BOOK
REVIEW Invisible walls in
Xinjiang The tree that
bleeds: a Uighur town on the edge by
Nick Holdstock
Reviewed by Michael
Rank
If the name Yining means anything at
all to the outside world, it means inter-ethnic
strife. This remote city in the far western
Chinese region of Xinjiang was rocked in 1997 by
riots, officially said to have been fomented by
drug addicts, thieves and other "social garbage",
but viewed by the outside world as the result of
Chinese repression of Uyghur and other ethnic
groups who are being increasingly outnumbered by
Han Chinese.
It was very much with the
city's troubled history in mind that Nick
Holdstock, who had spent a year teaching in
central China, got
himself a job, also as an
English teacher, in the mysterious Yining in 2001.
Holdstock admits that he found probing
into the background to the unrest much more
interesting than teaching the niceties of English
grammar, and in this lively and highly readable
book he provides some valuable insights into the
fraught relations between the Han and mainly
Uyghur inhabitants of this so-called autonomous
region.
The Chinese even use time to
enforce their rule in Xinjiang, absurdly including
the province in the same time zone as Beijing even
though its regional capital, Urumqi lies some
2,400 kilometers west of the national capital. The
author calls this arrangement "farcical", and
adopted the Uyghur custom of setting his watch two
hours earlier than the official time, making the
sun in winter rise sensibly at around 7.30 am
rather 9.30 am as the Communist Party prescribes.
Holdstock soon discovered that, both
contributing to the tension and reflecting it, Han
and Uyghur students lived remarkably separate
lives, with dormitories ethnically segregated and
canteens also separate because of the Muslim taboo
on eating pork. "The Han and Uyghur students
didn't talk to each other or play sport together.
They certainly did not date. But despite this
separation, there was little visible rancor. It
was more likely they were trying to pretend each
other did not exist," he writes.
Which at
one level at least makes the unrest that has
periodically rocked Xinjiang over the last few
decades all too easy to understand, and suggests
there is little hope for a peaceful resolution to
the conflict.
Holdstock made plenty of
Uyghur and Kazakh friends in Yining, ranging from
Islamic dogmatists to relaxed, beer-drinking
soulmates, but he was surprised and puzzled to
find his Han Chinese colleagues and students cool
and standoffish, even though he had had no trouble
making Han friends when he taught in Hunan
province.
He doesn't seem to have got to
the bottom of this, although he did eventually
discover over a drunken meal with his boss that he
was able to make many more friends off-campus than
on because students were allowed to visit his room
only in groups of three or more and teachers only
if accompanied by a colleague.
This was
apparently because a few years earlier a Norwegian
teacher had used his classes to proselytize for
Christianity, activity that is banned under
Chinese law, although Holdstock reports that there
are large numbers of missionaries in Xinjiang and
the authorities, surprisingly, often turn a blind
eye to their activities.
He had been in
Yining only a few weeks when the September 11,
2001, attacks occurred in the United States, after
which he and two other foreign teachers were
summoned to meet the president of the college, who
warned them to be alert to "a small group of
separatists" who were out to cause trouble, that
there were a few Taliban around, and that he and
his colleagues were prime targets for kidnapping.
The 9/11 attacks also encouraged
conspiracy theories among the Uyghur, and
Holdstock quotes one Uyghur friend who tells him
the Chinese could have been to blame, which would
mean that "The Americans will fight the Chinese.
They will win and then we will be free."
Relations between Han and Uyghurs could
hardly be helped by the small number of non-Han
Chinese admitted to university - only four out of
350 students in the English department of
Holdstock's college (although there were higher
numbers of Kazakhs).
This is partly
because, although non-Han need lower exam scores
to enter university, they are, to balance this
reverse discrimination, admitted only in alternate
years.
The system is opaque and the book
doesn't really cut through the opacity, but it's
so vividly written that one doesn't mind.
Holdstock, an atheist, makes it clear that
he loathed some of his covert missionary
colleagues, going so far as reporting them to the
university authorities, who made it clear that,
unlike usually when a crime is committed in China,
they will not act without hard evidence.
Some readers may be appalled by the
author's behavior in reporting on his fellow
teachers, and I was surprised how he makes no
apology for what could easily be regarded as
stabbing colleagues in the back.
The fact
that the book is written in 119 chapters (plus an
Afterword) makes it easy to take up and put down,
but also makes it rather bitty and slightly
scattergun. For some obscure reason, the author
occasionally refers to himself in the second
person, which is disconcerting and pointless, and
he makes a few factual errors (Nanjing is the
capital of Jiangsu province, not Jiangxi, and
Manichaeism is hardly an early Christian sect as
he claims in some potted historical background).
Things have no doubt changed in Yining
since Holdstock left 10 years ago, but this book
is certainly a vivid eye-witness account of
everyday life in one of the remotest areas of
China.
The tree that bleeds: a Uyghur
town on the edge by Nick Holdstock. Luath
Press Ltd (Jun 2011). ISBN 978-1906817640. Price
US$20, 358 pages.
Michael Rank
was a British Council student in China from 1974
to 1976 and a Reuters correspondent in Peking
1980-1984. He is now a journalist and
Chinese-English translator living in London.
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Holdstock soon discovered that, both
contributing to the tension and reflecting it, Han
and Uyghur students lived remarkably separate
lives, with dormitories ethnically segregated and
canteens also separate because of the Muslim taboo
on eating pork. "The Han and Uyghur students
didn't talk to each other or play sport together.
They certainly did not date. But despite this
separation, there was little visible rancor. It
was more likely they were trying to pretend each
other did not exist," he writes. 
