Excerpts from a Xinjiang-dominated diary

August 3, 2006 - between Beijing and Urumqi

...Still sitting on this train. Everyone's legs are starting to swell and the prostitutes across from me have staked out a spot on the floor with newspapers... The Uighur journalist across from me said I have beautiful eyes and should probably shave and that I look like David Beckham -- farcical -- and I have an extremely large Xinjiangnese gentleman looming over me, patting his swelling thighs and telling me to write. Will do...

August 27, 2008 - Lake Karakul, 200km from Pakistan

I wish I could continue on and leave my scheduled life in tatters. Pakistan will have to wait until I am older and possibly wiser. This lake is beautiful. The sun is going down behind rolling ochre and the white-capped Karakoram peaks are bathing in the glow. There is a Tajik graveyard with a pack of wayward camels. Chinese soldiers are building up the local infrastructure. People mill about... This is a border junction reached via a border city with a border province...

Xinjiang Riots

How distant my last post looks from today's Xinjiang. I've been watching the violence with fear -- both for the mainly innocent working class Han Chinese, who were also victimized in Tibet; and for the Uighurs who have been swept up in all of this.

It's probably way too early for analysis. But I do have a worry that the Chinese government is allowing foreign media access in such a way that diminishes the true impact of state repression in Xinjiang. The narrative, which originally was "the Uighurs are protesting in the same way as the Tibetans", has swiveled on a pivot and become "Uighurs perpetrate senseless violence against innocent Han Chinese". It seems the local government is permitting access to hospitals and Han Chinese victims, but there is much less reporting on the impact of the violence -- I won't call it senseless -- on Uighurs.

No Uighur in his right mind would talk to the foreign press about Han Chinese mobs, in front of the journalist's government minders. Nor would any sensible Uighur want to give his full name and location, or a detailed description of their plight, in case they should be tracked down by local agents of the PSB and harassed or jailed or executed.

Adam Minter over at Shanghai Scrap has already mentioned the discrepancies between the Tibetan "protest" coverage and that of the Muslim Uighur "riots", noting that the foreign media has less sympathy for the Uighurs, and a total love-on for the Tibetans. To me, this point seems rather banal -- of course they do, the love on for Tibet and the ignorance of Xinjiang has been utterly complete for years, even during the Olympics.

Because of this, the Chinese state's narrative about Uighurs continues unabated, while we would normally report the shit out of the Chinese government's silly attempts to vilify the "Dalai clique". Sigh.

Good luck Xinjiang. My heart goes out to you.