Month: November 2013

Wang Meng, Chinese Literary Giant, Uyghur Speaker

Published by Darren Byler

By all standards Wang Meng (1934- ) has had a tremendously successful career. Easing out of his problematic role as Cultural Minister in 1989, Wang was nominated for the Nobel Prize in 1994 by the Chinese Literary Society. He has published more than 100 books and was listed as the 24th most commercially successful writer in China in 2010 with a net worth of 1.75 million yuan. This past year a village on the border of Kazakhstan opened a museum in his honor. Unlike other contemporary Han intellectuals who have been exiled to Chinese Central Asia, Wang spent most of his life in Xinjiang living with Uyghurs in Ghulja (Yining) on the border of Kazakhstan. He wrote numerous books about his experiences with Uyghurs which addressed the way he came to appreciate Xinjiang culture and learn Uyghur language. Relative to Ai Qing (who I wrote about last week), Wang was able to transform his exile into the Central Asian landscape into a tremendously productive career. By utilizing an ethnographer’s curiosity, Wang was able to …

The Legacy of Ai Qing’s Xinjiang Poetics

Published by Darren Byler

“Sometimes the mountains faded into the whiteness of the clouds and it was difficult to distinguish what was snow and what was clouds. Yet some days there were no clouds and the mountains seem to float in the air. This caused me to have a good and proper smile”. –Ai Qing, The Poetic Life, 2007, 67 (Looking south from his labor camp in Shihezi to the Heavenly Mountains) 1. Like the rest of contemporary China, Xinjiang is going through a rapid economic transformation. By simultaneously depoliticizing the economic and encouraging a new ethic of entrepreneurialism, new forms of governance and subsidized development in Xinjiang are drawing waves of rural Han migrant workers from other parts of China. In general terms, these new arrivals are faced with the same uncomfortable environment and displacement that confronted Ai Qing, China’s preeminent revolutionary poet and father of the rabble-rouser Ai Weiwei, when he arrived in the late 1950s. In fact, throughout China’s history new migrants to Northwest China have been forced to resolve whether Xinjiang can be transformed into a home, in …

Climbing the Father of Ice Mountains

Published by Darren Byler

In his book The Gift the Russian-American novelist Vladimir Nabokov describes the mountains of Northwest China as a “transparent and changeable setting” where “the dryness of the air produced an amazing contrast between light and shadow: in the light there were such flashes, such a wealth of brilliance, that at times it became impossible to look at a rock, at a stream; and in the shadow a darkness that absorbed all detail.” Since the nineteenth century the mountains of Xinjiang have drawn adventurers with their remote and quiet brilliance high above the desert oases of the Uyghurs. The people who live in those mountains – Kyrgyz, Tajiks, and Kazakhs – seem to reflect this quiet dignity; they move with grace, speak in low tones, and act as though trained by survival. Those who come to test their mettle often find themselves deeply impressed by the strong women and men who help them through this atmosphere of rock and sky. A few months ago it was the allure of these bare mountains, and their great height, …

Minor Politics and a Kazakh Singer On “The Voice Of China”

Published by Darren Byler

The first time Tasken competed on the TV show The Voice of China, the Chinese version ofAmerica’s Got Talent, he didn’t get through to the second round.But the second time, he sang the song “A Lovely Rose” in Chinese. The judges were so impressed, they asked him to sing it in his native language – Kazakh. Kazakhs in China The second largest Turkic Muslim group in Xinjiang, with 1.5 million people, Kazakhs in China have a long tradition of pastoral herding between high-elevation summer pastures and lower-elevation winter pastures on the northern fringes of the Heavenly Mountains (Tian Shan). But in recent decades, a combination of state policies and the sense of lack which accompanies rapidly imposed development has radically transformed their way of life.Their rangeland was gradually seized by the Production and Construction Corps, a paramilitary established by agricultural Han in China’s border areas as land reclamation and irrigation projects were geared to secure the Chinese-Soviet frontier. This has led many Kazakhs into a more sedentary existence in government housing in small villages, and following the …