CHINA COLUMNS

Afaq Khoja Mausoleum Reconstruction. Revolution and PC: @rcmar, Flickr.com. State Formation as Oasis Storytelling in Xinjiang

Bilal Zenab AHMED

Beijing has reacted to Uyghur spirituality o one can say that the world is and ethnic distinctiveness with a strongly ignoring Xinjiang. In October, at the assimilationist policy aimed at creating a new NAmerican Association of Christian kind of post-communist and post-Islamic society. Counselors, US Secretary of State Mike This essay examines the ways in which Uyghur Pompeo likened China’s treatment of over Islamic indigenous traditions have undergone a million Uyghur Muslims in the Xinjiang ‘creative destruction’ through pressure from Autonomous Region to George Orwell’s 1984 Beijing, and considers the potential for alternative (Reuters 2019). This was at the same time traditions, such as mythic storytelling, to that the Trump White House began placing form the basis for collective resistance. sanctions on Chinese governmental and business organisations involved with the now

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infamous reeducation camps in the region. Pakistan, India, and Afghanistan. Xinjiang has China has been condemned by representatives two distinct subregions: Dzungaria, which from over 20 countries, with the notable is north of the Tianshan Mountains, and the exceptions of Muslim-majority states that have Tarim Basin, which is largely a desert to its important trading relationships with Beijing south. The vast majority of Uyghurs live in such as Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Iran, and Iraq the Tarim Basin, which has half a dozen major (The Guardian 2019; Shams 2019; Kerimkhanov cities on the edges of the Taklamakan Desert 2019; Zhen 2019; Calabrese 2019). (hence the Turkic name ‘Altishahr’, which Yet, in the current political climate, with the means ‘Six Cities’ and will be used in the United States and China engaged in a protracted possessive throughout this article as a synonym trade war and the War on Terror evolving into for indigeneity). After the Chinese Revolution rapidly-intensifying Islamophobia and the in 1949, ten ethnic groups were classified as use of concentration camps the world over, ‘Muslim’ minorities, including the Uyghurs in important details about Chinese objectives in Xinjiang. Xinjiang have been poorly discussed in mass Prior to the Qing Dynasty, the Altishahri media. Academics, journalists, and politicians economy prospered from complex trading are right in noting that Beijing is using the networks on the Silk Road, with merchant camps as a tool for social reengineering, in commerce reinforcing highly cosmopolitan and order to force Xinjiang’s ‘integration’ into the only loosely hierarchical readings of Central Chinese political and cultural mainstream. Asian Sufism that are difficult to assimilate into Nevertheless, this analysis, while correct, risks modern state institutions without alteration. overlooking long-term economic goals in the Following the Qing Dynasty’s conquest, local region, most notably Xinjiang’s importance rulers led frequent revolts against Beijing, to the Belt and Road Initiative, as well as the during a period of Chinese expansion, Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) existential population growth, and prosperity that would opposition to the ideological threat of Uyghur start to decline shortly before the Opium ethnic, cultural, and spiritual distinctiveness. Wars. It was the violent suppression of these Ultimately, what is often left out is that the revolts that began to shift ruling-class attitudes CCP’s social engineering appears to be creating towards Muslims in China, and Uyghurs in a new kind of post-communist and post- particular. The region’s Muslims were treated Islamic society in Xinjiang that will likely be with hostility during the Republican era (1911 on the cutting edge of similar pushes for mass to 1949), and particularly so due to continued surveillance and ethnic cleansing all over the violence from loyalist Muslim members of the world. Kuomintang, who fought in China’s western provinces throughout the 1950s (Jacobs 2016). Apart from its geopolitical significance, The New Frontier Xinjiang has been cultivated as a major food production centre in China, serving as the country’s second-largest pastureland First, it will be useful to give a brief overview (including major sheep farming and wool of Xinjiang. Xinjiang literally means ‘New production), and its largest growing base Border’ or ‘New Frontier’, and indicates a for cotton, hops, lavender, as well as other territory that was conquered by an expanding important crops. Xinjiang is also rich in Qing Dynasty in the 1760s. The region is energy resources, with the country’s largest about one sixth of China’s total land area and oil, natural gas, and coal reserves, in addition includes 5,600 kilometres of international to 130 different kinds of minerals. Many of borders with eight countries, including Russia, these resources are being exploited by the several former Soviet republics in Central Asia, bingtuan which is shorthand for the Xinjiang

