Ili at Unease

Due to riots, I spent a restless two weeks cooped up in my apartment before heading westward to Guljа and Khorgаs in Ili. Foolishly. This became apparent further along the trip when I was briefly detained and questioned by the police at a border town near Kazakhstan, but more about that later. Usually an eight-hour bus ride from Rockriverton, the overnight drive to Guljа took double the time, at first because our engine overheated and ground to a steaming halt, then because the drivers stopped for a midnight meal of laghman. At least I could see the Milky Way from the highway. Police checkpoints set up all along the highway to Guljа, however, slowed our travels the most. After passing Lake Sayram, every city, town, tollbooth that we had passed mandated a stop. The police boarded the bus and pulled out every young Uуghur man (but no Uуghur women or Kazakh men) to record their names, cell phone numbers, permanent addresses, destinations, and reasons for travel. Finally, when I arrived in Guljа, I was dismayed to see even more checkpoints, this time at every intersection-- little red tents guarded by soldiers with semi-automatic weaponry, pitched for the express purpose of registering Uуghurs. All of the public buses approaching the historic district became subject to random police searches as well. Despite the semblance of martial law, though, the Han cops in Guljа seemed much more excited to discuss Michael Jordan with me, a native North Carolinian, than to register or arrest anyone. Meanwhile, local officials had decorated the city with red banners, stenciled with reconciliatory slogans, like the one above: "Han cannot be separated from ethnic minorities."

First, I visited the Beytullah Mosque, located at the heart of historic Guljа. Completed in 1773, this building symbolizes efforts by the Qianlong Emperor to accommodate Islamic beliefs following the conquest of Xinjiang. As a patron, Qianlong granted a Turkic official ten thousand liang of silver for construction. Regardless of these allowances toward the local population, Beytullah's style copies the architectural tradition set by the Great Mosque in Xi'an from the eighth century; basically, it is a Chinese Buddhist temple masquerading as a mosque. Architecturally speaking, what makes Beytullah Islamic is this tiny metal crescent which crowns a square pavilion out back. More recently, however, the mosque has been expanded and rebuilt to suit more "traditional" tastes in Islamic architecture-- domes and towers, as seen on the Id Kаh Mosque in Kаshgаr. Then, I took a guided tour of Guljа's Old Town next door, an area built by entrepreneurial Russians, Kazakhs, Tatars, and Uуghurs who were keen to profit from Great Game trade and politics a hundred and fifty years ago. Currently, most of the Uуghurs in Guljа reside in these neighborhoods, whose entrance a dozen soldiers have been "protecting" post-riot in full military gear. Compared to Kаshgar's warren of mud and brick, Guljа's Old Town features plaster mansions with luxurious patterned carpets, bright blue walls, and carved wooden windows, similar to those found in Siberia. At one of the houses I visited, the owner told us that normally she would host a hundred visitors a day during the summer, but because of the riots, I was the only one. This drop in tourism seemed inconceivable at first, given everyone's cheery attitude during the day. By nightfall, however, the apprehension in Guljа became obvious: as trucks full of soldiers drove in to secure Old Town, the streets eerily emptied out. Later, my hotel announced at 2 am that the police would be conducting random ID checks throughout the night.

The next day, I took the bus to Khorgаs, the border crossing to Kazakhstan, west of Guljа. My mission in Khorgаs was to find a pair of patchwork Tatar boots for a friend. Given the security situation, not such a smart idea. For instance, an unfortunate conversation with one burly cop who studied my passport on the highway went as follows.
PO: It says here you were born in Japan.
Me: Yes. But I'm an American. This is an American passport.
PO: Your name is Japanese.
Me: I know.
PO: So...? [Looks at my rather un-Japanese face.]
Me: ...
PO: Japanese people, they are very evil.
Me: Oh yes. I know. Japanese people are devils.
PO: Have you seen Nanjing, Nanjing?
Me: No, I haven't seen this movie yet. I'm a history major, I know what happened at Nanjing.
PO: Well, you should see this movie. The Japanese are really bad.
Me: Uh huh.
Sufficiently satisfied to hear me denounce the enemy of all Chinese enemies, the police let me continue on my way. Approaching Khorgаs, however, we were stopped again, and this time the local law enforcement decided to take me into custody. For the past week, Khorgаs Public Security Bureau was staffed entirely by Han agents. Lucky for me, though, the token Kazakh policeman-- also the deputy officer of the station and reputed top cop in Ili-- happened to return to Khorgаs that very morning, after helping conduct the riot investigation in Uruмqi. During routine questioning, all the other officers agreed that a foreign teacher buying yards of traditional embroidery, while a crazy combination, did not merit any further suspicion. The deputy definitely thought otherwise. Bent on finding incriminating photos, shady contacts, and contraband goods, this Kazakh cop searched my backpack, cell phone, and camera. He found none, since ten minutes earlier, I had deleted most of my Ili photos, while balancing myself above the station's squat toilet. Regardless, the officer still demanded that he take down a formal statement of my visit. In similar situations, my shrewder colleagues have offered bribes compensation, but this man seemed unreceptive to such venal overtures, and now I have a police record for being a tourist. At the same time, in an office down the hall, the cops had rounded up dozens of Uуghurs to take their mug shots and fingerprints, only because they were from out of town. After this three-hour ordeal, I stumbled out of the station into Khorgаs proper, an empty and flat town traversable by its own army of little, red, three-wheeled taxis. Back in 1758, Qianlong had emerged victor to a battle here against local Turkic groups; this conquest therefore has given Chinese trading companies the right to build four huge, but vacant souvenir malls... that sold no Tatar boots. That was a little disappointing. In the afternoon, eager to flee Khorgаs before the police thought of any further excuses for arrest, I hopped on a bus at Qingshuihe, transferred to a taxi at Kuуtun, and returned home by midnight.

I must have met fifty or more police officers over the course of this trip, and besides the two exceptions above, I was surprised at how friendly, relaxed... and bored they all seemed. Nevertheless, after the riots, I could see that the authorities tried to control the cities west of Uruмqi by constant monitoring, producing a guise of safety. The implicit threat lay in the idea that the government was watching and recording everyone's movements across the region at all times. This type of surveillance had generated sheaves of charted paper and used hours of police labor; its value depended on the chance that if any further incidents should happen, it already would have all the names of suspects and witnesses in the area. As troubling was the blatant racial profiling. The authorities picked up only Uуghurs from the buses and streets, and processed them through their system, even when they had not committed any crimes. This procedure starkly contrasted against a ridiculous incident that just happened near my university in the United States: police accidentally arrested a renowned Harvard professor for breaking into his own house. This black professor decried the racist police, and President Obama invited the two to the White House for drinks. Would Hu Jintаo ever have a beer summit with any of the registered Uуghurs, famous or not? Um, no. Nor were these Uуghurs particularly upset about the process, certainly not enough to create a massive publicity stunt (and not that they could, anyway). Still, this system of monitoring, though it seemed objective, ultimately depended on the subjective. The police at the checkpoints based many of their decisions to pass or block Uуghurs on their hometowns and appearance. One such experience by a guy friend of mine, while being processed through Rockriverton, could be summed up in this final dialogue.
P1: Where are you from?
AB: Korlа.
P1: Oh, people from Korlа are pretty chill. You can go ahead.
P2: Yeah, you are way too cute to cause trouble.
AB: [to me] Ugh, I think that cop is hitting on me.