Author: Darren Byler

Requiem For The ‘Living Dead’: Ten Years After 7/5

Published by Darren Byler

Like a frightened flock of sheep, the people’s erratic dreams dividing unbroken Heavenly Mountains: A borderland Great Wall, a natural Wailing Wall Those unrecognized souls are the mud and night of other souls Only the cries of dreams, the tears on faces, like an expression of the heart, need no translation. 像惊恐的羊群人们时断时续的梦境隔着一座绵延千里的天山：一座边地长城，一堵大自然哭墙那些不被认识的心灵是另一些心灵的泥淖和长夜只有梦中的呼救、脸上的泪痕像内心的表情，毋须翻译 — Shen Wei, an excerpt from “Ürümchi: An Abandoned Bed” (my translation) in the poetry collection Requiem I first heard about the poem “Ürümchi: An Abandoned Bed” from a now-disappeared poet, Perhat Tursun, in 2015. We were sitting in his apartment high above Consul Street in Ürümchi, smoking cigarettes and chatting in Uyghur. He told me that the poem’s author, Shen Wei, was one of the only Han intellectuals he truly respected. He said, “He was the only one who actually acknowledged what really happened during Qi Wu.” Like most Uyghurs, Perhat code-switched when it came to talking about the period of time that surrounded July 5, 2009. It was always just Qī Wǔ (七五) — the Chinese words …

The Legacy of the Uyghur Rock Icon Ekhmetjan

Published by Darren Byler

People still remember where they were the day Ekhmetjan[1] died. It was Thursday, June 13, 1991. He was only 22 years old. As is common with the death of an icon, many people refused to believe he was gone. Instead rumors spread that thugs from a rival disco had knifed him in a back alley or that he had faked his death and gone abroad to marry a princess. Ekhmetjan had been in Ürümchi preparing for a concert across the then (relatively) open border with Kazakhstan when he died. Back in those days before the train reached Kashgar and the highway stretched across the desert to Hotan, it was difficult to carry bodies home for burial. There were no freezer trucks. After a long and bumpy ride around the desert Ekhmetjan arrived in his hometown of Qarakash (near Hotan) covered in celery and ice against the smell of rot. People remember when he arrived. As his official biography puts it, Ekhmetjan died of “an illness.” Although everyone knows he died of a heroin overdose, no …

Why Xinjiang is an internal settler colony

Published by Darren Byler

The transformation of the Uyghur-majority lands of Southern Xinjiang known as Alte Sheher, or the Six Cities, came in waves, first in the 1950s when systematic political changes to Uyghur and Kazakh social life began, and then in the 1990s when resource extraction infrastructure, industrial farming, Han settlers, and the Chinese market changed all aspects of Uyghur life. An elderly Uyghur farmer in Khotan I interviewed in 2015 illustrated this process using the lives of trees as an example. He said that, in the Uyghur homeland, there were three generations of trees: First, there were the trees that still remained from before the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949. These trees were quite rare and viewed as sacred. Then there were trees that were planted in the villages organized as work brigades (大队 dàduì) during the Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s. During this period, Uyghur farms were consolidated into communes and farmers were moved from standalone farming homesteads into villages, where most houses were the same height, and for at least some periods …

‘Ethnic extinction’ in northwest China

Published by Darren Byler

“That’s right. Since I’m from Southern Xinjiang I know that I’ll never be able to find a job,” Kaiser told the Han taxi driver in Mandarin. “If you don’t have connections, you won’t even be considered for jobs. This country doesn’t serve the needs of the ‘common people.’” Kaiser used the term “lǎobǎixìng 老百姓” — or “old 100 names” — to refer to the predicament of the common people. Of course, the surnames that belong to these “old 100” — Wang, Li, Xi and so on — do not include the names of Uyghurs. Turkic Muslim Uyghurs don’t use family names as surnames; instead, the given names of their fathers become their surname. Nonetheless, the Han driver accepted Kaiser’s claim to “laobaixing” identity without batting an eye. The middle-aged man with a crew-cut replied, “That’s right. The other day, when I was at this intersection here at Solidarity Road” — he gestured out the window — “there was some sort of motorcade up to the governor’s residence. We just had to sit here waiting for …