WhirledView

Stress Test for Pakistan's Judicial System

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

A father (with accomplices)beats his daughter to death right  in front of the courthouse in Pakistan’s most sophisticated, most cultured, most refined city—and the police behave as if they’re watching TV!  That this could happen in Lahore reveals the depths to which Pakistan has sunk.  Mohammad Ali Jinnah, a brilliant lawyer and Pakistan’s Founding Father, would be aghast.

No One Intervened

Since there’s always a crowd around a courthouse in Pakistan, there would have been plenty of witnesses.  Casual passers by, of course, and peddlers of snacks and soft drinks, but also many figures directly involved with courthouse routines. A dozen or more otherwise jobless graduates would have been writing letters and pleas for the illiterate.  A swarm of opportunistic courthouse lawyers would have been hoping to pick up last minute clients.  The more successful lawyers and their assistants would have been going in and out, pursuing their more profitable advocacy.  Trial witnesses, family members, unrelated observers, journalists, miscellaneous court employees, shoe shine boys and barbers squatting on mats—these, too, would have been close enough to intervene, close enough to save a young woman’s life.  But no one did. 

A crowd, then, plus the police, but not a soul rushed forth to restrain the father and his cronies in order to rescue the girl, who was pregnant, though that wouldn’t have been evident.  Her killers didn’t have guns, only bricks and stones they’d picked up and put to use, but still the police did nothing.  They just stood there, sympathizing with the father who was beating a young woman to a pulp right before their eyes.

Propping Up the Male Ego

This was a so-called honor killing, the cold-blooded slaughter of a daughter who defies patriarchal authority and marries the man of her choice, which has nothing to do with badmouthing Islam.  It's a cruel anachronism, a tribal matter, a clan custom, an unwritten relic of a cruder age.  There’s absolutely no case here for the capital crime of blasphemy.  Yet, even if there were, a death sentence belongs to the courts, not the mob. 

What’s more, Lahore isn’t in North Waziristan where brutal tribal imperatives still reign more or less unimpeded.  No, the victim and her assailants don't hail from some remote mountain valley.  Their village is located in prosperous Punjab, a mere fifty miles from the city.  People there would enjoy TV and mobile phones.  Most likely ox power has long since been supplanted by tractors, and bicycles are giving way to motorcycles and even cars.  

The Key is Impunity

So, no, this  father didn’t kill out of simple tribal obligation.  He killed because his will was thwarted, because he'd wanted to use his daughter as a tradeable, sellable property to further his own ends, but she'd defied him, which meant he'd lost face and so, since he expected to get away with it, he set out to redeem himself by killing her.   As he would have known all too well, "honor" killing, in Pakistan, is seldom punished.  Families and clans close ranks.  Spineless witnesses refuse to testify. Male judges side with murderous fathers and male relatives.   And so,  every year, countless girls and women are slaughtered with impunity......

....Indeed, they certainly are!  The latest news reveals that the victim's husband  had murdered his first wife a few years ago,* which suggests that the father, if he knew about this (and how could he not have known, in a village?), had at least one good reason for not wanting his daughter to marry the guy.  Even so, daddy did not have the right to kill the foolish headstrong girl.

What a melodrama!  In the environs of sophisticated Lahore: two women dead, one murderer free (thanks to a payment of blood money) to marry again, the other also likely to  escape punishment.  Poor fellow!  His slut of a daughter wouldn’t obey him! I hope that daddy doesn’t have another independent-minded daughter—or his wife doesn’t make eye contact with the milkman.

The Legal Shell Game

Pakistan has the semblance of a modern legal system, but it’s mostly  an empty shell when it comes to women’s rights.  More often than not, the police don’t protect or arrest, the state doesn’t prosecute and the courts don’t convict.     

It’s fairly easy to ignore an honor killing in the tribal areas, but this one took place in front of innumerable witnesses right in front of a courthouse in the elegant city of Lahore.  This, then, is a very important test case.  Will this father be held responsible for killing his daughter in cold blood?  Even if the father is charged with a crime, it will probably take years for the case to work its way through the system.  Will anyone see that justice is done?

