Kashgar’s Old City: Sinicization, or Epcoticization?
It is well-known that in 2009 the Chinese government bulldozed the ‘old city’ in the heart of Kashgar, a move that was not taken particularly well in the West. What is I think less well-known is what that old city was replaced with: a reasonable (if quite obviously inauthentic) facsimile of same, still called the Old City on maps and by locals even though it is more reminiscent of the Epcot Center than it could possibly be to the city it replaced.
This Epcoticized Old City remains, at least based on my observations, a major draw for tourists, from the West but, to a greater degree, from China itself. It is not hard to see why. It is a tremendously tourist-friendly place, the streets wide, clean, well-lit, lined by tourist-friendly storefront shops, with all manner of home-made (or “home-made” — I was never sure) wares on display to be appreciated by passersby; the entire place is on display.
It also seems almost designed to allay the fears of tourists discomforted by Xinjiang’s reputation for instability, or by Uyghurs themselves (there is an incredibly widespread association among many Han Chinese between Uyghurs and pickpocketing and the use of knives.) There are no cheap or unfamiliar products on display: few Uyghurs live nearby (and most of them are wealthy; as the New York Times reports, the government covers the cost of some, but not all, of the cost of these rebuilt homes, for those that want to return to them.) There is no evidence of poverty. It is surrounded by normal, non-themed retail stores. A Xinhua bookstore and a supermarket sit nearby.
Located a few bus stops away from the Old City sits the ghost of tourist spots past: an actual old Uyghur neighborhood, streets narrow, actual residents (thought not too many of them) present. The neighborhood is walled and apparently cut off from immediate lines of escape, and tremendously old and decrepit: two sides seemed almost unsafe to enter, and it was initially difficult for me to believe that the place was inhabited.
Upon entering it I felt intensely uncomfortable, as though I were invading the privacy of the complex’s residents, but in fact evidence remains, in the form of signs advertising homestays and local products and explaining naan as Uyghur bagels, of the place’s past as an actual tourist attraction. A few (that is, two) stores catering to tourists, located in what are clearly private homes, also remain. I encountered a total of five tourists while there, three of them domestic — a small fraction of what I would have seen at the Old Town. It seems reasonable to assume that it has been starved of guests, and revenue, by the new Old City, which is much more pleasing in every way, save authenticity.
At the same time, this old district transparently lacks the capacity to deal with anything like the number of guests that the Old City does, in the simple fact of its narrow alleys, and because there is no room to build or start a hotel of any size it cannot be made as convenient for tourists as the Old City is. In general, the place would require bull-dozing itself to be able to attract guests in the numbers the Old City does, or to handle them if it did attract them.
It would be wrong to attempt to directly compare the two in any case: the Old City would always have been (slightly) more centrally located than this older complex, and, more importantly, is adjacent to the Id Kah Mosque, China’s largest; the Old City likely always was a larger draw than this district. At the same time, it likely could never have achieved the volume of visitors that it has if it remained in any way similar to this older district: as it must have in 2009 when Time described it as “an atmospheric, mud-brick maze of courtyard homes, winding cobblestone streets plied by donkey carts, and dozens of centuries-old mosques.” To neither contradict nor endorse ideas about the Chinese government’s intentions toward a symbol of Uyghur identity, the reconstruction of the Old City can only have been a net positive for Kashgar’s economy, which presumably needs it.
And how about all that?
It is not necessarily a good idea to speculate on the Chinese government’s, and Communist Party’s, motivations for doing anything, especially given the uncertainty over what level of the bureaucracy a given decision is made by, but it seems to me that the decision to destroy and recreate the Old City, without the consent of Uyghur groups, should be viewed at least partially in terms of the ever-enlarging role that the tourism industry is supposed to play in current plans for western development. As is laid out explicitly in this (link in Chinese) 2015 article (which posted on Kashgar’s official government website) with “unceasing development” (不断发展）and “unceasing improvements in standards of living” (人民生活水平的不断提高）has come the opportunity for many cities to use tourism as a mechanism to boost their economy, to become a “一带一路旅行集聚区,” a One Belt One Road tourism center — and Kashgar’s many charms put it in prime position to do so; a perhaps more cynical way to conceptualize this would be to harness local exoticism and fascination with Uyghur kitsch (now hopefully abstracted from actual political concerns by its cartoonish reproduction) to affect a transfer of wealth from the developed east.
This actually is in keeping with both media depictions of One Belt One Road and official Chinese thinking on it; though it’s typically depicted as a daring geopolitical gambit in Western media, in China it is consistently linked with tourism in the the western provinces. (See this article on increasing “Silk Road” tourism in Gansu or this one, about the travel agency Lu Mama, which will be assisting (助力) Xinjiang (as part of One Belt One Road, of course) by opening an office in Urumqi. And a lot of this is actually state directed (link in Chinese)(in a typically Chinese, highly uncoordinated manner: under the encouragement of the central government, various areas in China have set aside funds to support tourism projects in Xinjiang: Shanghai municipality has set aside 424million yuan to invest on Xinjiang projects, Guangdong province 700million, Jiangsu province 370million, and other provinces also have initiatives to promote tourism to Xinjiang.)
And this does not strike me as a bad idea, at least in theory: its hard to imagine increased tourism being a net negative for these provinces’ economies. And although pollution and land rights are issues that do lead to social disturbance in China, there certainly does seem to be a positive correlation between economic development and harmoniousness there, as well as most other places. But there are very obvious dangers to all this, particularly if these tourism projects take the form of exploiting Uygurness.
Commodifying ethnicity as happened in Kashgar, is a popular engine of economic growth used by local government really anywhere it seems likely to attract Han tourists, i.e. in exotic Southwestern China and in Tibet. It also has taken place elsewhere in Xinjiang: Urumqi’s Grand Bazaar was torn down and rebuilt as a caricature of itself in 2003.
This commodification of ethnicity obviously brings with it the incentive to commandeer sites like the Old City in Kashgar that can be justified as ‘authentic’ exemplars of Uyghur culture, which is to say to the incentive to commercialize and probably degrade historic sites, as well as sites that are meaningful to their local (Uyghur) communities. It is also likely to bring local populations into contact with tourists who view them as exotic — which is to say, alien — which seems counterproductive to the CCP’s goal of socializing Uyghurs into the (Han) Chinese mainstream. (This is exacerbated by the fact that, unlike most of the populations exoticized for tourist purposes, which do not have any larger culture with which to associate, alienated Uyghurs are likely to identify even more strongly with Islamic and Turkic culture.)
As such, all this seems to be less-than-salutory for local populations, for preservation of Uyghur history, and for Xinjiang itself. Nonetheless, attempts at commodifying Uyghur identity, encouraged by a Chinese government that is evidently convinced that economic growth is both necessary and sufficient for ethnic harmony, seem likely to be intensified and accelerated by these new Silk Road policies. It is a trend worth watching.
