The Emperor Far Away Read Online Free Page A

speak as their first language, let alone write.
    Billy, though, was one of the Uighurs who had benefited from the special policies for minorities. He spent two years at Xinjiang University, before transferring to a college in Shanghai. After graduating, he worked briefly for a property company in the north-east of China, but soon returned to Urumqi. ‘You can’t get good Uighur food there,’ he said of the east. At twenty-seven, Billy had never held down a job for very long and was still looking for the main chance he was convinced was out there for him. His latest scheme was operating an ad hoc airline ticket agency with a friend.
    Like all Uighurs his age, Billy attended an all-Uighur junior school, before going to a mixed high school. Now the government has banned Uighur-only education and insists that all of Xinjiang’s ethnic groups attend the same schools as the Han. It is another source of resentment for the Uighurs. ‘At Chinese school, you only learn Chinese history, no Uighur history,’ Billy explained. ‘And it’s very hard to find a book in China on Uighur history. We have to hear it from our parents and grandparents.’
    Along with many other locals, Billy was convinced that making Uighur kids attend Han schools was a deliberate attempt by the authorities to dilute Uighur identity. ‘I’ve been walking down the street and heard two Uighur kids speaking Chinese to each other. Chinese! What do you think of that? It makes me really sad. It’s the result of making them go to Chinese school. If our language dies out, then so will the Uighur nation,’ said Billy.
    During the twilight days of the Qing dynasty, the Chinese also tried to make Uighur children learn Mandarin, going so far as to keep the reluctant pupils in school by chaining them to their desks. It was part of an attempt to sinicise the Uighurs which has never really stopped. In what has been described as the Confucian Man’s Burden, the Han felt it was their duty to civilise their conquered subjects. Essentially, that meant making them more like the Han. In the parlance of the time, the barbarian minorities were either shufan , cooked and therefore tame, or shengfan , raw and savage.
    Defiantly uncooked, the Uighurs needed to be grilled. Han officials flooded into the region and demanded an allegiance and respect that was enforced by the sword. Intermarriage with Chinese immigrants was encouraged, but the matches made were few and far between. The Qing’s time was almost past, though, by the time Xinjiang became a full province of China, and the locals never took to Confucius. When the Han finally rejected thousands of years of imperial rule in 1912 and the Qing dynasty collapsed, Xinjiang split once more into the fiefdoms which were its natural state whenever the Chinese weren’t around.
    Even today, few Uighurs speak and write fluent Mandarin. I thought it would surely help future generations if they knew the language properly. Billy dismissed that with a wry smile. ‘I speak and write good Chinese,’ he pointed out. Indeed, Billy was one of the Uighurs who, if the CCP’s propaganda is to be believed, should be reaping the benefits of government investment in Xinjiang. Huge amounts of money have been pumped into the region in an effort to quell Uighur unrest by raising their living standards.
    Who benefits from that largesse is a different matter, because it is the Han who control the local economy. Chinese companies claim they cannot employ Uighurs because so few of them speak Mandarin, or else they insist the Uighurs prefer to work with each other. Either way, the result is economic apartheid. Just 1 per cent of the work force of the booming oil and natural gas industries, which account for over half of Xinjiang’s GDP, are Uighurs.
    That disparity between the prospects of the locals and those of the Chinese migrants fuels the conflict between them. There are now eight million-plus Han in Xinjiang, or over 40 per cent of the