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Unplugged in Urumqi

 

In fact, some Internet is available to the general public. Since late December, there has been a rollout so gradual that some folks on Twitter dubbed it the “Chinese water torture: Xinjiang Internet opens up – very, very, very s l o w l y.”

The first Web sites to be restored were two Chinese state-media outlets, Xinhua and the People’s Daily. They were followed by watered-down versions of two leading Chinese Web portals, Sina and Sohu. Last month, 27 more Web sites were restored.

Internet cafes are still largely closed, but what really puzzled me was how any business was getting done. Fax? Telex? 

An ethnic Chinese resident in Urumqi explained that his company – a sizeable Chinese venture with partners in Europe and the United States – had Internet and normal email services. All companies had to do, he said, was apply to authorities for the service. This did not automatically grant every employee in the company Internet access; they had to register with their managers in order to be able to use it. Once they did, however, they had the same Internet services available to the rest of the country.

Nevertheless, there seemed to be no registration option for travelers. At an international hotel chain, a letter from hotel management greeted us on arrival: “Please be kindly advised that all Internet service in Xinjiang is restricted to local Internet sites only, due to the current situation in Xinjiang.” 

During the National People’s Congress in Beijing earlier this month, provincial officials from Urumqi announced that full Internet service would be restored shortly. 

But those assurances were qualified. One Xinjiang functionary was quoted in the China Daily as saying, “Authorities should focus on managing the Internet more effectively when the service is fully resumed, so it won’t be used by criminals as a tool of communication.”

Keeping a tight lid on who?
The Internet restrictions have been the central feature of an overall clampdown on communications in Xinjiang since July. 

International calls and text message services to the region were only restored in January. But international calling cards have a 30-minute limit, and there’s a daily cap on how many texts one can send per day (answer: 20 – after being cut off on our Blackberries, we suddenly found ourselves keeping close count). 

“Everything we keep online – our email addresses, our phone numbers, you lose that, you can’t access it,” Josh Summers, an American teacher, told me. 

Summers, who lived in Xinjiang for four years and has just returned to the United States for an extended break, kept an informative blog about his experience on “Xinjiang, Far West China.”    

“For the people who are minorities, who are most likely to have families outside China – in Turkey or Kazakhstan, for example – not having international phone lines meant that you couldn’t contact your families.”

But it’s questionable whether the targets of Internet control are just Xinjiang’s main ethnic minority, the Uighurs. Chinese state-media reports have blamed last summer’s violence on Uighur separatist groups, but there’s another demographic that could be worrying the authorities.

“Some of it was the Uighurs,” said a U.S. official, who wished to remain anonymous. “But I think the real reason was that they wanted to stop the Han Chinese from organizing.”

Last September, an estimated 10,000 ethnic Chinese marched on the streets of Urumqi to protest against the local government’s handling of the July incidents. Witnesses were quoted as saying they felt let down by authorities, who had failed to protect them. Some placards went so far as to call for the ouster of Wang Lequan, the powerful Communist Party chief who has run Xinjiang for more than 15 years – longer than any other provincial party secretary.

But from the surface today it was hard to tell any of this.

 

Underlying tensions
The Chinese we met in Urumqi, for the most part, insisted that everything was back to normal. (Unlike their counterparts elsewhere in China, who still express alarm about the region. Whenever we mentioned our upcoming trip to local Chinese, their reaction was uniform, “Oh, but it’s still so dangerous there. Aren’t you worried?”)

On the surface, in Urumqi, the “back to normal” claims seem to be well-founded and there was nothing to suggest anything untoward. No extra police, no military – apart from one little shack on a main thoroughfare.

But some indications do suggest that all is not well – for example, the extra layer of security taken on by individual businesses. 

Our hotel had a new machine to screen bags. An office we went to film on the outskirts of the capital had a stack of electric cattle prods lying on a windowsill, and they kept the front door chained shut. I saw none of this kind of concern at the height of pre-Summer Olympic security preparations in Xinjiang in 2008.

“There’s no actual sense that something is unsafe,” said Summers. “But if you talk to a Uighur person or a Han person, they’ll say they’re afraid to go down to that restaurant or that area because it’s Uighur or Han.”