Even before I ever made it to Turkestan, traveling in Tibet made me recognize the position of minorities in China. Although the founding principles of the People’s Republic was that it was made up of many equal nationalities, the reality is far, far different. Being of the Han nationality and speaking Mandarin comfortably puts a person in a higher status than those of other nationalities or language groups. This higher and lower status is replicated all over the world, by language, skin color, religion and ethnicity.
Why was I surprised at the treatment of Tibetans by the Han Chinese? Not only had the Chinese driven the Tibetan leader from his home and taken over the land, the day to day interactions between the obviously wealthier Han and poorer Tibetans was disturbing. I often heard harsh words directed at young Tibetan women by Han men, saw children shooed away from begging at restaurants and saw an older woman ejected from a seat on the bus. The Han man might have had a reserved seat, but the discourtesy shown made me angry.
When we arrived at the college we had signed on to teach at in the fall of 1987, we quickly learned the best street food was ‘minority’ food, shish kebab, cooked on open coal fires. The slices of meat were interspersed with fat pieces threaded on recycled bicycle spokes, and sprinkled with a delicate and distinctive mix of spices. Even now, almost forty years after I first tasted this spice mix, I can identity it as quintessentially the Uyghur shish kebab spice.
When I tried to tell my Han colleague that in America we have many ‘minority’ restaurants, including Chinese restaurants, he was unable to understand the joke. For him, food, fan (rice) had variety enough. It perhaps didn’t occur to him that food in other parts of the world could encompass Uyghur and Chinese food on an equal footing, as ‘minority’ cuisine.
But it was the stark reality in the classroom that made me remark in my diary on the status of minorities. Thirty percent of our agricultural college were minority students, six percent of the faculty. There were no minorities in my English classes. In Urumqi I met a foreigner staying next door in a hotel and fell into conversation. “She was in Turfan last week and visited two middle schools, one minority, the other Han. They taught Chinese as a foreign language in the minority school, English in the Han. An example of how the Chinese are controlling the minorities, keeping them from learning English, the gateway to other knowledge, going outside the country for further education, etc.” (Wed Sept 30, 1987)
This control of the population, or attempted control, was also noted by earlier travelers. Lady Macartney, the wife of the British consul in Kashgar in the early twentieth century, wrote of her many experiences. “Chinese Turkestan, as the name implies, belongs to China, and is governed by the Chinese. To them, the natives, or Turkis, are aliens, just as the Indians are to us in India.” Later, she remarks on the philosophy of the Chinese and method of control of the locals. “…Keep the shepherds pleased, and never mind about the sheep, because they are dumb.” Her replacement at Chini Bagh, the consulate in Kashgar, was the sister of the new consul, Ella Sykes. She and her brother published a book in which they described their experiences. They said of the Chinese who they found there, “The province is a backwater of the Chinese Empire” in “which they looked upon as a land of temporary exile.” (In 1987, my students felt the same way. Even though they had been born in the province, they claimed origins in ‘China.’)
The last consul’s wife in Kashgar also wrote of her experiences. In 1946, Diana Shipton embarked on a two year stay in Kashgar. She understood that some of her duties were to entertain the local dignitaries. She suffered through boring officials’ parties, until she decided to give a ‘purdah party’ which the local Muslim women only would attend. “There was no stiff silence and restraint.” “Certainly, I was not impressed by the Turki women. Their main interests were entertainment and new clothes.” “Although I counted the ashtrays to see if any were missing, I enjoyed the unaffected hearty atmosphere of my purdah parties far more than the stiff embarrassed parties of men.” And she also noted her true enjoyment and affection for the locals’ way of life.
Nick Danzinger in 1986, described the influence of local groups and “…partly because of them, the modernizing influence of Urumqi still only goes skin deep.” He also quoted a government official in Urumqi who described the governance of more rural areas. “Under the Mao cap, there’s still a Muslim skullcap.”
One might ask why, in 2024, I choose the term Chinese Turkestan for this place. My answer is that, at heart, it is still Turkestan and the veneer of Chinese ‘rule’ is just that, a thin covering.