*She evidently resisted sharing her husband with a second wife, so he killed her and avoided prosecution by paying blood money to their son, who says he's satisfied!!!!

 

Promises, promises: the Kremlin and Ukraine

By Patricia H Kushlis

Over the past several months, I’ve been trying to figure out what the Kremlin’s policy toward Ukraine is. Does Moscow have a long term objective or is it, in reality, winging it?

Is the Putin regime foremost playing to nationalist grievances at home while causing as much chaos in the neighborhood along the way?  What does Vladimir Putin think he’s accomplishing by parking 40,000 troops near the Ukrainian border for months, threatening to invade Ukraine, then promising to remove his forces multiple times but failing to do so.  What does he think - that the US and Europeans don’t use satellite imagery to verify his pronouncements – remember Reagan’s “trust but verify” mantra that has become a cornerstone of US foreign policy since the 1980s?

Is the fourth time the charm?

Will Putin’s promise to withdraw the troops for the fourth time turn out to be the charm?  Will he turn his back on those very separatists his henchmen turned loose to terrorize the local populations in what seemed like an organized plot to make the region vulnerable to an easy Russian takeover as happened in Georgia’s Ossetia and Abkhazia in 2006? But Ukraine is much bigger than and a different story from Georgia.  It is among other things, also next door to Poland which has experienced an economic miracle since joining the EU.  Ukraine’s west at the very least would like a chance at closer economic ties to Brussels.

Are we just supposed to forget about the Kremlin’s takeover of Crimea which started this year’s illegal Russian land grab and where the Kremlin used the very same tactics and operatives it subsequently shifted to Eastern Ukraine – a region the Russians have effectively managed to destabilize through the combination of Genghis Khan style terror and information warfare - but much of the region has not succumbed as readily as Moscow likely hoped.

Has the Kremlin not read the polls indicating that 70% of the population in the East does not want to separate from Ukraine let alone become part of Russia?  Or does the Kremlin not understand that as a new Gallup poll indicates, “the majority (of Ukrainians) in all regions agree that no government outside of Ukraine has a right to be involved in decisions about Ukraine's future.”

Without Eastern Ukraine, is Crimea to become another of Putin’s Russian atolls like Kaliningrad –between Lithuania and Poland? A small piece of formerly militarily strategic land annexed to make the home-crowd ultra-nationalists not feel the pain at the start of another economic downturn now being accelerated by US and European economic sanctions?  If the Baltic and Black Seas rise as a result of global warming – what will happen to these islands or peninsulas?  Dikes are expensive to build and maintain.  Of course, in the meantime, so are the care and feeding of the people and troops who make such atolls home.  

When Boring is Good: Indian Elections

By Patricia L. Sharpe

How boring!  I’ve been looking for instances of vote rigging, fraud, bribery, intimidation  and/or violence during the multi-week polling process in India, but so far my web searches have uncovered a complaint in just one precinct, in a suburb of Mumbai.  Maybe I didn’t look hard enough.  But believe me, I’ve tried.

On the other hand, before the weeks-long polling process began, there were plenty of blog posts and news items that warned  of the tampering possibilities inherent in the electronic voting machines designed especially for India  to work for the illiterate as well as the literate.   Post election?  No I-told-you-sos. I guess the machines weren’t so bad after all.

A Rare Achievement

So, three cheers for India.  China’s leadership is afraid to ask the voters what they want.  Russia’s last elections were rigged in favor of Vladimir Putin.  Promoters of the Arab spring weren’t prepared for the tasks of governance, and look at what’s happening in Thailand.  Above all, check out India’s neighbor to the West.  When Pakistan managed to transfer governance from one set of civilians to another for the first time in its 60 years of existence not so long ago, there was much crowing.  But why?  This transition is pure aberration unless it can be repeated again and again and again, ad nauseum, to the point of boredom. 

So three cheers for India which has been running honest elections, uninterrupted by a single military coup, ever since 1947, when the British partitioned the subcontinent and walked off. 

