Chinese travelers throng the bazaars of old Kashgar, munching mutton kebabs and soaking up heavily commodified Uighur culture — part of a government push to remold troubled Xinjiang into a tourism paradise.
Kashgar, an ancient Silk Road oasis, was more recently on the frontlines of Beijing’s sweeping anti-terrorism campaign in the northwestern region.
The city’s outskirts are still pockmarked with facilities that the ruling Communist Party once called vocational schools but Western researchers describe as extralegal detention camps for Muslims — with the US linking them to policies of “genocide.”
Photo: AFP
Now, after years of assault on Uighur traditions and ways of life, the government is pumping cash into repackaging a state-approved version of their culture to attract domestic and foreign travelers.
On a recent visit to old Kashgar, thousands of tourists crowded streetside stalls that were selling silk scarves and steaming naan.
Other visitors snapped selfies in front of the pastel-yellow Id Kah Mosque.
Photo: AFP
“The old town is the heart and soul of Kashgar, with a long history, rich culture and unique architecture,” said a Uighur tour guide as she whisked visitors, mainly from China’s Han majority ethnic group, through the narrow streets.
“Many tourists like it so much that they come back, start businesses... and live here alongside other ethnic minorities as one big family.”
Dozens of stores catered to a trend for “travel snaps” taken by a professional photographer, where tourists can pay over 1,500 yuan (US$205) to don spangled veils and pose around the city in Uighur clothing.
Photo: AFP
The celebration of traditional dress comes despite a ban authorities placed a few years ago on Uighur women wearing veils and men growing long beards.
Looking beyond the tourist activities, there were other signs pointing to a loss of traditions and lifestyles for Uighur residents.
An expanse of rubble lay at the site of Kashgar’s former Grand Bazaar just beyond the fringes of the old town.
The vast market, where thousands of traders once hawked fabrics, spices and other wares, was reportedly razed by authorities last year.
Much of the old town had also been demolished and rebuilt over recent decades as part of the government’s development drive.
TOURISM BOOM
Chinese officials have long viewed tourism as a way to develop resource-rich but historically impoverished Xinjiang.
The strategy has gained new impetus this year as the economy staggers out of a hardline zero-COVID policy that gummed up domestic travel and throttled consumption.
Last month, President Xi Jinping (習近平) called on officials to “strengthen positive publicity and show Xinjiang’s new atmosphere of openness and self-confidence.”
The region’s tourism bureau plans to spend over 700 million yuan this year, more than double its pre-pandemic budget in 2019.
A suite of new projects has been announced across Xinjiang, from luxury hotels to campsites, rail routes and activity parks.
They include agreements totaling 12.6 billion yuan (US$1.72 billion) with Western hotel brands like Hilton, Sheraton and InterContinental, the ruling party-run People’s Daily newspaper reported in June.
Tourism has also provided an opportunity for Beijing to push back against criticism of its policies in the region.
A chorus of researchers, campaigners and Uighur overseas have alleged systematic rights abuses in Xinjiang stretching back years — including mass internment, forced labor, coercive birth controls, political indoctrination and curbs on religion.
“Do people look oppressed? Does the city look like an open-air prison like the US said?” wrote one state-linked journalist in July on Twitter — the platform rebranded as X, which is blocked in China — alongside clips of herself dining and dancing with Kashgar locals.
China has dismissed a UN report detailing “serious” abuses that may constitute “crimes against humanity,” and blasted US claims of a “genocide.”
Its foreign ministry said that in Xinjiang “people’s lives are continuously improving, cultural spaces are prospering and religion is harmonious and agreeable.”
The development push has coincided with a relaxation of security in cities where Uighur residents were once subjected to pervasive body scans and other inspections by armed police.
In Kashgar, AFP saw just a handful of officers, and abandoned or barely used scanners dotted the streets.
PRAYERS PROHIBITED
But off the main tourist trail, in the mostly Uighur town of Yengisar, there was a sign in a cemetery prohibiting Islamic “religious activities” such as kneeling, prostrating, praying with palms facing upwards and reciting scripture.
The same sign permitted certain offerings for the Qingming Festival, typically observed by Han but not Uighur.
Around a dozen mosques in other towns and villages around Kashgar were found locked and rundown. Some appeared to have had minarets and other Islamic markings removed, and many bore the same government slogan: “Love the country, love the party.”
In Kashgar, no more than two dozen mostly elderly Uighur men were seen entering Id Kah Mosque for Friday afternoon prayers, vastly outnumbered by tourists — a stark change from the thousands of believers that would congregate a decade ago.
Three other community mosques within a few hundred meters were shuttered, with a store advertising adult products operating a stone’s throw from one of them.
Such closures were largely deemed “unnecessary until the recent wave of repression” beginning in 2017, said Rian Thum, an expert on Uighur history at Britain’s University of Manchester.
“The destruction of religious sites... is part of a larger set of policies that are transforming the landscape and disconnecting Uighur culture from the geography” of Xinjiang, Thum said.
The sharpest reminders of Beijing’s policies still lurk on Kashgar’s periphery, which houses many of the alleged internment camps.
While some appear to have been converted or abandoned, others look to still be operating — and provoke official unease when exposed.
“Don’t take any photos!” yelled an unidentified woman in an unmarked car that followed AFP to a nondescript compound on a bleak industrial estate an hour’s drive from the city.
“That’s not permitted around here.”
May 26 to June 1 When the Qing Dynasty first took control over many parts of Taiwan in 1684, it roughly continued the Kingdom of Tungning’s administrative borders (see below), setting up one prefecture and three counties. The actual area of control covered today’s Chiayi, Tainan and Kaohsiung. The administrative center was in Taiwan Prefecture, in today’s Tainan. But as Han settlement expanded and due to rebellions and other international incidents, the administrative units became more complex. By the time Taiwan became a province of the Qing in 1887, there were three prefectures, eleven counties, three subprefectures and one directly-administered prefecture, with
Taiwan Power Co (Taipower, 台電) and the New Taipei City Government in May last year agreed to allow the activation of a spent fuel storage facility for the Jinshan Nuclear Power Plant in Shihmen District (石門). The deal ended eleven years of legal wrangling. According to the Taipower announcement, the city government engaged in repeated delays, failing to approve water and soil conservation plans. Taipower said at the time that plans for another dry storage facility for the Guosheng Nuclear Power Plant in New Taipei City’s Wanli District (萬里) remained stuck in legal limbo. Later that year an agreement was reached
What does the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) in the Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌) era stand for? What sets it apart from their allies, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT)? With some shifts in tone and emphasis, the KMT’s stances have not changed significantly since the late 2000s and the era of former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九). The Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) current platform formed in the mid-2010s under the guidance of Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文), and current President William Lai (賴清德) campaigned on continuity. Though their ideological stances may be a bit stale, they have the advantage of being broadly understood by the voters.
In a high-rise office building in Taipei’s government district, the primary agency for maintaining links to Thailand’s 108 Yunnan villages — which are home to a population of around 200,000 descendants of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) armies stranded in Thailand following the Chinese Civil War — is the Overseas Community Affairs Council (OCAC). Established in China in 1926, the OCAC was born of a mandate to support Chinese education, culture and economic development in far flung Chinese diaspora communities, which, especially in southeast Asia, had underwritten the military insurgencies against the Qing Dynasty that led to the founding of
RSS