Uighur jade peddlers at the bazaar in Khotan....

 

Sunday’s “big bazaar” day in Khotan, on China’s northwest frontier, where the big money’s tied up in Khotanese jade. Prices for pure nephrite from the local “White Jade River” have shot up ten-fold in just two to three years, helping this desert junction on the storied Silk Road – in the late 1990’s, a poor, dusty seedbed of violent outbursts by Muslim Uighur separatists – recoup some of its ancient luster as a nexus of trade. On a recent Sunday in April, along an arcade lined by dozens of jade shops and a vast mosque, Uighur men in skullcaps shuffled about in scrums, palms extended like beggars. They held pebbles with black beauty marks, sunbursts of orange, and creme de mint-colored ripples. The precious stones fetched offers in the hundreds of dollars from Han Chinese collectors from as far east as Suzhou. 

These were only the smalltime hawkers. The leading Uighur stone merchants, who sell to Han Chinese connoisseurs, fellow Uighur compradores, and migrant lapidarists from wealthier inland regions, are amassing once-unimaginable fortunes. But to cement their status and wealth, they invest in travel in the opposite direction: to Mecca. Along the bazaar is a little Islamic bookshop built into the side of the mosque between jade shops, where the lone frill on the walls is a blown-up photo of the throngs at Mecca. The young woman behind the counter, whose parents joined in on the journey four years ago, raved that as of just the past few years, there were "so many wealthy Uighurs" in Khotan. “All the rich want to go on Haj, to become ‘Hajji’,” said Adelet, adding: “All the Hajji end up the richest.”

In the past decade, Beijing has made substantial inroads in extending trade, transport and technology links to the eight million-plus Uighurs in Xinjiang. This has been part of the government’s strategy to convert an alienated minority, who are mostly Muslim and speak a Turkic dialect, to the national faith in the Chinese market. For six decades, Uighurs by and large have considered themselves a subjugated caste – overrun politically by the Communist Party, territorially by the People’s Liberation Army army, and economically by waves of Han Chinese settlers and state companies moving in on the region’s lode of oil and minerals. Uighurs have seen their communities colonized by Chinese schools, civil service quotas, changes to the official written script and the “patriotic” religious (or not-so-religious) regime restricted to state-approved mosques, imams, and copies of the Qu’ran. Economic progress has furnished newfound opportunity and greater personal leeway. But one unintended side effect in this Central Asian outback is Beijing's contest against Islam for influence .

Islam has in fact prevailed in Khotan, the region’s most densely Uighur-populated prefecture, for nearly a millennium. Effectively purged from Uighur lives during the Cultural Revolution, when mosques were desecrated and imams denounced, the religion now marks one of two very disparate paths to success.

In Khotan, the way of the “Hajji”, as veterans of the Haj to Mecca are called, promises big dividends in terms of local commerce, community clout, and personal space to speak Uighur and practice Islam. But it comes at the expense of many job and educational opportunities, tight controls on everyday ritual, and the increasing risk of state scrutiny. Meanwhile the state-approved path offers improving education, job and welfare incentives – but at the expense of everyday Islamic practices and the mother tongue, not to mention the growing risk of being ostracized by more devout fellow Uighurs. Neither road is easy. Most Uighurs still don’t “make it” either way.

The two spheres are bound by common interests in business, stability and guanxi. But they also appear bound to clash. As Islam spreads, Communist Party authorities in China, officially godless, are working nervously to contain it.

Religious and socioeconomic frictions ignited suddenly in late March, following the mysterious death of one of the foremost Hajji jade men in Khotan. Mutallip Hajim, 38, was a jade aficionado with a network of Chinese clients nationwide, and a major patron of his Muslim Uighur community. But his dealings led to run-ins with Chinese authorities, say peddlers at the bazaar.