The Mighty Congress Loses

In substance, what happened during this election was very dramatic, but that drama was as strong a testimony for the strength of Indian democracy as the boring mechanical perfection of the process.

The Indian National Congress, which (with a brief interregnum some years ago) has been ruling the country for 60 years, came away with less than fifty seats in Parliament, hardly enough to control an opposition coalition, but even that came as no surprise.  It had been predicted for months. Congress has no new ideas, and the heir to the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty refused to step aside for more energetic leadership even though it has long been clear that he has no taste or talent for politics. 

So the mighty Congress lost massively, which is precisely what is supposed to happen when a once dominant political party loses relevance, and the reigning Gandhis conceded the loss, although (it’s said)  the Congress leadership lacked the grace to wish the winner well, which is regrettable. 

Nevertheless, one thing is clear: there will be no attempt to reverse the election, to undo the rejection, to prevent time from marching on.  The results of the election will not be contested, because they are not contestable.  The Indian Election Commission does a very good job.  This is no small thing. 

Now Another Drama begins. 

Narendra Modi won (which is to say his party the Bharatya Janata Party (BJP) ended up with the lion’s share of seats in the Lok Sabha) because Modi campaigned on revitalizing the Indian economy, although (no secret) his base consists of Hindu nationalists who have an agenda of Hindu supremacy.  Does this make Modi a proto-Nixon?  Nixon, a Republican, was able to resume diplomatic relations with China without being seen as soft on Communism, which implies ( in South Asian terms) that Modi might finally effect a rapprochment with Pakistan.  Maybe—and maybe not.  Meanwhile, Modi has invited Pakistan’s Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to attend his installation as PM and has further agreed to a tête-a-tête during the visit. 

However, because of his Hindu Nationalist ties—and his ambiguous role in some  horrendous Hindu-Muslim violence in his home state of Gujerat, Modi’s BJP lost 90% of the Muslim vote and most of the Christian vote as well.  He will need to calm the fears of minorities if he is to achieve his economic agenda, but his ideological constituency will be very unhappy if he fails to fulfill their very inflammatory agenda and quickly.  Fully satisfying everyone won't be possible.

Modi will also have to placate or reward, generously, farmers and tribal peoples if land is to be obtained for mineral extraction and industrial expansion without pouring more fuel on an already serious armed rebellion or giving rise to endless stalemate vis-à-vis local and state politics.  The BJP does not control all state Assemblies.  Moreover, only if marginalized, underskilled people can be persuaded to believe that they too will profit from a highly modernized version of economic progress will Modi be able to reform labor laws that protect workers in the short run while undermining the welfare of all in the long run.

And so on.  Land mine after land mine.

An Election Test Always Looms

Because Indians are eager for change, they held their noses and voted for Modi’s ideologically controversial party.  But results are expected, and the clock is ticking.  If Indian voters can throw out the Congress and the Gandhis, they can also cast Narendra Modi onto the dung heap of history.

  

It Works! The Fulbright Program Deserves More Support, Not Less

 By Patricia Lee Sharpe 

Approximately 325,400 intellectual leaders or leaders-in-the-making—122,800 from the United States, 202,600 from other countries—have participated in the Fulbright  Program since its inception in 1946.  The founding idea was that greater international understanding might help to prevent world wars like those that disfigured the first half of the 20th century, and maybe it has, though civil wars are still a serious problem.  Nevertheless, international understanding is the universal lubricant for the complex machinery of global interaction.  Blind ethnocentricity is increasingly a losing game.

Today the Fulbright Program is active in over 155 countries and awards about 8,000 grants annually.  Congress supported the program with  $242.8 million in FY 2013.  Some $80 million more comes through binational commissions or foundations in countries that share the Fulbright vision and have the resources to contribute.

A willingness to share costs! 

If that’s not proof of success, what is?  Clearly Congress should ignore any shortsighted suggestions to cut back on U.S. support for this universally applauded program.  What’s more, however viewed, whether as a part of the entire national  budget, as part of the national security budget or as part of the State Department budget, the Fulbright  program costs a pittance compared to the gratitude and respect it earns for the U.S. around the globe. 

