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3 The Xinjiang factor in the new Silk
Road By David Gosset
Because of endless reports on conflicts,
trafficking, corruption, terrorism and extreme
poverty, Central Asia's image is largely negative.
When Zbigniew Brzezinski, former national security
adviser to US president Jimmy Carter, spoke about
the "Eurasian Balkans" in his book The Grand
Chessboard to describe Central Asia, he was
contributing to a pejorative stereotype that does
not reflect the complex reality, and certainly
does not serve the interests of the people living
between the Caspian Sea and the
Gobi
Desert.
True, President Hamid Karzai's
Afghanistan is far from stable, Pakistan's
political situation is fragile, and post-Soviet
Central Asia is in a difficult transition, but the
region is certainly not in desperate chaos. If one
can measure the constructive role played by
Xinjiang in the middle of a new Silk Road, and put
aside the irrelevant notion of a "Great Game",
Central Asia appears as a source of hope and a
land of opportunities. One has to rethink Central
Asia as a key component of a Eurasian axis of
development.
A part of the People's
Republic of China, Xinjiang Uygur autonomous
region is too often the blind spot of most of the
analyses on Central Asia. However, China has
always played a key role in Inner Asia. During the
early period of its prosperous Tang Dynasty (AD
618-907), the Chinese Empire extended so far as to
neighbor what is now Iran, enveloping modern Zapol
in Iran's Sistan province. Li Bai (701-762),
arguably the greatest Chinese poet, was born near
Tokmok between Bishkek and Issyk Kul lake in
today's Kyrgyzstan, and the generous poems of the
"Drunken Immortal" (Jiu Xian) are often inspired
by the infinite space of High Asia. Chinese
students can recite the beautiful verse, "Above
the Tianshan Mount the bright moon arises / and
among an immense sea of clouds she flies" (ming
yue chu Tianshan / cangmang yun hai jian).
Observers of Central Asian affairs still
widely use the expression "Great Game". This
notion, made famous by Rudyard Kipling in his
colorful novel Kim (1901), did capture a
geopolitical moment, but it does not help anymore
to make sense of the dynamics at work in the heart
of the Eurasian continent. On the contrary, such
an anachronistic paradigm obfuscates the reality.
In the 21st century, Central Asia is not
the place where the British, Russian and Chinese
empires collide and struggle for supremacy. The
British Raj ended in 1947, and both Russia and
China have entered a post-imperial era. The former
British and Russian consulates in Kashgar,
Xinjiang, two symbols of the Great Game, are now
hotels' annexes welcoming tourists from all over
the world.
Between the Caspian Sea and
China, five countries have declared their
independence since the disintegration of the
Soviet Union. Moreover, China, Russia, Kazakhstan,
Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan decided in
2001 to structure their interactions within the
Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), whose
fifth anniversary celebrated in Shanghai last June
15 was a major international event. Inner Asia's
players are trying to create a cooperative space
to manage unavoidable growing interdependence, and
in that sense the Great Game, antagonistic by
nature, is over.
But the major change in
Central Asia's geopolitical equation is the
Chinese renaissance and what it brings to one of
its five autonomous regions, Xinjiang, literally
the "New Frontier". The Great Game and the rivalry
between the 19th-century superpower, the British
Empire, and a rising Russia was made possible by a
relatively decadent Qing Dynasty and then a weak
Republic of China (1912-49). Today, the dynamics
are absolutely different. In a fragile
macro-region, Xinjiang stands, by sharp contrast,
as a pole of stability and economic development.
Its land opening up - the autonomous region has
established 17 land ports - benefits not only
China's citizens but also underdeveloped Mongolia,
a relatively marginalized Siberia, the uncertain
post-Soviet Central Asia, and South Asia.
Xinjiang's achievements Sun
Yat-sen (1866-1925), the pre-eminent leader of
China's republican revolution, planned to connect
Europe and China by railways; Xinjiang - Sun
explicitly mentions Ili, now an autonomous
prefecture in Xinjiang, in The International
Development of China written in 1922 - was the
pivot of this Eurasian system. This vision is now
a reality.
China's most western region -
under the Han Dynasty it was just called Xiyu or
the Western Region and referred to the land west
of the famous Dunhuang (in today's Gansu province)
- covers one-sixth of China's territory (9.6
million square kilometers) and has a population of
20 million (4 million in 1949).
The
autonomous region neighbors eight independent
countries (Mongolia, Russia, Kazakhstan,
Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan and
India - in total, China has land borders with 14
states), and its international border makes up
one-quarter of China's total land boundary (22,117
kilometers).
Last September, President Hu
Jintao spent six days in the autonomous region, an
unusually long inspection visit and an indicator,
among others, of Xinjiang's unique strategic
value.
After the end of the Sino-Soviet
tension - very obvious around the Ili River not
far from the city of Yining - the collapse of the
Soviet Union and the improvement of the Sino-India
relationship - Beijing
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