Two to three years ago, recounted one friend of Hajim’s family, a top communist party cadre in the prefecture fancied a jade nugget in Hajim’s shop; it's value was then appraised at around one million yuan ($125,000). The official expected a healthy discount, but Hajim informed him he would have to pay top dollar, since, as the friend put it, “the government has money”. The party boss was incensed, and snapped back: “’There’s something wrong with your head.'" Later, for reasons not fully clear, police searched Hajim's house and accused him of possessing “anti-government” Islamic texts. During his latest spell in police detention, Hajim unexpectedly died. Police told his family he'd suffered a heart attack.

In response, on March 23, women from Hajim’s home in nearby Qaraqash county spearheaded two separate demonstrations. At least 200 people descended on the Sunday bazaar in central Khotan, according to witnesses, many veiled in black boshiya in the style of devout Hajji women. Some distributed flyers advocating independence and protesting a ban on female head scarves in certain state workplaces, particularly schools. Chinese security forces, whose garrisons corner Khotan, cordoned off the area swiftly enough: two weeks later, many traders in the sprawling bazaar said they hadn’t even seen the gathering. Others were too nervous or “busy” to broach the subject. Radio Free Asia broke the news only ten days later. A Uighur exile group later reported that at least 70 women had been arrested in the protests.

While the gloves have come off in the struggle over Tibet, Chinese authorities have been shadow-boxing in recent weeks with alleged Islamic separatists in Xinjiang. Not long ago police officials announced they'd arrested 35 people accused of plotting to bomb hotels in Beijing and Shanghai; poison meat supplies; and kidnap Olympic athletes, foreign journalists, and other visitors during the Aug. 8-23 Games. This followed media reports in early March that authorities had foiled two other plots -- one to blow up an aircraft, botched by a Uighur woman now thought to have been carrying a Pakistani passport.

At an international security cooperation conference Friday in Beijing, Interpol secretary-general Ronald Noble said there was a "real possibility" the Games could be targeted by terrorists, or that anti-China groups might attack athletes. "Recent Tibet-related protests have introduced significant additional complications to the normal security considerations for a major international event like these Olympics," he said.

In Khotan, officials have alleged that “splittist elements” there had tried to “trick the masses into an uprising.” The demonstrations, one Xinjiang goverrnment official told the China News Service, were part of a coordinated campaign of protests planned by Hizb ut-Tahrir, a religious organization that aims to create a pan-Islamic state, or caliphate. The group is banned in Russia and some Central Asian nations.

Critics say Beijing has manipulated the U.S.-led “war on terror” and grossly inflated accounts of “movements” and militancy to justify its relentless crackdown on Muslims in Xinjiang; the sweeping charges and  in turn only makes Beijing’s claims harder to assess. In the late 1990’s, Khotan was racked by incidents of arson and attacks on officials directed by ringleaders allegedly linked to Osama bin Laden. But the fleeting March protests amounted to the most visible instance of unrest in years, citizens there said. Many Uighurs interviewed said they only heard of the accused plotters of “Hizb ut”, as they termed the group, in the months before or weeks afterward, most of them via channels linked directly to the state, such as “political education” classes, warnings from state employers, or idle chatter at military bases or security companies. “If they really do exist here, you can’t see them,” commented one teacher at a Khotan technical college.

By the same token, both officials and Uighur exile leaders, in interviews, speculated that demonstrators might have been inspired by the unrest in Tibet to bring attention to their cause ahead of the Olympics. In Khotan, some Han Chinese and Uighur state employees had heard that theory or thought it plausible. But most Uighurs flatly refuted the Tibetan connection. It was also a subject they were anxious not to discuss.

Uighurs and Tibetans do however share a complex list of grievances against Beijing, including a severe ontological disconnect over their religious faith. Party and police authorities have long been quick to peg unsanctioned Islamic texts, schools, or dress, and even non-violent dissent as “religious extremism” and conflate it with terrorism and separatism – together dubbed the three “evil forces”.

Though Beijing lacks evidence of organized extremism, there is “increased religious conservatism” in pockets of Uighur society, notes Dru Gladney, an authority on China’s Muslims at Pomona College in California. The religious revival has coincided with growing numbers of well-off Uighurs going on the Haj – considered a rite every Muslim should perform at least once in life. Nationwide, a total of 10,700 Muslims belonging to the Hui and Uighur Musliim minorities made the trip in 2007, 900 more than in 2006 -- though Party authorities have maintained strict caps on the numbers since opening passage to Mecca in the 1980’s.