America isn’t getting much of either these days.  Not much gratitude.  Not much respect.  We should treasure a program that everyone loves us for. 

Win-Win Educational Exchanges

Fulbright  grants insert U.S. teachers into the faculties of foreign institutions, exposing many thousands of foreign students to instructors who are American (and model American values) even if they aren’t teaching American studies as such.  Other American grantees do research around the globe, thus acquiring or strengthening the degrees or other certifications by which they can qualify as area studies professors at American colleges and universities.  Unexposed to such expertise, Americans might find it more difficult to wrap their minds around global issues,  and an ill-informed citizenry isn’t likely to understand or support a wise foreign policy.  Meanwhile, foreign grantees absorb American culture along with specialized training in the U.S.

Another plus: ex-Fulbrighters often land in the  recruiting pool for American national security agencies, all of  whose personnel need to understand other cultures if our foreign policy is to be soundly formulated and applied.  The latter process is facilitated if there are people in other countries, Fulbright alumni, for example, who know and sympathize with the U.S.  

Last but hardly least,  a truth we should never forget when we're seized by our recurrent anti-intellectual spasms: American leadership in the world depends very much on its intellectual leadership and the ability to deploy that expertise in world fora.  In this category the Fulbright program excels.

An Untarnished Reputation

And here’s the real magic: yes, the Fulbright program has served America well, but no one has ever been able to discredit the Fulbright program with the ugly label:  propaganda.  It’s intellectual integrity has survived for sixty years.   So where’s the downside of this program?

In short, with the world in the throes of chaos and major change, this is no time to withdraw serious support to a successful academic program.

So why (except for inertia) aren’t American beneficiaries, those tens of thousands of individuals, those colleges and universities and think tanks, why aren’t they all joining together to put more audible public pressure on Congress?  Why aren’t they shouting from the rooftoops, why aren’t they using every possible electronic medium, why aren’t they flocking with flags and banners to Congressional offices? Individuals have jobs they’d never have snagged if it weren’t for the benefits of a Fulbright experience.  Universities wouldn’t have been able to enrich their offerings with superb area studies programs conducted by first rate professors.   And this, too: American foreign affairs agencies would have had far fewer well-trained people to recruit.

Fulbright to Foreign Service

I’m one of those recruits, by the way.  When I speak in support of the Fulbright program,  I speak from long experience among grantees and administrators. 

I first went abroad as the young wife of a Fulbright student researching his Ph.D. dissertation in India.  During those two years I learned Hindi by sitting in on my husband’s Fulbright-funded language lessons and and learned it well enough to publish translations of Hindi short stories.  My second Fulbright experience was as the wife of a Fulbright professor in India, but my third was quite different.  While my husband was a Fulbright researcher looking into aspects of Pakistani politics, I was a Fulbright lecturer in American Literature at Lahore University in Pakistan.  Evidence of effectiveness: one of my Pakistani students earned a Ph.D in American literature and became a professor of same.  As for my ex-husband, the book form of his dissertation on the Indian National Congress is still in print.  He taught hundreds of American students about South Asia and maintained life long connections with South Asian colleagues—and his story is far from unique.  

Had it not been for my Fulbright experience in Pakistan, I’d never have joined the U.S. Foreign service.  As a U.S.I.S. cultural affairs officer or as branch or full public affairs officer, I oversaw the administration of the Fulbright process abroad.  Working with local leaders and institutions in India, Pakistan, Indonesia, Sierra Leone and the Dominican Republic, I sought the best and brightest and sent them to the U.S. for appropriate academic programs.  Coming home, these grantees became ambassadors for American higher education and also for bedrock American values such as those enshrined in the Bill of Rights.  Meanwhile, I worked to place well-prepared American Fulbrighters with local universities or other institutions for teaching or research.  With a very few exceptions, mostly due to rigidity on one side or the other, Fulbright pairings were productive for all parties.  And, thanks to the prestige of the Fulbright program,  my own list of valuable contacts grew longer and longer in every country.  

