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Xinjiang may be far from everywhere, but it is as close to Europe as it is to Beijing. In this spirit of cross-pollination, Huang plans to register a company in the United Arab Emirates later this year. And even though he only finished primary school, Huang sent his daughter to university in London. But the entrepreneur who made his fortune in Xinjiang isn't too impressed by the British capital. "London isn't very developed compared to Urümqi," he says. "Here, there are so many new buildings being built, but in London most things are old." Marco Polo, too, must have distrusted the easy comfort of the past. For him, as with Huang, adventure and riches came from savoring the new, the unknown, the path less explored.
An Explosion of Han
Few towns are more bleak than Alataw, a mountainous settlement on the border of western Xinjiang and eastern Kazakhstan. The outpost's few trees permanently hunch southward from the Siberian winds that whip past. Even at twilight, when other Chinese towns are usually filled with gossiping, snacking pedestrians, almost no one ventures out onto Alataw's streets—there's nothing to see or enjoy here. Yet Alataw is home to some 10,000 people, living mostly in a desultory scattering of low concrete blocks, and, by the end of this year, it will likely become the largest land port in China. As the only place in Xinjiang linked by railway to Central Asia, Alataw is positioned as a crossroads between East and West, the linchpin of what the Chinese have dubbed the Eurasian Continental Bridge, beginning in eastern China's Lianyungang city and extending for 10,900 km to Rotterdam. Shipping goods to Europe via road or railway, as opposed to by ocean, cuts the journey from 45 days to just 25. "[Alataw] looks like the middle of nowhere," says Li Zhong, an Urümqi entrepreneur who visits once a month. "But you have to go through here to get anywhere."
Kazakhs, Mongolians and Uighurs—a Muslim Turkic group that prospered in the old Silk Road's heyday—dominate the sere hills nearby. But Alataw is a town of outsiders. The settlement's boom, like those in other parts of Xinjiang, has been powered by a mass migration by China's ethnic majority, the Han. When the victorious People's Liberation Army marched to the far west in 1949, there were few Han living in Xinjiang. Five years earlier, the region's majority Uighurs, with the sanction of other minority populations, had declared the region to be the independent nation of East Turkestan. (A previous effort at sovereignty in 1933 had failed.) National currency was even printed. China, however, considered Xinjiang—Mandarin for "new dominion"—an inalienable part of the country, like Tibet to the south. To help populate Xinjiang with citizens who believed the province was inseparably Chinese, Han settlers were encouraged to migrate westward. The campaign worked: in 1949, 6% of Xinjiang was Han; today, if unregistered migrant workers and long-term soldiers stationed in Xinjiang are also counted, the Han outnumber the once majority Uighurs.
Many Han came through the Production and Construction Corps, a quasi-military force that began massive irrigation and city-building projects in the 1950s. Some of the Corps' recruits were demobilized soldiers, others were forcibly relocated as punishment for their capitalist pedigrees. Like the armies of farmers spurred by the U.S.'s Homestead Act to take Native American land, the foot soldiers of the Production and Construction Corps helped make the majority Uighurs a minority in their own home. Problems for the Uighurs didn't stop there. Worried that Islam would rival communism as a guiding ideology in people's lives, the Party cracked down on religious activity. Indeed, separatist Uighurs linked by the central government to a series of bombings in Xinjiang and Beijing in the 1990s have used Islam as one of their rallying cries. Even today, official regulations prohibit children and university students from praying or fasting. Uighurs who work for state companies are forbidden from wearing veils or sporting facial hair. Although thousands of mosques dot the Xinjiang landscape, few Uighurs seem willing to express fervent religiosity. "If we say we are religious, then the Han people think we are lazy and want to avoid work by praying all the time," says Turuson, a Kashgar taxi driver. By contrast, Han immigrants to Xinjiang openly display Buddhist or Taoist icons in their offices and restaurants.
Even today, the Corps employs more than 2 million Han, and the road from Alataw to Urümqi, 10 hours east by car, is lined with settlements with unwieldy names like Corps Division No. 82 Ranch. Such subsidized farming ventures have helped turn Xinjiang into one of China's biggest fruit producers, but the Uighurs were rarely given financial incentives to irrigate their small scraps of farmland. Nor can the Uighurs lay much claim over Urümqi, Xinjiang's booming metropolis, which is 80% Han. Designated the provincial capital by the communists, Urümqi entered the record books as the city furthest from the sea in the world. Trade on the new Silk Road has eliminated that sense of isolation. The international airport teems with merchants from Asia and Europe. Hotel-lobby clocks are set to times in Baku, Dubai and Frankfurt. At the giant free-trade zone in downtown Urümqi, Central Asian and Russian traders haggle with almost exclusively Han vendors over stilettos and stereos and Barbie dolls. A Kazakh customer named Alyona Andronova compares her ex-Soviet homeland to China: "In Urümqi, it's still supposed to be communist, but all everyone talks about is money, money, money."
Urümqi, and Xinjiang as a whole, have profited greatly from a Beijing-run program called Develop the West. Kick-started in 2000, the campaign has sought to level income disparity between industrialized Eastern China and the backward interior. With subsidies for megaprojects like a road through the Taklamakan Desert, Develop the West has done just that for many parts of Xinjiang. The infrastructure seed money has attracted foreign traders and investors, who in turn are catered to by more Han migrants. The circle of prosperity, though, has left out the majority of Uighurs. In Urümqi, these dispossessed locals walk around, prayer caps and veils on their heads, like colorful extras on a Han movie set. Want to buy a kebab, they call out, or dried apricots? The expensive commodities in the air-conditioned stores are mostly the province of the Han. This may be the capital of what was once East Turkestan, but the Uighurs are outsiders in their own homeland.
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