In Saudi Arabia, pilgrims are exposed to “new waves of Islamic thinking and teaching from the Middle East” and come back with “greatly enhanced authority," says Gladney. On their return, families and neighbors can be seen gathering roadside to honor Hajji's with a heroes’ reception. Hajjis become the equivalent of made men in the community, by the account of locals in Khotan, gracing weddings and other life-cycle events as honored guests. Although they’re not clerics, some are also treated to banquets and speaking engagements, where they disseminate sharpened political and religious views.

Historically, Uighurs have practiced a relatively temperate amalgam of Sunni Islam and Sufi mysticism imbued in folk entertainments like the twelve Muqam, a suite of epic song cycles. Notwithstanding a distinct increase in bearded men, veiled women and religious fervor, many Khotan residents contend most Hajji businessmen appear to remain just that – businessman. They know better than to dabble in politics or radical Islam. “Maybe some of the Hajji think about those things, but most are more about business,” observed Abdul, a non-religious businessman in Khotan. “Our government is always accusing people of separatism and terrorism,” echoed the Hajim family friend. “But most people are not about this at all. Most are still moderate Muslims.”

Officials are careful not to implicate the Hajji in their crackdown on the “three evil forces”. But as the ranks of Hajji and their "wannabe's" have mushroomed, Uighurs also widely contend, authorities have quietly pinched at ties to Mecca.

To start, passport controls have tightened. In some villages in Khotan, Uighurs from the prefecture say, only one or two passports are being issued a year now, often to the highest bidder.

  Paying for passage to Mecca is another challenge entirely. As of 2004, the state has restricted pilgrimages by offering only expensive, officially escorted tours to Mecca—at $5,000 or more each. Authorities also have required exhaustive background checks. Starting this year, the state also extended the rule to block Uighurs who receive a government salary from going at all. Of the 10,700 pilgrims from China in 2007, only around 3,400 were from Xinjiang.

State employees were already prevented from fasting on the job during Ramadan and are strongly discouraged – if not outright forbidden, as some locals claim - from praying at mosques. As Khotan develops, the young increasingly go to state schools, where they are directed to eat during Ramadan and face Chinese language requirements that, while still considered too low to ensure proficiency, are getting tougher. Young men are not allowed into mosques before they reach the age of eighteen, an age barrier some said was enforced more consistently of late (as with young lamas in Tibetan monasteries). Young people in their twenties are also ineligible for trips to Mecca.

In the past year, returning Hajjis also have been asked to hand over passports, report Uighur activists abroad. Exiled dissident Rebiya Kadeer, president of the World Uighur Congress, says some have seen the edges of their passports shorn by authorities, making them unusable.

In the city of Khotan, whose official population was 114,000 in 2006, there are 3,000 to 5,000 veterans of the Haj, locals estimate. The city’s name in Uighur means a “place that abounds in jade”; in addition, Hajjis trade in carpets, silk, sheepskin, dried fruit and nuts -- and, increasingly, property development. They own their own buildings and factories, multiple homes and some malls, including at least one giant mosque-like structure capped by golden domes.

Hajji also support Uighur schools, mosques, orphanages, and hospitals. Non-drinking, non-smoking and comparably non-philandering, they cut a contrast not only with many Han Chinese fat cats but also with secular young Uighur dropouts, stereotypically portrayed as wasting away their days drinking, smoking hash and hustling at billiards halls. Compared to most Chinese towns, Khotan nightlife still features fewer karaoke bars and bathhouses that double as bordellos, despite an influx of Han Chinese entrepreneurs from Zhejiang and other gold-coast provinces who’ve set up grocery stores, hotels and clothing chains.