Bottom Line

Am I indulging in nostalgia or hyperbole?  Not at all.  Short term.  Long term.  The Fulbright program is one of the best investments the U.S. has ever  made—and, with the U.S. confronting so many complex international crises, this is no time to underfund it.

How to Humanize Inequality

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

Remember the “takers” and “makers” flap that fatally wounded Mitt Romney when he sought the presidency in 2012?

Takers and Makers

Romney, addressing a controlled-admission audience of his well off supporters, was explaining that lazy “takers” are dragging down the economy.  Too many people are on the dole, he confided.  A whopping 47% of the population, he declared, a massive accumulation of drones irresponsibly enjoying their too generous entitlements (food stamps, Medicaid, disability payments, etc.)  while the entrepreneurial few work long hard hours to create wealth.  It was quite a rant.  Fortunately, unbeknowst to Romney, his  comments were being recorded. His contempt for America’s less advantaged was reported, the report went viral, and one maker’s political career was over.

According to Romney, it seems, overcoming poverty and closing the income gap is a simple matter of character.  Get off your duff, work harder and you too will live the life of Riley, though how, without unions, you’ll pry economic justice out of the profiteers who can buy Congress is anyone’s guess.

Inequality

Today’s super star economist, Frenchman Thomas Picketty, begs to differ with maker Romney.  In his data-rich new book Capital, whose  title alone is red meat to conservative critics, Picketty concludes that extreme inequality results inevitably from massively unequal opportunities to save when capitalism reigns unregulated.  The well paid  accumulate surpluses  they can invest, after which they keep on investing, thus increasing their capital as well as their income.  A virtuous cycle, so to speak.  Since the working poor can’t save a sou, they fall ever further behind as time goes on.  Inequality expands, and the poor get  poorer, resulting in the vicious cycle within which the U.S. is currently trapped. 

Another French economist, the non-Picketty, so to speak, is more complacent.  He thinks the gap between rich and poor is less extreme, but not because the economic system, even as he sees it, works much more equitably for the poorly paid.  No, says Pierre Rosanvallon, in his new book The Society of Equals, the gap should be seen as smaller because Picketty forgot to consider the equalizing effect of entitlements.

Equalizing effect of entitlements? 

Agreed, conditionally.  Tax-supported programs give a boost to the desperately poor.  However, the inadequacy of America’s menu of assistance shouts out from demographic statistics. On the average, compared to those other industrialized countries, Americans have shockingly shorter life spans and dramatically higher maternal and neonatal mortality.  (The figures for Americans in the upper income brackets, those who can pay unaided the going rate for the good things in life,  mirrors that of their counterparts in Europe, Canada and Japan.) 

Note:  I’m concerned here with the working poor, the people who live prudently, work full time and are yet  so woefully underpaid that they and their families can’t survive without  public assistance.  The enfeebled elderly and the seriously disabled among  others may also need help, but living wage laws wouldn’t apply.  They fall into a different category of need, which I am not discussing here.   

So, what’s the difference between redistributing obscene over-concentrations of wealth via a fair, inflation-adjusted living wage and narrowing the gap by supplementing starvation wages with handouts from grudging taxpayers?

The Psychic Cost of the Wrong Equalizer

Simple.  It’s the difference between shame and pride, contempt and respect, receiving charity and being paid a fair wage for a good day’s work.  Disparities may continue, but the bottom rung has to  relate  humanely to the cost of living.

Guess what!  The rules are different for the rich.  Income on capital is taxed at a lower rate than earned income.  And ordinary people, unlike  greedy tycoons busily milking Congress for all we taxpayers are worth, get no respect if they accept government assistance to support themselves and their families.  When Mitt Romney, the arrogant self-satisfied taker, was pouring contempt on the so-called  takers, he wasn't referring to the never-satisfied beneficiaries of the farm subsidies lavished on agrobusiness, etc. , etc.  He meant the exploited workers who can’t make ends meet without extra help. 

In America, social welfare programs don’t equalize, you see.  They stigmatize the recipients.  Only a realistic living wage law can avoid or undo the psychic  harm.