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Production and Development Corps (Yi 2019). post-Islamic society in Xinjiang that is driven While the bingtuan employs about 12 percent as much by technological advances as its own of Xinjiang’s population, its workforce is over conventional and managerial worldview. 80 percent Han Chinese. The bingtuan has been operating since 1954 as a paramilitary- development organisation, and directly reports Altishahri Integration to Beijing, rather than the local government. While its original objectives were to ensure the settlement of Han Chinese immigrants, to While Beijing often accuses Uyghur political change the province’s demographic balance, agitators of separatism (though it has steadily to maintain security internally and along updated this rhetoric to be more about ‘fighting international borders, and to project the power terrorism’ over the past 20 years), ‘separatism’ of the ‘centre’, the bingtuan has developed a as a term is very reductive and does not fit complex multi-sector economy based on food the complexity of Altishahri spiritual and and agriculture. The bingtuan also controls political thought. Indeed, its unique reading of important technological, cultural, health, Islam, legends, and history, reflects a dynamic and judicial infrastructure, and in many cases cosmopolitanism produced in part by Silk Road actually built it. merchant commerce that is often hard to define Many of today’s problems in Xinjiang for bureaucratic and managerial purposes. were severely exacerbated by Beijing’s Open This is largely the reason that ‘Islam’ often Up the West Campaign (西部大开发) in the means so many different things with respect to 1990s, which aimed to increase Han Chinese the Uyghurs. It is not common to hear Beijing, immigration to Xinjiang through a system of or workers in the bingtuan, label anything from economic and social incentives. It was in the language to ethnicity to diverse spiritual rituals 1990s that the CCP first began to promote as ‘Islamic’. Xinjiang is a unique context with moving to Xinjiang based on a rhetoric of multiple sources of Muslimness, and seemingly ethnic unity, national integrity and stability, ‘non-Islamic’ markers like the Turkic language religious activities being opposed to the state, that are nevertheless attached to Islam in and anti-separatism, among other things. The popular and institutional consciousness. Campaign resulted in huge wage and labour It is important to fully appreciate this gaps between Han Chinese and Uyghurs cosmology and understand it within the local and other local minorities, especially in the context rather than from the standpoint of professional and managerial class. Uneven conservative and statist ideologies—if only to access to state institutions and jobs created, avoid unintentionally reinforcing the CCP’s and then reinforced, spatial divisions in efforts to brand ‘Uyghur’ as a neatly bounded cities, worsening ethnic apartheid and gaps identity that is essentialised for administrative in living standards. Since the 1990s, China and bureaucratic ease. Indeed, even Uyghur has adopted a policy of ‘creative destruction’, exiles and political activists risk adopting the whereby it destroys cultural religious sites, language of separatism, nationalism, and even but also funds educational, religious, and Islamism, in a manner that reshapes local tourist infrastructure in order to integrate understandings of politics and struggle while the non-threatening remnants of ‘Altishahri’ sidelining a properly Altishahri approach. indigeneity. Global outcry has tended to focus Altishahri ideas about resistance are rooted on the more destructive parts of Beijing’s in a blend of Silk Road cultural traditions approach, for understandable reasons, but shaped by the active veneration of Sufi saints this ignores how the CCP is simultaneously and community-authored manuscripts. It is creating a new kind of post-communist and this tradition that China seeks to crush in

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Kashgar, a modern Uyghur residential area can be spotted through a partially demolished wall. PC: @choongching, Flickr.com.

favour of ideas that are more compatible with when pilgrims go to the shrines, and remember a centrally-managed approach to religion these figures, they go over the historical record and identity. Altishahri resistance is heavily and meditate on the ‘higher’ values associated influenced by Sufi Naqshbandi Islamic orders with them. This puts them in the position of that arose in Central Asia in the fourteenth noting the gap between these values, such as century, with Semitic, Iranic, and Turkic freedom and justice, and the world around influences (Thum 2014). By the 1930s, this them, which can potentially lead to utopian mixture became roughly equal to a ‘Uyghur’ thinking that is represented in the memory of identity strongly affected by Sufi cosmology. the figures themselves. Important manuscripts, Traditionally, local history is taught at the written by the local community, also encourage tombs of important figures (‘shrines’) where utopian thinking in a similar process. It is shaykhs tell pilgrims different stories and tales useful to consider Altishahri thought as a kind about them. This storytelling has a great deal of of ‘active mysticism’ through which meditation spiritual legitimacy, often because it is literally and worship starts to blend with political on the same ground that the figures walked. activity, without strict distinctions between the There are also political consequences, because secular and religious.

