Jonathan Watts - When a Billion Chinese Jump

My plane touched down in Urumqi Airport close to midnight. I was thrilled to arrive. Central Asia was a region that my Anglocentric education had neglected, but its geography and history were compelling. 6Until the advent of ocean travel, Xinjiang—then known as East Turkestan or Uighurstan—was the often tumultuous meeting place of East and West. Physically, the region’s angular features are formed by a horseshoe of mountain ranges, the world’s third-biggest desert, and two giant basins, each home to a predominant culture: Kazakh nomads in the northern Dzoungar, and Uighur oasis dwellers in the southern Tarim.

Sited at the center of the Silk Road, the great trade route across the continent, Xinjiang has been traversed by Marco Polo and pillaged by all of the great historical rampagers: Attila the Hun, Tamerlane, Alexander the Great, and Genghis Khan. Spies and explorers, including Francis Young-husband, intrigued here during the Great Game era, when Britain and Russia dueled for control of central Asia. 7The territory was rarely stable for long. As I was to find out, it was also highly vulnerable to migration and climate shifts.

The causes and effects of global warming are rarely so closely juxtaposed as in Urumqi and its glaciers. European, American, and Japanese cities are far from the polar ice caps where the greenhouse gases they emit wrought their greatest damage. But in China’s far west, carbon and its consequences sit side by side.

Xinjiang, which means New Dominion, is the nation’s fossil-fuel front line, containing a third of the nation’s known oil and gas reserves and the biggest untapped coal deposits. Once burned, the impact of this carbon will be felt at the world’s physical extremes, many of which are found in Xinjiang. Drier, wetter, hotter, colder, lower, higher, and bigger than almost anywhere else in China, this Uighur Autonomous Region is an ideal location to assess the changes in the planet’s climate. Yet it has become a global blind spot because it is one of China’s highest-security areas.

Those who have heard of the region tend to associate Xinjiang with desert, but that is only part of the ecological picture. As well as being home to the deepest depression after the Dead Sea and the biggest body of sand after the Sahara, the region is a moisture trap. Its mountains, several of which rise over 7,000 meters, receive more precipitation each year than the annual flow of the Yangtze River. 8Much of it freezes. This makes the region an important part of the “Third Pole,” the central and southern Asian mountains that contain the third-largest body of ice on earth. 9China is home to 46,000 glaciers, more than any other country, but they are shrinking fast in both size and number as temperatures rise faster in the mountains than anywhere else in the country. Two-thirds are expected to disappear in the first half of this century. 10Many are in Xinjiang, where the Altai and Tian ranges in the north and the Pamirs and Kunlun in the south have seen their snow lines retreat by about 60 meters between 1960 and 2000. 11During the same period, the sparsely populated wilderness on the fractious western border of China has been transformed by a spectacular burst of fossil-fueled activity and an influx of the Han ethnic majority. There are few places on earth where industrialization and globalization have arrived so suddenly.

Chinese children are taught that the region has been part of their country’s territory since 60 BC. 12But the degree of control has fluctuated enormously, and often been interrupted completely, owing to the mutable and porous nature of Xinjiang’s borders, which touch on eight nations. 13Sovereignty has been more sharply defined in the modern era but remains hotly contested. Today the region is autonomous, but only in the Chinese sense, which is to say the predominantly Uighur local population is free to do anything Beijing likes. The state’s demands on the region have increased along with its strategic importance. In the nation-building 1950s, Mao’s war on nature prompted the first waves of quasi-military pioneers to grow fruit and grain in the desert. Amid the political turmoil of the 1960s and 1970s, Xinjiang was part of the front-line defense against the Soviet Union. Since the 1990s, the government’s focus on economic growth has driven a new wave of migrants to develop the cotton and oil industries under the “Open the Northwest” and “Go West” strategies. Each successive influx has heightened environmental and ethnic pressure.

Even on the drive from the airport to the center of Urumqi, the region’s cultural complexity is apparent. On road signs, Han Mandarin characters sit above sloping Uighur script. On the skyline, domed mosques and minarets peep out among office blocks. On the streets, there is an eye-catching ethnic mix of Kazakhs, Russians, and, of course, Uighurs, the easternmost of the Turkic peoples. Green eyes and brown hair are common here. More men have facial hair, though because this is a mark of the Uighurs’ unique ethnic and religious identity, even a mustache is forbidden among officials—a mark of Beijing’s insecurity regarding the region. Xinjiang is the only region in China where a teacher can be fired for growing a beard.

People even live on different clocks. To enforce a sense of unity, Beijing insists that all of China uses the same time. For Xinjiang, more than 3,000 kilometers west of the capital, this means the summer sun does not officially rise until 9 a.m. and sets as late as midnight. Unofficially, locals keep Xinjiang time, which is two hours behind Beijing. It can be confusing. When we arranged a car for the journey to the glacier, we first had to agree which of the two clocks to set our alarms by.

At 8 a.m., Beijing time, the road outside the hotel was free of traffic. Locals on Xinjiang time had yet to wake. But our driver, Wu Shibao, was up and waiting. He was used to switching between two clocks and cultures. As we set off, he told us his family history. It was a typically modern story of Han settlement and environmental stress. Turning down the car stereo, he told us he was born in Xinjiang, but his parents were Han. In the 1950s, they had left their homes in distant Anhui in response to a call from Mao Zedong to “bolster the border areas.”

The change wrought by successive waves of migrants became apparent as we drove. Compared with the low-rise mud-brick homes and alleys of a traditional Uighur community, the broad roads, tinted windows, and rectangular buildings of Urumqi marked it out as a settlers’ city. More than 80 percent of the 2 million residents were Han. The provincial capital was one of an increasing number of areas in Xinjiang where Uighurs had become a minority in their own land. We drove for about an hour, passing from gray urbanity through pale plains, and then to the thickening color of irrigated cropland.

The roadsides were a reminder of history. This land was once lightly touched by humanity. In 1950, while the rest of China was overcrowded, Xinjiang was home to only 5 million people. But the wide-open spaces were impossible for Mao to resist. He began diverting part of the country’s rising population into Xinjiang. The propaganda version has it that most of the newcomers were mangliu (blind migrants), who were driven by idealism to the far west without knowing what to expect. But many clearly went with their eyes wide open. Huge numbers were fleeing poverty and starvation in overcrowded eastern provinces such as Hunan, Henan, and Anhui. Others, such as the poet Ai Qing, were escaping political purges. Many more were sent by the state. In the 1950s and 1960s, thousands of teenage women were recruited as brides for the lonely pioneer soldiers. Their self-sacrifice is celebrated in the state media as the story of the “Eight Thousand Hunan Maidens Who Went Up Heaven Mountains.” A less idealized version of their experience suggests they were deceived into going west with false promises of Russian lessons and technical training, only to find out when they arrived that their fate was to be shared out among the older, senior officers. 14