For those who can read Chinese, here’s a just-published tale of growing up Uyghur in Xinjiang:

我的维吾尔“民族主义”是怎样形成的
http://cn.nytimes.com/china/20140703/cc03mystory/

This is also an example of what is referred to above as “lived experiences,” but not one that will be appearing in a Xinjiang museum (or publication) soon.

My intention was that of drawing attention to the depth of Han perspectives, representations, and experiences in Xinjiang rather than prioritizing the broader implications of the state-generated process of settlement and transformation. If we follow the stories of Han people in the Bingtuan – many of whom identify themselves today as “Lao Xinjiang” – we hear stories of situations over which they had very little control. Extreme poverty, Maoist politics and systematic coercion, all played a role in their inscription into the Bingtuan system. Unlike the profit-seeking migration (XJ is actually the 4th largest receiver of construction workers after Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou – see Ren Qiang and Yuan Xin. 2003. “Impacts of Migration to Xinjiang since the 1950s.”) that began in the 1990s this earlier settlement process cannot really be thought of as “voluntary” (the structural violence of China’s hukou system is a major player in this later migration as well).

Although many of the terms of strident macro-politics can be used to describe what is happening in Xinjiang, my feeling is that talking about the lives of everyday people in the categorical terms of absolute critique (chauvinism, racism, colonialism, occupation, terrorism, extremism, separatism etc) does not foster interethnic solidarity and mutual recognition. My goal instead is to describe the micropolitical mechanisms through which people get caught up in structural violence and oppression. Rather than assigning blame I hope to analyze the way contemporary forms of governance result in ethnicity projects, cultural invention, interpersonal agency, transnational linkages and urban development. I start from the premise that “balanced” representation is not really possible and instead attempt to be accurate in my presentation of experience-based evidence of both what has happened and what ought to be. As frustrating as it might be there is a future-oriented politics and an interpersonal ethics of care embedded in the refusal to label phenomena as recognizable things. Given the sensitive nature of the situation I also depend (perhaps too much in this case) on an active and sympathetic readership.

So thanks for reading – I hope my explanation of my intentions gives you a sense of where I am coming from.

It’s one thing to report on what China puts in a given museum; it’s another to write about it at length without even mentioning how the reality on the ground contradicts the museum’s Han chauvinist and incomplete narrative.

The Bingtuan is nothing less than as a patriotic army of Han settlers holding down the fort in this Turkic-speaking, Muslim-dominated “Wild West,” a virtual state-within-a-state with iron-willed backers in Beijing. The Bingtuan is virtually an occupying force that behaves like a landlord across huge swathes of Xinjiang, which itself covers 1/6 of China’s territory. It has a monopoly on much of Xinjiang’s underground resources and money-making crops like cotton; it employs few non-Han locals, and much of what it takes out of the ground goes elsewhere, with the proceeds going to the central government, not the people of Xinjiang. And it manages much of China’s gulag for political prisoners to boot.

This is well documented in English, and in books like Wang Lixiong’s “My Western Realm, Your Eastern Homeland” (我的西域，你的东土) which is based on his 21st century Xinjiang travels with a Uyghur friend. It is banned in China and available only in Chinese, unfortunately.

A more balanced and more informative view the next time around, please!