The Hajji up-and-comers are thus seen as prime catches by young Uighur women. Amangul, a long-lashed 23-year-old from a non-Hajji family, is dead-set on marrying into one. She currently sells perfumes and cosmetics at a department store stall, making no more than $275 a month. Some day soon she seeks to get hitched to a Hajji, she told me blushing, for two reasons. “It will cleanse my mind,” she said, adding, “If I become a Hajji, I’ll have money and be taken care of. If someone gets sick, I won’t have to worry, either.” Amangul pulled out a plush prayer mat that she keeps in her store, like most stall vendors around the Khotan bazaar. There she prays on the job each day.

  Authorities typically keep close tabs on the more prominent Hajjis, says Gladney, though any connections to active Uighur dissidents and militants are little understood and hard to establish. In Khotan, Uighurs are generally reluctant to talk politics, period. “They will never really tell you what they have in their hearts” acknowledged the Hajim family friend. “They just tell you what they have to tell you.” Broadly speaking, those who make it to Mecca from more traditional rural areas tend to become “more deeply religious and ethnically-oriented,” explained another local Uighur businessman. The city set he knew were considerably more pragmatic, cosmopolitan, and socially engaged. One morning, descending the steps into a subterranean mall, I spied a woman in a tropically hued head scarf slipping a bill to a bearded old beggar man, a deed not so readily seen in Beijing.

  The travels of Hajji even lead some rebrand their businesses. One is “Jilili Hajji Jewelry”, in Khotan’s upstart gold exchange, where chic customers in velvet burqa and polka-dotted silk headscarves hovered over counter after counter of yellow gold bling. Mr. Jilili’s wife boasted that he’s been on Haj five times (she once). Asked if it’s been good for business, she nodded with a grin and said “yes”. The question of whether Xinjiang should split was more of a challenge, as Jilili’s wife bobbed her head non-committally in response. “It’s hard to say if that would be good or bad.”

Hajji grievances are more palpable in the business of religion itself. Within the mosque bordering jade-sellers’ row is a huge open-air expanse, with knee-room enough for many hundreds of Muslim men to prostrate in prayer. At the Islamic bookshop just outside, men in cropped beards and pressed robes perused copies of the Qu’ran. Since her parents made the pilgrimage in 2004, the principle benefit to the family has been added “respect”, said Adelet. She punctuated the point with a proud flick of the chin. Her Qu’ran selection comprised pocket-size and bilingual Uighur-Arabic editions. She said that ninety percent of editions sold are in Arabic script, which is what Uighur pilgrims on the Haj would read. All had to come from state publishers, of course. Adelet said her family's store is but one of four licensed Islamic bookshops in Khotan city, and ten in the entire prefecture of two million people.

She had felt the strain of other sanctions on her faith. Adelet graduated from technical college in Chinese with plans to get into teaching. But any state school would require a younger teacher like her to shed her headscarf in class. Instead she’s determined to pursue private trade until she marries. “[The headscarf ban] is not the only reason, but you could say it’s one of them.” The increasing difficulty in getting a passport was another bone of contention. “Where you’re from, you can travel anywhere in the world you want,” Adelet complained. “We can’t go anywhere all.”

Religious barriers, some prohibitively costly, have only driven deeper the wedge in lifestyles between Hajji or wannabe Hajji and other Uighurs more assimilated into the Chinese mainstream -- and exacerbated tensions between them. “A lot of other Uighurs don’t take kindly to me just because I speak good Chinese,” said one 30-year-old Uighur woman at the gold exchange, who was looking to replace for a stud earring she’d lost. The woman stood out from the the stylishly covered shoppers at the jewelry bazaar because of the military fatigues she wore. She explained that she trains Uighur sharpshooters in the Chinese military. “‘You’re Uighur. You should be speaking Uighur,’” other Uighurs have often told her. “I say China is developing fast, so we have to speak Chinese.”