Fighting Fear and Deception

Enforcing living wage laws would also make for a more rational, more accurate way of accounting for the real cost of  goods and services.  Instead, we customers are subjected to a very clever shell game: the burger is cheap, the tee shirt is cheap, but we haven’t finished paying when we leave the cash register.  We’ll owe more in taxes to provide assistance to those scandalously underpaid buger flippers and sales “assistants.” 

So who wins?  Not the workers.  Not the customers.  Investors may reap higher dividends and lovely capital gains, of course, but top management really rakes it in. Nine figure salaries—plus perks.  And golden parachutes.  Not exactly the food stamp crowd.  The star and serf system is all too prevalent in the capitalist economy of  twenty-first century America.

Naturally, those who profit most from the current system do their best to frighten voters away when the question of a living wage appears on the agenda of this or that city council.  If workers are paid more, the one per centers warn, prices will skyrocket and—the big tear crocodile jerker—workers will be laid off.

The Reality Check

Not really.  Cities that have instituted inflation-adjusted living wage laws do not report soaring prices or de-employment.  Santa Fe, New Mexico, among others, took the plunge some years ago.  Belief in economic justice defeated the inevitable fear tactics, and the citizens voted to pass the referendum.   As a result, in Santa Fe, the minimum wage already exceeds that which President Obama futilely proposed last year for the nation. 

Guess what?  The sky didn’t fall in.

Fulbright, International Exchanges and the Annual Budget Wars

Sound the alarm.  Call the troops to the battlefield of the annual budget wars currently underway in Washington. Here’s just one example: a poignant but less than fully historically accurate plea by a journalist on the program’s behalf. This year the venerable Fulbright program for academics and scholars is under threat of a 13% cut from Congress.  How can such a dramatic reduction be endured?

Chances are good that there will be a reduction of funds for the program but not by 13 percent because, you see, the Fulbright program benefits American scholars and students as well as foreign ones. American Fulbright alumni, their universities, the Board of Foreign Scholarships, the overseas Commissions, and IIE, the agency that operates the program under contract to the State Department here in the US, are being summoned to sound the clarion call to lobby Congress on the program’s behalf. 

The Key to Roll-Back

This US government supported program is one of the few international exchanges of people with dedicated and appreciative American alumni who can be reliably called upon to defend it before Congress time and time again. They are articulate, involved and concerned citizens. They also vote.

Yet a 13% cut, is not draconian – despite what its staunch program defenders argue.  The program has suffered far worse cuts in the past and survived – including a reduction of 28% in FY 1996 – after the US had decided that history had ended, it didn’t need to engage publics abroad, educate its own citizens about the world beyond its borders, or even have an agency that effectively administered US information and cultural programs overseas.

I remember it too well because I was Branch Chief for European Academic Exchanges in the then US Information Agency at the time. Not only was the European budget for Fulbright by far the largest Fulbright program budget in the world but European governments – especially, but not just Germany - were the most responsive in supporting the program with their own public and private sector funds – as I would guess and hope they still are.

Since far more Americans would prefer a Fulbright experience in Europe and European governments are the most financially and administratively supportive, it’s no surprise then that the European program has had by far the largest staff as well as budget for years.  I suspect that’s still the case.

The problem is, however, that as much as I support the Fulbright program, one that I defended and administered in the US and overseas throughout my 27 plus year Foreign Service career – particularly since Fulbright is a real exchange (not just a one way program for foreigners to come to the US and spend a few weeks touring the country and meeting their counterparts) - there are other factors that need to be considered and questions that need to be asked and answered in the context of the international exchanges budget in the bureau as a whole.

Let's not forget that since 9/11, the budget for State’s Bureau of Education and Cultural Affairs (ECA) has increased substantially more than just making up for the draconian cuts of the 1990s.

Now as the federal budget is again in a period of decline, what percentage of that decline affects the ECA bureau’s entire budget (don’t panic it’s been firewalled off from the overall State Department budget so funds from the Fulbright program cannot be diverted for use elsewhere in the department – or if that is happening just let me know and I too will sign the petition)?  Assuming, however, this is not the case, I would like to know whether Fulbright is being unduly penalized to cover increases in other ECA programs.   And if so why and which ones are among the more favored?

