Asia Times, 10 January 2012
By Michael Rank

If the name Yining means anything at all to the outside world, it means inter-ethnic strife. This remote city in the far western Chinese region of Xinjiang was rocked in 1997 by riots, officially said to have been fomented by drug addicts, thieves and other “social garbage”, but viewed by the outside world as the result of Chinese repression of Uyghur and other ethnic groups who are being increasingly outnumbered by Han Chinese.

It was very much with the city’s troubled history in mind that Nick Holdstock, who had spent a year teaching in central China, got

himself a job, also as an English teacher, in the mysterious Yining in 2001.

Holdstock admits that he found probing into the background to the unrest much more interesting than teaching the niceties of English grammar, and in this lively and highly readable book he provides some valuable insights into the fraught relations between the Han and mainly Uyghur inhabitants of this so-called autonomous region.

The Chinese even use time to enforce their rule in Xinjiang, absurdly including the province in the same time zone as Beijing even though its regional capital, Urumqi lies some 2,400 kilometers west of the national capital. The author calls this arrangement “farcical”, and adopted the Uyghur custom of setting his watch two hours earlier than the official time, making the sun in winter rise sensibly at around 7.30 am rather 9.30 am as the Communist Party prescribes.

Holdstock soon discovered that, both contributing to the tension and reflecting it, Han and Uyghur students lived remarkably separate lives, with dormitories ethnically segregated and canteens also separate because of the Muslim taboo on eating pork. “The Han and Uyghur students didn’t talk to each other or play sport together. They certainly did not date. But despite this separation, there was little visible rancor. It was more likely they were trying to pretend each other did not exist,” he writes.

Which at one level at least makes the unrest that has periodically rocked Xinjiang over the last few decades all too easy to understand, and suggests there is little hope for a peaceful resolution to the conflict.

Holdstock made plenty of Uyghur and Kazakh friends in Yining, ranging from Islamic dogmatists to relaxed, beer-drinking soulmates, but he was surprised and puzzled to find his Han Chinese colleagues and students cool and standoffish, even though he had had no trouble making Han friends when he taught in Hunan province.

He doesn’t seem to have got to the bottom of this, although he did eventually discover over a drunken meal with his boss that he was able to make many more friends off-campus than on because students were allowed to visit his room only in groups of three or more and teachers only if accompanied by a colleague.

This was apparently because a few years earlier a Norwegian teacher had used his classes to proselytize for Christianity, activity that is banned under Chinese law, although Holdstock reports that there are large numbers of missionaries in Xinjiang and the authorities, surprisingly, often turn a blind eye to their activities.

He had been in Yining only a few weeks when the September 11, 2001, attacks occurred in the United States, after which he and two other foreign teachers were summoned to meet the president of the college, who warned them to be alert to “a small group of separatists” who were out to cause trouble, that there were a few Taliban around, and that he and his colleagues were prime targets for kidnapping.

The 9/11 attacks also encouraged conspiracy theories among the Uyghur, and Holdstock quotes one Uyghur friend who tells him the Chinese could have been to blame, which would mean that “The Americans will fight the Chinese. They will win and then we will be free.”

Relations between Han and Uyghurs could hardly be helped by the small number of non-Han Chinese admitted to university – only four out of 350 students in the English department of Holdstock’s college (although there were higher numbers of Kazakhs).

This is partly because, although non-Han need lower exam scores to enter university, they are, to balance this reverse discrimination, admitted only in alternate years.

The system is opaque and the book doesn’t really cut through the opacity, but it’s so vividly written that one doesn’t mind.

Holdstock, an atheist, makes it clear that he loathed some of his covert missionary colleagues, going so far as reporting them to the university authorities, who made it clear that, unlike usually when a crime is committed in China, they will not act without hard evidence.

Some readers may be appalled by the author’s behavior in reporting on his fellow teachers, and I was surprised how he makes no apology for what could easily be regarded as stabbing colleagues in the back.

The fact that the book is written in 119 chapters (plus an Afterword) makes it easy to take up and put down, but also makes it rather bitty and slightly scattergun. For some obscure reason, the author occasionally refers to himself in the second person, which is disconcerting and pointless, and he makes a few factual errors (Nanjing is the capital of Jiangsu province, not Jiangxi, and Manichaeism is hardly an early Christian sect as he claims in some potted historical background).

Things have no doubt changed in Yining since Holdstock left 10 years ago, but this book is certainly a vivid eye-witness account of everyday life in one of the remotest areas of China.

The tree that bleeds: a Uyghur town on the edge by Nick Holdstock. Luath Press Ltd (Jun 2011). ISBN 978-1906817640. Price US$20, 358 pages.

Michael Rank was a British Council student in China from 1974 to 1976 and a Reuters correspondent in Peking 1980-1984. He is now a journalist and Chinese-English translator living in London.

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