Xinjiang, August 08

At the end of August, and parts of early September, I took a trip out to Xinjiang, the northwestern-most province in China. It borders Russia in the north, Pakistan in the southwest, Afghanistan and a couple of post-Soviet 'stans to the west, and more or less sits directly north of Tibet. It is a place close to my heart; so close that people often make fun of me for it --- parroting my voice, of course, and elongating the latter syllable like neighbourhood kids used to do my name (Iain) when I was a boy in suburban Ontario.



Nevertheless, it has only became more important to me --- and the way I think about China and its problems --- over the years, despite some of the mundane, travel-related hardships I've occasionally faced there. Originally, when I applied to the School of Oriental and African Studies for my MSc in International Politics, I had proposed to examine how China was interacting, through Xinjiang, with the oil-rich and autocratic Central Asian states to China's west.

Eventually, I decided to extricate myself from that notion. It dawned on me, as any scholar of Xinjiang could tell you, that one needs to speak (and read) numerous languages to do work on the area --- at least Chinese and Russian; Uighur helps, Turkish helps, others help. The area is a confluence of historical civilizations and is hardly Chinese in any case. None of the documents are in English and the first, real academic/general-interest English-language history of Xinjiang was written only in 2007 (by James Millward; it's excellent -- also, Christian Tyler's Wild West China is good, if you're more interested in a more gripping, poetic treatment).

Since I realized I'm not a historian, and that I wouldn't be able to meaningfully advance the debate (as far as any grad student could hope to, anyway), I broadened my interest in I.P. and put forward the idea of a "Chinese cosmopolitanism," based on melding Chinese political history/philosophy and a critical cosmopolitan approach to international political theory (the very, very few who are interested can email me if they want a copy).



I was in Beijing in the summer of 08, staying with gracious friends while researching, conducting interviews, and writing my dissertation. I decided to take a trip out to Xinjiang; I missed the place. My daily dinners of laghman noodles up on Gui Jie food street just weren't cutting it. I managed to get to a few silk road cities, such as Gaochang, that I hadn't had a chance to see (or interest in seeing) the last time I went, when I knew practically nothing about the place.




I also got extremely close to Pakistan (roughly 144 km) on the Karakoram highway, referred to locally (very, very cynically) in CCP parlance as the China-Pakistan Friendship Highway. The views here were exceptionally beautiful: jagged peaks pierced up into the clouds from dry lake beds and there was a general transience about the route that moved me --- literally and emotionally. I want to go back there and cross into Pakistan that way; it's rather romantic, methinks. Also, the region is incredibly important and has stories that need to be told in a different way than we're used to.



That's it for now. I'll try and revamp this blog and keep it as a place of travel and ideas and photography, all as original as possible.