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It is important to distinguish ‘active the past three centuries, narratives about the mysticism’ from the kinds of mysticism with man have been occasionally reshaped based which Western observers are normally familiar, on changing politics and shifting definitions which is seen as something a worshipper does of what is considered properly ‘local’ to in withdrawal and isolation from the rest of Xinjiang. Starting in the 1930s, Afaq’s tale the world. Indeed, while local Islamic practice was reconfigured as an ethno-national history does contain these forms, mysticism can also of rebellion and independence from China, mean a variety of activities that are explicitly which is often portrayed as a ‘distant city’ in rooted in the ways one deals with society. the manuscript tradition of Naqshbandi maq Mysticism is not only about one’s personal the. Beijing has made dramatic changes to how spiritual needs outside of the community. Afaq is understood, whether in the manuscripts It is also explicitly about how those needs themselves (CCP officials confiscate or destroy are expressed through interactions with the copies of the popular historical novel Apaq community (which is what makes it ‘active’). Khoja) or the oasis history that pilgrims hear Worship can take many different forms, only about at his shrine. Indeed, CCP-appointed one of which is private apolitical meditation. In shaykhs and the local tourist industry tend to Xinjiang, one person may tell a tale about a Sufi place more emphasis on his descendant Xiang mystic, at their shrine, with that storytelling Fei (香妃) who is also buried at his shrine and being an expression of worship in a similar way was known as the ‘fragrant concubine’. Legend to a pilgrim hearing that tale. More radically, has it that the Qianglong Emperor was so a pilgrim may hear that tale and be inspired enamoured with her beauty that he brought to interact with the community in ways that her from Xinjiang to be a consort at the Royal correspond to the spiritual themes of the story. Court. Effectively, therefore, rather than values Such actions could be anything from marrying of liberation and resistance associated with the a suitable partner and treating one’s elderly story of Afaq Khojah, pilgrims and tourists now relatives with respect, to giving money to the learn to value the Han-Uyghur cultural fusion poor and waging armed struggle against the at the core of this romance. As such, the shrine Chinese state. has largely been neutralised, with the role of Beijing has shut down shrines and ended gender in reconfiguring the spiritual tale being Uyghur Islamic practice, but also reshaped particularly significant, since the Uyghurs are activities at other shrines and inserted itself now represented by a passive and seductive into the regulation of manuscripts, because it is female who captures the Emperor’s benevolent threatened by the political ramifications of this attention, rather than her male ancestor who active mysticism. It coopts local spirituality violently pushed back against Chinese empire. by controlling the shaykhs that lead it and Clearly, the takeaway is that Uyghurs need emphasising the kind of storytelling that gives to be seen and not heard. They are allowed to rise to forms of community interaction more be exotified by middle class tourists but can aligned with its strategic objectives in the never be political subjects in their own right. region. As a result, Beijing effectively positions As Afaq’s tale and shrine has always been itself to rearticulate the local transmission of reformulated based on changing political and knowledge and spirituality, with a significant economic forces, it has now morphed in respect impact on its political landscape. It is like to Beijing’s new regional and global ambitions. changing the textbooks that students use to For their part, Chinese officials often say that make them think a certain way. they are attempting to guard Xinjiang from Rian Thum (2012) explains this process foreign influence, and are seeking to prevent through the example of Afaq Khojah. Afaq Islamic extremism. Yet, the reality is that was the founder of a line of rebellious Sufi Beijing often seeks to redesign Uyghur Islam leaders in the seventeenth century, and over in order to make it more compatible with the

