Steven Parham - Chinas Borderlands: The Faultline of Central Asia

Steven Parham spent more than a decade trekking through the borderlands of Central Asia, recording what he saw and heard. He is Associate Researcher in Social Anthropology at the University of Bern and a postdoctoral researcher on Central Asia at the University of Tampere in Finland. He has taught around the world on the ChineseRussian borderlands, including at universities in Turkey and in Budapest.

Steven Parham's illuminating book explores the dynamic relationships between local populations and the state in the borderlands of Central Asia, and offers an invaluable insight into the factors that have shaped the lives, loyalties and identities of people in these regions during a period of great political change.

Nick Holdstock, journalist and author of Chinas Forgotten People: Xinjiang, Terror and the Chinese State (I.B.Tauris, 2015)

Boundary, n. In political geography, an imaginary line between two nations, separating the imaginary rights of one from the imaginary rights of the other.

Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, 1911

CHINA'S
BORDERLANDS

The Faultline of Central Asia

S TEVEN P ARHAM

For Virva

Published in 2017 by
I.B.Tauris & Co. Ltd

London New York

www.ibtauris.com

Copyright 2017 Steven Parham

The right of Steven Parham to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Every attempt has been made to gain permission for the use of the images in this book.
Any omissions will be rectified in future editions.

References to websites were correct at the time of writing.

International Library of Central Asian Studies 8

ISBN: 978 1 78453 506 3

eISBN: 978 1 78672 125 9

ePDF: 978 1 78673 125 8

A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available

CONTENTS

PREFACE

You are a spy, my friend, no matter how much you deny it. You're a spy for the Chinese, who want our land and women. Or for the Americans, who want our money. Or maybe for the Russians, who want us back. But we are Kyrgyz here, not Chinese or American or Russian. You should not be here, here in the borderzone. Why is that? Because you could disappear in this place, without a trace. You could die. Nobody would know, ever, I promise. I will not harm you, don't worry, but others could. This is a place where you must be careful of us because we don't know who you are, and we don't want you here.

I was an undergraduate anthropology student in the summer of 1999 when I recorded these words spoken to me by an officer of the border-guard corps of Kyrgyzstan. I was not, at that time, particularly interested in the countries neighbouring China, and I had decided to visit post-Soviet Central Asia because it was a blank space on the map for me, noteworthy only because the three new countries along China's north-western frontier (Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan) appeared to share their names with ethnic groups in China of which I knew little. On previous trips within China I had heard much from Chinese friends about how inhospitable Central Asia was said to be. They often spoke of how the Uighurs of Xinjiang (the majority of this largest Chinese province's population) resented the rule of a distant government in Beijing that appeared not to respect this large, Muslim minority's way of life. I heard and read of how the ethnic minorities of China's periphery had become enamoured with the prospect of joining the peoples of post-Soviet Central Asia in their independence. The border, Han Chinese friends often told me, would change: the Kyrgyz, the Tajiks of China, and others even the Uighurs would either leave the People's Republic en masse or they would fight against continued rule by a non-Muslim Chinese state. In light of this second-hand knowledge that I brought with me on my first visit to an independent Central Asian republic, I was probably rightly denounced in Kyrgyzstan as a spy. In At Bashy I was simply yet another outsider who had arrived to tell people such as the Kyrgyz who they were and where they belonged.

I found myself spending my first trip to the border between Kyrgyzstan and China's province of Xinjiang in a jail near At Bashy, a village of several thousand Kyrgyz inhabitants in Kyrgyzstan's largest, most mountainous and least populated province of Naryn. At Bashy is the closest settlement to the Chinese border a dusty town at the farthest end of what had been the Soviet Union until late 1991, with a high density of military installations, administrative buildings, schools and monuments to World War II (the Great Patriotic War, as it is called here) set in the breath-taking landscape of the high-altitude Tian Shan mountains through which the borderline runs. I was arrested because the townspeople I had been talking to had become suspicious of my interest in how they regarded their large neighbour and the status of the Kyrgyz as an ethnic minority in China. The man who reported me to the police had hosted me in his home in the days prior to my arrest; a former member of the Soviet border protection unit in this military district of a now-defunct state, he did what he believed to be his duty. I had violated a boundary that had been invisible to me, by speaking of the alleged ethnic proximity of Kyrgyz groups who, I was told in At Bashy, were no longer really Kyrgyz due to their collusion with the wrong state. The state border between Kyrgyzstan and China, it was suddenly revealed to me, was not merely one between two states it had become a border between different understandings of ethnic identity, of Kyrgyz-ness.

Western audiences are strangely fascinated by the lands that lie to the west of central China and the east of eastern Europe, south of Siberia and north of the former Persian Empire. Majestic mountain ranges, fabled desert cities and the sweeping steppes of Eurasia spring to mind when picturing Central Asia. Exotic lands of medieval oriental despots the descendants of Genghis Khan, iconic models for the tales from One Thousand and One Nights became the closed lands of a poorly understood Soviet despotism in the twentieth century; since 11 September 2001 they have become the lands of a similarly despotic, fundamentalist Islam in popular Western, Russian and Chinese imaginations.

Fear has always radiated from this heart of Eurasia. In Europe, Russia and the United States and in China it is today a pathological fear of Central Asian structural political instability that stands to infect the wider world. Where before the marauding hordes of steppe warriors who entered European annals as Scythians, Huns or Turks threatened to destroy European or Chinese civilisation, today it is the opium-peddling farmers known as silent supporters of the Taliban in Afghanistan who threaten the cohesion of entire societies. Ethnic groups battle each other as well as their governments, and bloodshed accompanies vast numbers of migrants seeking work abroad. Central Asia remains an immoral vacuum; and Central Asians are a faceless source of political terror, economic corruption and social backwardness. The twenty-first-century solution to the world's fear of this region has been to keep people where they are, to increase the hold of young states over their populations. Borders are the sites where this is to take place, and governments from Beijing to Moscow to London and Washington have invested significant political and economic capital in arguing for the urgent need to increase the capacity of Central Asian states to secure their edges.