The Emperor Far Away Read Online Free Page B

population, up from just 220,000 in 1947. For the Uighurs, it is the equivalent of 25 million Poles arriving in the UK, or 120 million Mexicans migrating to the USA, and taking charge of the economy, while refusing to employ the natives and demanding they learn to speak Polish or Spanish.
    ‘The government has sent more money to Xinjiang, but they’ve also sent more Han and they’re taking all the work. Their lives are getting better and ours are getting worse and worse. It’s the same in all cities in Xinjiang. Of course we feel angry about it,’ said Billy. Nor is there any sign of that hatred diminishing. While I was in Urumqi, a Uighur man drove an electric cart into a crowd in the city of Aksu in western Xinjiang, and detonated a bomb that killed seven people.
    With little chance of being employed by a Han company, most well-qualified Uighurs like Billy look for work with the Xinjiang government. Local authorities are huge employers all over China. But jobs with them are especially prized at the edges of the country where state-owned companies, which in Xinjiang means Chinese-staffed ones, are far more prevalent than the private enterprises found in the eastern cities. The fact that Billy didn’t attend the mosque was another point in his favour. Under Chinese law, no government worker can practise a religion of any kind.
    Yet Billy held back from applying for positions which would guarantee him, and his family, a better life. He claimed it was because he despised the Han. ‘I hate them, I do. I’ve hated them since I was a kid,’ he said in his mild way. Listing the litany of complaints the Uighurs have against the Chinese like an imam intoning the Koran, Billy seemed to have lost all hope for the future and thought Uighurs who crave an independent state were just dreaming.
    ‘A lot of Uighurs say they want independence. They look at Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan and wonder why we’re not like those countries. It’s only Uighurs who don’t have their own country with our own traditions and cultures. But we lost our place a long time ago. The Han are too strong. They have all the power and all the weapons,’ Billy said. ‘I think two things will have happened in twenty years’ time. Either the Uighurs are over, finished, and we are assimilated, or another country like the US helps us. Maybe if the Americans fight China we can get our own country.’
    Many Uighurs express similarly apocalyptic sentiments: that it will take either China’s economy collapsing, or a world war, for them to gain independence. It is an unlikely scenario. Xinjiang acts as a strategic shield between China and central Asia and Russia and, more importantly, has vast reserves of coal, oil and natural gas that are immensely valuable to China, the most energy-hungry country in the world. Losing them would be a huge blow, one which Beijing would do anything to prevent.
    It is for that reason that Xinjiang has effectively been ruled by the gun since the communist takeover. In September 1949, the residents of Urumqi were ordered to the airport, or face being shot, to greet the first planeloads of soldiers from the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). Their commander was General Wang Zhen, who would later rise to be vice-president of China. A Long March veteran and diehard Maoist, Wang was notorious for his unreconstructed opinions. After the pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square in June 1989, he suggested exiling what he described as ‘bourgeois-liberal intellectuals’ to Xinjiang.
    Wang oversaw the massive increase in Han migration that occurred after 1950 at the behest of Mao Zedong. It was empire expansion on a grand scale with millions of former PLA troops and their defeated opponents in the nationalist army heading west. Mao recognised that as long as the Chinese remained a tiny minority in Xinjiang they would always be vulnerable to Uighur insurrection. Ensuring that didn’t happen made Wang infamous. Even some Han historians