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needs of modern China. Prominent Uyghur ‘Chinese Islam’ that trims perceived Altishahri activists, as well as international observers, excess, at the same time as wiping out the basis often participate in this redesign by simplifying for its independent existence as a societal form. Altishahri resistance as separatism by a Xinjiang’s surveillance and concentration culturally distinct population, a nationalistic camp infrastructure serves both purposes— backlash to human rights violations, or simultaneously crushing and reorganising an internal problem of Islamic extremism the Uyghurs—in order to create a new human and terrorism. These interpretations of the landscape in the area. While not anti-Muslim, province’s cultural and political landscape are this landscape will confine Islamic practice to often more about the observers and their needs a few tolerated spaces and forms, with a new, to impose certain historical and geopolitical implicitly Han Chinese and CCP-controlled, narratives on the situation. Ultimately, it is the secular culture dominating the region. Uyghurs that lose out the most, as Altishahri Since 2017, as many as 1.5 million Uyghur cosmology is largely deleted and reorganised Muslims (out of a population of about to fit within the authoritarian requirements of 11 million) have moved through holding China’s emerging imperial model. cells in the Xinjiang prison system before being handed long sentences or indefinite internment in concentration camps that Communism as Forced push ‘transformation through education’. The camps effectively function as medium- Baptism security prisons, with ‘vocational training’ that seems directed at teaching Uyghurs to Integration is necessarily a process of disavow Islam and embrace secular allegiance deletion and substitution as the target to Beijing. Since there is no clear definition population is shaped to be more manageable by of what ‘Islam’ even means with respect to the ruling class. The War on Terror has created the Uyghurs, the word ‘allegiance’ should be a global climate where Muslim minorities face understood as a euphemism for the forced unprecedented scrutiny—including in long- adoption of irreligion under duress. When the established democracies like France, the United CCP, or institutions linked to Beijing, speak of States, and the United Kingdom—and where ‘integration’ and ‘fundamentalism’, they are government agencies root out ‘extremists’ referring to this process of rooting out beliefs and appeal to moderate Muslims that profess and practices. The approach parallels that of loyalty to the state. Yet, it would be misleading other major powers in previous centuries, with to characterise Beijing’s conduct as the latest the notable addition of huge technological chapter in a period of worldwide Islamophobia. advances. Rather, the integration of Xinjiang is a heavy- Darren Byler recently spoke at Left Forum handed push to wipe out all but a sliver of 2019 and cited a spokesperson of Leon the Altishahri backdrop that preceded the Technology—an IT company providing current period, while leaving fragments that services to the government in Xinjiang—to can be assimilated into state administration show how this tension means that a racialised (in addition to important tourist and cultural desire for control gets projected on the issue. production industries in the province). Byler said that the spokesperson, who was at Similar to other post-communist states, the Ürümchi security trade fair in 2017, noted: China does not ban Islam outright. Indeed, ‘Anyone who has been to Kashgar will know such a move would be counterproductive, given that the atmosphere there was really thick and its ambitions as a world actor and strategic imposing.’ The words ‘thick’ and ‘imposing’ partnerships with majority-Muslim countries. mean ‘Uyghur’ in this context, and Leon Instead, Beijing pushes to create a distinctly Technology was building an AI project to learn