The woman works another part of her days as a clerk at a megamart recently opened by a Zhejiang grocery mogul. She takes her training orders from the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, the military offshoot responsible for erecting highways and other basic infrastructure and settling several million Han Chinese in Xinjiang since the dawn of the Mao era, when the population was 90 percent Uighur (now it’s 45 percent). Many shoppers in the supermarket were Han soldiers in military fatigues, as is she half the day. Her mom had been a devout Muslim, she said, “but never a separtist.” She herself was not believer, and she disparaged those who were: “Those separatists are terribly strong in Khotan right now. The Muslim extremists are getting stronger and stronger.”

One evening several weeks ago, aboard a public bus taking passengers home from work, a Uighur housewife, a teacher, and other state employees got into a heated conversation about the trouble at the bazaar several days earlier in March. Later one young woman who took part summarized the discussion for me: “’If we have a strong government then we can have a good salary and a good life and travel around the world. But if our country is not peaceful then we’ll have the same life as people from Pakistan and Iraq.’ That’s basically what they said. I also think that way.”

The young woman asked to be identified by her online alias, Music Girl. She had studied English and Chinese at a top local university, and on graduating landed a job at a state bank. The path to her courtyard home led down a sandy alley where women from a neighboring household, shrouded in black burqa and boshiya, packed into the family touring sedan. Music Girl noted the freedom to which she clung as a woman from lay family in China – again, “not like women in Pakistan”.

The Internet only came to Khotan circa 2000. Music Girl’s middle school years in the late 1990’s were marred by separatist violence and tight controls. Now her main joy in life was nights spent online, where she gabbed with “ordinary young Uighurs” like herself and tracked the latest peccadilloes of stars like Britney Spears. In her view, yes, her people remained a disadvantaged minority, "like blacks in America". But ultimately, she says, "It is just no use to complain about the government.. Only a tiny fraction of Uighurs agitated against officialdom, she maintained, and those who did were partly to blame for bringing hardship upon the rest. She blamed Hajji activities for the harsher curbs. "All the Hajji want to go to Saudi Arabia to get to Mecca. We just want to go to Europe or the United States to study more or do more business. But their every little move can impact us." 

Politically, one thing Beijing and Islam share vis a vis the Uighurs is heightened support for their world views with respect to the bloody U.S.-led war in Iraq, which has been dramatized to tragic effect on Chinese Central Television. I visited another far southwestern desert outpost of Xinjiang a little over five years ago. This was after accused Uighur militants captured in Afghanistan were shipped to Guantanamo, but before “Shock and Awe”. Uighur villagers voiced there overwhelming admiration for American freedoms, and sympathy for the “war on terror” . But this time in Khotan, several of those I asked said the Iraq campaign had tilted their views against the United States. “I feel that most Uighurs’ impression of America right now is not good,” commented a twenty-something teacher named Arzigul. “They are always fighting in other places and in all these countries a lot of people are dying and their children are becoming orphans. People don’t like that.”

Both Beijing and Islam have benefited from trade contacts with the Arab world as well. At Arzigul’s school, a private vocational training center for Uighurs, the course offerings include computers, English, Chinese and math. But when I visited, the best-attended classes by far taught Arabic. There are tens of thousands of Arab businessmen based in coastal manufacturing towns like Yiwu, and “they need translators and tour guides,” said Arzigul. She wore a blue-and-brown plaid headscarve that presumably would have been forbidden at a Chinese state school. A male colleague of hers joined us in the headmaster’s office and, when prompted, recited a sample sentence from his Arabic lessons: “Khotan jade is famous the world over and has made a major contribution to Khotan’s development.”

Since the 1980’s, illegal Islamic madrassas have popped up here and there in Xinjiang’s deeply Uighur South, some propped up by Saudi funding, only to be shut down and have students rounded up. But the Arabic teacher at the training center said no religious texts could possibly be approved, and the school principal was any political or religious motives. The Arabic teacher did admit, “Every student has a different aim.” That was evidenced by a couple rows of fully veiled women in two crammed classrooms. Some do study Arabic in preparation for Haj trips.