What is an exchange program:  one way or two?

I also support international youth exchanges which, for my money, are more cost effective and just as influential as Fulbright.  I think youth exchange should equally benefit American youth as well as foreigners – although with the exception of the Congress-Bundestag Youth Exchange (which I worked on in its formative years and which exchanges American and German youth for an academic year of study and family stays in each other’s countries) – have not benefited American teens as much as they should have because the emphasis for all but CBYX especially since the take-over of the Bureau by the State Department has been on bringing foreigners here – not also helping to send American teens to study and live with host families abroad. 

Kanishka in Kashgar: A Report from the Fringes of the Chinese Empire

 By Patricia Lee Sharpe

Note: Photos offer views of life in the few remaining wholly Uighur sections of Kashgar.  Central Asia immediately comes to mind.

April 30: News flash! Three dead, dozens injured, outside a RR station in Urumqi, capital of China’s “autonomous” Xinjiang region. 

Ok, who did it? Muslim extremists? Uighur separatists? Muslim extremists who happen to be Uighurs? Uighur separatists who happen also to identify as Muslims? No one has claimed responsibility, but it could have been any or all of the above. China’s attempt to absorb a reluctant Uighur minority into an undifferentiated “Chinese” mass and then, that policy having been ill-received, the decision to flood Xinjiang with Han Chinese have together provided more than enough reason for nationalists or theocrats to raise havoc. Uighur aspirations may be next to hopeless, but anger and resentment are hard to bottle up completely. Unhappy people take risks. They strike out.

I could have written this without going to China, but I wanted to see the situation in Xinjiang for myself.

Checking Out the Periphery

So, in mid-April, during my first and only visit to China, I spent a few days in Kashgar and Urumqi, two important cities in Xinjiang. In fact, even as I planned my tour of that country’s non-Han periphery, I’d wondered if I would be able to pull it off. For one thing, given my proposed itinerary, which also included Tibet, would Chinese officialdom issue the requisite visas and permits? Second, would violent protest force itinerary detours once I was in China? Would I, perhaps, end up eating scenery from the deck of a slow boat on the Yangse?

As it turned out, I completed my atypical itinerary, seeing and learning as much as I could, given the enormously frustrating fact that I can’t read or speak any version of Chinese. But I had excellent one-on-one tour guides, each rooted locally, each well-educated and articulate in English, each (to my surprise) quite independent-minded. Mere “minders” they were not, though each had also memorized an encyclopedic collection of facts and figures and was ready to reel off a “bigger, better, faster” spiel for the sites that were the “official” goals each day, including latitude, longitude, annual climate range and how many tons of concrete were needed for project X!

The Guides

Actually these spiels made me smile, thinking of how Americans used to sound, back in the days when we were bragging about the unrivaled marvels of American engineering (Skyscrapers! Wow!) and the blessings of a fairly unblemished American democracy. Still, verbal data dumps can be very tiresome. Fortunately, when I observed, courteously, that I’d already assimilated the basic dates and stats, the spiel would give way to conversation. Best of all, my questions, probing but not rude, got answered pretty candidly. (How did I know? Too complex to answer.)

Interestingly enough, wherever I went in China, I encountered a lack of curiosity about the U.S.  Although industrial (and other) espionage continues, I got the impression that, for many if not most ordinary educated Chinese, the era of learning from others is over. China is rich now (see all the skyscrapers, the highways, the railways—so many, built so fast!) and soon, despite the embittering humiliations of the 19th century, China will be reclaiming her rightful dominant position in the world.

Such arrogance! And how redolant of the American ego in the 20th century!

Language Policy

This striking absence of curiosity about things non-Chinese notwithstanding, I encountered far more English-speakers during my  China trip than I had expected. English, it seems, is the vehicle by which China has chosen to communicate with the rest of the world, a policy which greatly facilitated my navigation of the many glassy-glossy new (pride-inspiring) airports I flew in and out of. When I commented to one of my guides that English seemed to be China’s   de facto second language, she seemed a bit startled.  No.  More like offended, as if there were some thing insulting in my observation, but it’s true. 