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from this ‘thick and imposing atmosphere’, Towards a New to make it more manageable and legible to Beijing. Indeed, the spokesperson went on to Altishahri Resistance say: ‘Through the continuous advancement of the project, we have a network of 10,000 While this particular combination of video access points in the surrounding rural mass incarceration, the tech sector, ethnic (Kashgar) area, which will generate massive erasure, and discussions of Islamic terrorism amounts of video. This many images will bind and extremism, may seem new, it relies on a many people.’ It is difficult not to see what is classical imperial push for difference being really going on. controlled and neutralised that has led to Leon Technology is one of many firms concentration camps in every other major working with Beijing in the mass surveillance power. Indeed, there is not much difference, and incarceration projects that have been set in terms of state behaviour, between China’s up in Xinjiang at an accelerated rate since behaviour in Xinjiang, and the Spanish the declaration of the People’s War on Terror Empire’s in Cuba, the British Empire’s in South in 2014. Reports from camps themselves, Africa, and so on. The history of concentration officially called ‘Vocational Education and camps is one of societal anxieties leading to Training Centres’, often shock audiences undesirable populations being caged and then with descriptions of how Beijing’s goals are stripped away of what is said to make them enforced by state-of-the-art technology. threatening. As China builds the military and TV monitors are used to deliver the state trading infrastructure to compete with the curriculum in cells and classrooms, while world’s richest countries, it is also building its detainees are closely monitored. They are equivalents of migrant detention centres on disciplined via speaker systems if they sleep at the Australasian, European, and US–Mexico the wrong times, express what are seen to be borders and colonial prisons in Abu Ghraib, Islamic traditions, speak Uyghur, or otherwise Guantanamo Bay, and Bagram Air Base. The behave ‘improperly’. Technology is also used danger is that this is just the beginning, and to terrorise the Uyghurs outside of the camps, these versions of the authoritarian policing with transnational corporations like Google, technology being used in Xinjiang will Huawei, Facebook, and Hikvision interlinking eventually be exported throughout the Belt and with venture capitalists from the major Road Initiative, whether in northwest Pakistan powers (including the United States) to build or eastern Europe. This is entirely possible, a sprawling AI-based policing infrastructure despite Beijing facing a torrent of popular for the Chinese state. Millions of people in the criticism and international pushback due to its region are now subjected to smartphone scans, policies in western China. wiretaps, location tracking, and regular 3D Beijing is in the process of creating a new kind facial and voice scans at local police stations of Xinjiang, in which Uyghur cultural, spiritual, that create biometric databases for Chinese and political expression is severely limited and intelligence agencies. It is very likely that as placed below the needs of a new secular (and Xi Jinping pushes China towards becoming multicultural) polity. While it is tempting to a ‘cyber superpower’, the slow erasure and believe that oppression of the Uyghurs will rewriting of Uyghur Islamic practice will be limit its ambitions, particularly considering touted as a pioneering victory for social control international outcry, the reality is likely to be to be repeated elsewhere. that Chinese internal imperialism and social reengineering will mark the beginning of a new phase of capitalist governance. Certainly, the

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technology being used in Xinjiang will become mold of Islamic Neoplatonist philosophy is far more widespread, but the same goes for the more likely to hit mass appeal in several Belt way that local culture and distinctiveness and Road countries (especially Pakistan) than is being destroyed and violently brought in established left-wing traditions. It is a question line with the CCP’s top-down ideas about of exploring Altishahri thinking as something manageability and social control. One could that has value outside of museums, tourism, argue that the techniques on display in Xinjiang and the niche interests of academics—as a are more refined versions of tactics initially source of political understanding that regards fine-tuned during European imperialism, history to be mythic and inspirational, and with particularly fruitful comparisons being storytelling to be on the same plane as large- possible with the settlement of the Americas. scale insurrection. ■ Obviously, the question of genocide and population settlement is different in the two cases, but the shared point is a new world being built on the colonial frontier that erases its indigenous precursors and serves as an exemplar for future governance. Left-wing observers of Xinjiang have the chance to use Beijing’s oppressive policies as an excuse to reevaluate Uyghur spiritual and cultural material as a source of political resistance, including outside of the region itself. This will likely be a prolonged process done in conjunction with Uyghur scholars, and risks being counterproductive due to how academic and governmental requirements are likely to reshape Altishahri consciousness as well. As Xinjiang goes global, it is unlikely that one will find a pure form of the complex societal medley that emerged from Silk Road trading across Central Asia. Nevertheless, it is certainly possible to appreciate how the Uyghurs may continue to be subjects of their own history, inspired by the manuscripts, oasis storytelling, and ‘active mysticism’ that alarms Beijing and the CCP. Certainly, this is a helpful approach to countering the War on Terror in general, as David Brophy (2019) has written with reference to the simplified rhetoric of ‘Good Muslim’ and ‘Bad Muslim’. Yet even beyond the need for Uyghur agency, as Brophy writes, it is worth considering that Altishahri resistance in the future can be a source of inspiration for resistance against state authoritarian models. Indeed, its reliance on storytelling and religious activity in the

MADE IN CHINA / 1, 2020 33 This text is taken from Made in China Journal: Volume 5, Issue 1, 2020, edited by Ivan Franceschini, Nicholas Loubere and Christian Sorace, published 2020 by ANU Press, The Australian National University, Canberra, Australia.

doi.org/10.22459/MIC.05.01.2020.03