A Minute and 100 Metres Down the Road

June 27, 2010 9:31 PM

A Minute and 100 Metres Down the Road. The soldier outside the station had one hand on the barrel and the other on the butt of his shotgun. There were two military trucks by the bus stop and two soldiers in the back-right seats of every bus leaving Urumqi station... I arrived via long-haul train, 40 hours and just under 4000km in a hard-seat, from Beijing, where rumours were circulating about the extent of the military presence, needle attacks, Uighur and Han street gangs, and the validity of the reports coming out of Xinjiang. After four days I left with more doubts about why ethnic tensions in Urumqi arose and how they could be resolved.

Kyoto Journal's Silk Road-themed issue is now available with selected excerpts available online. The guest editor for this issue is Leanne Ogasawara, a talented translator whose incredible blog, Tang Dynasty Times, was the catalyst for this issue.

Selected Contents

• 10,000 Miles Away: Chang'an and Nara
• The Road to Oxiana
• The Great Kashgar Bus Convoy
• Along the Silk Road Today

posted by KokuRyu (2 comments total)

They arose because the Chinese finally decided to settle the thousand-year-old back-and-forth over the area by mass settlement of Han colonists, to the point where the Uyghur (along with many many other groups) became minorities not just in the PRC, but within their own traditional borders.

Let me put it another way. When I told my Han friend in Beijing that I was going to the Uyghur part of town to get dinner, she responded, "Why would you go there? Those people are dangerous."

The blog is neat. Thanks for pointing it out.
posted by 1adam12 at 12:02 AM on June 28, 2010

My impression of dissent in China is starting to tip, from "protest is rare, because people are too scared to protest more than the infrequent instances we see" to "protest is common, but we rarely see it because it just isn't reported about".
posted by jiawen at 6:39 AM on June 28, 2010