And here, to return to my primary topic of Xinjiang, is an interesting tidbit re language: in Kashgar schools, the Uighur kids have to study Uighur and Chinese, while the Chinese kids are expected to study Chinese and English. This means that the local kids aren’t prepared to join the global community and the Han imports don’t have to adapt to the local culture.  More evidence of the extent to which the locals and their language get little respect or encouragement from their Han overlords.  Since the bombing noted above, Chinese President Xi has suggested that Beijing might import more talent from the minorities.  Belated cooptation? 

Meanwhile, Beijing has made a policy of asserting that the regime treasures the culture of all its minorities. Evidence of this? Mostly, so far as I could see, in museum dioramas featuring mannequins dressed in antiquated ethnic costumes, like those in the museum in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, where the remarkable Caucasian mummies excavated from the surrounding desert are also displayed.

The Wrecking Ball

As for the living culture in ancient Kashgar, what’s left on the street level? Very little, although some quaint remnants of history-laden Uighur   neighborhoods may be preserved for the delectation of tourists. (Think of artsy “old towns” in modernizing American cities.) Meanwhile, most of the “native” quarter gets systematically razed, and the unhappy but powerless inhabitants are scattered about in non-glitzy, new apartment buildings that look like warrens for the unwanted.  After all, a restive minority may be more easily controlled if it is both diluted and decentralized. (Read more here.  This piece on Kashgar appeared before I left for China. Having now walked those streets myself, I’ll vouch for it.)

Oh yes, I almost forgot: to make up for the literal block-busting in Kashgar, the authorities have erected enormous billboards depicting a sleek futuristic city in the making.  Open spaces are adorned with propaganda posters featuring lilies, dignified sages, smiling children and poems that promote peace and harmony.  How did I know?  My guides did a lot of translating and explaining that had nothing to do with pointing out exotic woods in imperial pavillions. 

On foot or driving through the countryside, I was asking: What does this sign say?  Who lives in this building?  What's the cost of a new apartment here? What are they growing? What's going on in this compound? Where's that smoke coming from? And questions like this: Where did your grandparents live and what did they do?  People everywhere love to talk about their families.  One of my guides praised Maoism for breaking open the class structure, thus allowing him and others of peasant  stock to get an eduction.  Another told how his professional family had been ruined.  Two sides of the same coin. No one was happy about the defacing and destruction of monuments and artifacts during the great cultural revolution.   

The Signs Say It

AlthoughUighurs of Kashgars have no effective control over the transformation of their ancient city and the Han imports get the best jobs, run the big retail operations and can afford the nicest new apartments, a cynical veneer of local autonomy is maintained. This includes, in Xinjiang, a two language policy. Commercial signs—on shops, for instance—must use the Uighur language as well as Chinese characters. And they do, after a fashion. With few exceptions, the Chinese characters are huge enough to be read at a distance; the Arabic script of Uighur is so tiny it comes across as a long, illegible squiggle.  I haven’t had time to process my pix, but check out this photo from the story about the incident mentioned above.

Back to matter of questions. I had to field one in Kashgar that astonished me. It came to light that I had spent a good amount of time in India, so the question was: What did I know about the Kushan empire?

Kanishka, at Last

Well, this: the Kushan empire lasted nearly 300 years, straddling the B.C/Common Era divide; it was powerful and huge, taking in most of today’s northern India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Kashmir, a good bit of Uzbekistan, the region around KASHGAR and much of the Silk Route. The Kushans spoke and wrote an Indo-European language; and their most famous leader, Kanishka, converting to Buddhism, ruled accordingly. Above all, the Kushans were NOT HAN.

My acquaintance took great pleasure in this information. Given the fact that there were strangers within earshot, I felt it was better not to ask him why.

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Here are two companion pieces from my recent China trip:

http://whirledview.typepad.com/whirledview/2014/05/kanishka-in-kashgar-a-report-from-the-fringes-of-the-chinese-empire.html

http://whirledview.typepad.com/whirledview/2014/06/red-flag-over-lhasa.htmlBeijing