Some photos are light and graceful — like a bowl of pilaf posed beneath the morning light, a camel or a row of colored brick walls. Yet hidden between their densely packed pixels are others’ pain and suffering — it is just that we choose not to zoom in, and we cannot be bothered to adjust the contrast.
Taiwanese writer Chang Man-chuan’s (張曼娟) Facebook posts earlier this week detailing her trip to China’s Xinjiang were much like one of those beautiful photos. In the posts, Chang wrote about the flavors, the comfort of her journey, and the richness and complexity of Xinjiang’s local culture. Her words contained no violence nor ill intent — they even seemed to be an honest record of life.
However, that is precisely what made them all the more dangerous. Such words might lead people to mistakenly believe that Xinjiang is nothing but scenery — that history could be erased and human rights could be replaced with tourism.
Xinjiang is a region within China’s borders that has been both excessively overwritten and erased. When the Uighur language is suppressed, schools restructured and mosques turned into exhibition halls, this land would become another kind of apocalyptic scene — a multicultural specimen to entertain Han Chinese visitors, a backdrop for tourists’ ethnic-themed photos, and a showcase of stability and prosperity for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) regime. When cultural figures from Taiwan join this flavor-seeking journey, the issue lies not in whether they go, but how they go, for whom they go, and what they choose to say and leave unsaid.
In an authoritarian state, silence is a tactic. It is dressed in scenic postcards, spreads rapidly across social media, co-opts memories and obscures struggles. When an individual with a public platform chooses to use their reputation and words to describe these regions in a depoliticized manner, they do not separate themselves from politics. They are employing a form of language with a deeply political effect — normalization.
Yes, Xinjiang is diverse. The fruit there is delicious and sweet, but when such descriptions entirely omit the struggles being faced by local ethnic groups, and conveniently forget the widely reported issues of forced labor, re-education camps and surveillance systems, the evocations of normality are no longer innocent.
When a writer makes the decision to visit a specific place and write about it, they have already thrown themselves into the narrative arena. Xinjiang is not a blank canvas: The lines Chang chose not to write are crucial gaps in the narrative.
Are we perhaps too tolerant of this world, to the extent that we can ignore the oppression and suffering of others, and have this called one’s “personal style?”
Not all silence has value. Some silence is intentionally designed as a barrier to revealing the truth.
You might say that Chang was just taking a trip. However, when a woman hailed nationally as a writer enjoys the freedom to write in a place where free expression does not exist, she is no longer writing from her own personal perspective, but rather to answer one question — how much is our freedom worth?
We choose what to write, and we choose what not to write. We choose where we stand, and we choose whose faces to erase.
For Taiwan, Xinjiang is both distant and close. It is distant because it is the territory of another country with which we have no right to interfere; it is close because its fate is already intertwined with ours. Singing praises of daily life there is tacitly approving Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi’s (王毅) notion that Taiwan’s sovereignty is a matter of “China’s internal affairs.”
This is not to say that Chang alone has the power to change anything. She does not. However, it is precisely because she cannot change anything that her choices become all the more representative. When every intellectual convinces themselves that this is just life and not a political stance, we end up living in a world where all landscapes are censored and all language is a tool for the oppressive regime.
Not all scenery is worth sharing, and not all silence should be poeticized.
Liu Che-ting is a writer.
Translated by Kyra Gustavsen
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