Even as the cultural polarization grows, many educated Uighurs seem to consciously straddle two worlds as they leave Khotan for bigger Chinese cities to the east. As Hajim’s family friend, a teacher, neatly put it: “I don’t drink. I don’t smoke. But I also don’t pray.” The young man and his family recently vetoed his father’s plans to go on the Haj; he said he’d rather invest any extra savings directly on social causes than in religious attainments. But he lamented that his people as a whole are “losing our culture”, “becoming Westernized and Sinicized.” So he and his friends have grown anxious to protect the “way of our grandfathers, not religiously but culturally.” They hash over such issues on Minkaohan, a Chinese-language web forum popular with young Uighurs steeped in identity politics.

At times, flareups of dissent or violence in Xinjiang have been partly manifestations of “internal society splits” within the Uighur community or “internal debates among Muslims,” notes Gladney. Meaning they’re not solely motivated by underlying angst over Chinese rule or Han Chinese neighbors.

Five years ago or so, a generational rift started to emerge among some of the more conservative Muslims in Khotan. Young men chafed at established ways of practicing Islam, preferring a more visceral form of prayer, the family friend recounted. “For example, in the Koran, when it comes to saying ‘Amen’, the younger wanted to say it more loudly. But the older only say it inwardly.” As a result of the discord, he said, the elders started deriding the younger men as “Wahhabi.” The pejorative refers nominally to devotees of the Hanbali school of Sunni Islam, which Muslim Uighurs traditionally follow; here it was used as slang to brand the young as reprobates.

More recently, though, the older and younger generations seemed to respect and understand one another better, in this young man's view.  “We are going in different directions. But we all pray to one god.”

Mutallip Hajim, the family friend went on, was a “moderate Muslim” like most - “not someone to pay lip service to Mr. Bin Laden,” he says. But with all the ethnic and religious cracks embedded in the jade market, it’s natural terrain for conflict -- especially as alluvial deposits of pure jade are diminishing fast due to overzealous mining. The Khotan government inaugurated a jade festival in 2005, which primed the price pump. Now it's struggling to protect the local

Jade is very much a Chinese obsession; most Uighurs are just the delivery men. Virtually all the collectors are Han Chinese, as are skilled engravers who’ve migrated from provinces like Henan. The average Uighur hawkers are still untrained bottom feeders, and only a small minority ascend to Hajim’s stature as a top gemstone broker. “They’re big people and we’re little little people," says Abdo, a non-Hajji shopowner on the arcade. "With those I know the relations are good. With those I don’t know, relations are bad.”

The Khotan protests were not China’s only disturbance linked to the Uighur jade trade. Also in late March, unrest reportedly broke out in the Henan province town of Shifosi, where a significant number of Uighur jade traders reside. But the circumstances remain even less clear than they were in Khotan. Paramilitary poured in by the hundreds, sealed off the town, and arrested several dozen Uighurs, the Wall Street Journal confirmed.

Even among top Uighur merchants, Hajim’s level of knowledge and clientele distinguished him within the trade. His demise was a signal to other local traders of just how ruthlessly the chips can fall when a Uighur attempts to dictate the terms of the trade. Just one day after the protests, Chinese and Uighurs say, the streets of Khotan were effectively back to normal -- except for Han-owned shops off the jade bazaar, which remain closed for fear being looted.

But two weeks later, traders gathered around the strip were still on edge. Outside the mosque, one of the largest jade shops in the bazaar was padlocked shut and sealed with police tape, which stated that it was closed down by authorities in mid-2007. The reason for the closure phantom. On being asked about it and the recent protests, a Uighur man on the sidewalk tugged at me by the sleeve, leading the way into the dark, quiet confines of his store. “I’m sorry,” he blurted. “I’m not able to speak about the protest, and I’m not able to speak about why the shop was closed, either.” He launched into a long explanation of the precariousness of the situation, which ended: “Here we do business, not politics.”

A few minutes later, he unlocked his showcase, pulled out a small jade talisman, and motioned for me to come in closer for a peek. “Just now when we were talking out there, there were secret agents,” he claimed in a whisper. “In the bazaar, there are lots of them.” His allegations were such that they could not be confirmed.