring good luck.
That has made the wolf a sensitive symbol in the region, where some Uighurs dream of having their own nation, and Beijing blames foreign-influenced Islamic separatists for spiraling violence.
Chinese authorities are in the midst of a “strike hard” anti-terror campaign that has seen more than 20 executions announced in recent months, hundreds of arrests, and prominent Uighur economist Ilham Tohti sentenced to life in prison.
Yang owns more than 100 wolves, but his plans have stoked controversy. The businessman, who has an unassuming demeanor, but keeps an eagle as a pet, made a considerable fortune in logistics before turning his attention to wolves, collecting specimens from neighboring Mongolia and Russia.
He plans to breed more than 1,000 wolves and release them into the wild to become the star attraction of an ambitious tourist park, where a guesthouse resembling a medieval castle is under construction.
“I want to tell the government: Give me this land, and I will release wolves on it, and people will see what it is like for wolves to run free,” said Yang.
The project is loss-making, said Yang, who bears a faint scar on one cheek from a close encounter of the lupine kind, adding his motives were purely conservationist.
However, Xinjiang Ecological Study Society director Yuan Guoying (袁郭映) was skeptical, accusing him of exploiting the animals.
“Wolf bodies and wolf teeth are expensive, their claws and feet are sold as gifts,” he said, asking: “The project must be about making money, or why would he invest so much?”
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