[In 2010, Mr. Sabrié and I arrived in Kashgar after a long overland trip from the Wakhan Corridor of Afghanistan. Following days of driving through the mountains of Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, we experienced the same wonder that travelers must have felt centuries ago — at the bustling markets, the food stalls redolent with kebabs and cumin and the cool alleyways winding among mud-walled homes. The town was boisterous: Eid al-Fitr, the three-day feast celebrating the end of Ramadan, was starting.]
By Edward Wong
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Police officers on patrol
in Kashgar, China, checked the identification documents of
passers-by in December.
These two passers-by happened to be plainclothes
policemen. Credit Gilles
Sabrie for The New York Times
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KASHGAR,
China — The five policemen
in black uniforms surrounded the young man and his friend on the sidewalk.
The man, an ethnic Uighur, pulled out
identification. The policemen had been unaware that he was one of their own —
an officer, but in plainclothes.
The man, whose name my companions and I would
later learn was Rexat Yusuf, had been following us since we left our hotel in
Kashgar, a Silk Road oasis town in the deserts of far west China. From the
start, we could tell he and his companion, who was of the dominant Han ethnicity,
were policemen assigned to watch us.
On our stroll, we reached the rebuilt
ramparts of the old city wall and climbed stairs to take photographs. The two
men waited at the bottom, and that was when the police patrol confronted them.
When we walked down minutes later, the same
patrol turned its attention to us. They asked for our identification. Because I
was renewing my journalist visa, I did not have my passport on me — it was in
the hands of the Beijing police unit overseeing visas. They had given me a
temporary travel document that I had left in our hotel.
Officials said they were trying to prevent
violent, anti-state episodes in Uighur areas, which they attributed to
separatism, terrorism and religious extremism. The greatest outburst took place
in 2009, when ethnic rioting in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, the autonomous
region where Kashgar is located, resulted in about 200 deaths. Uighur advocates
say the harsh security measures fuel resentment.
I flew to Kashgar for a last look because it
is a touchstone in my relationship with China. For me, as for travelers through
the centuries, this town in the heart of Central Asia has been a crossroads and
a gateway. It is a bridge between interior China and the Eurasian continent,
with its Islamic lands. It even lay closer to my former bureau in Baghdad than
to my current one in Beijing, 2,500 miles away.
My first encounter with Kashgar was in the
summer of 1999, when, after graduate school, I backpacked overland from Hong
Kong to New Delhi. Kashgar was my gateway out of China then — a final stop
before taking the glacier-flanked Karakoram Highway through the Pamir Mountains
into Pakistan. I boarded a bus with other travelers from the Chini Bagh Hotel,
on the site of the former British Consulate.
I did not return to Kashgar until August
2008, months after arriving in China for The New York Times. I and other
members of the Beijing press corps flew to Kashgar to report on a bizarre assault
that had resulted in the deaths of at least 16 paramilitary officers.
I went back that autumn during a trip across
southern Xinjiang to report on restrictions on Islam. My companion, Xiyun Yang,
and I ended up in the apartment of a retired Uighur policeman and chatted with
his son about Western television shows.
In 2010, Mr. Sabrié and I arrived in Kashgar
after a long overland trip from the Wakhan Corridor of Afghanistan. Following
days of driving through the mountains of Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, we
experienced the same wonder that travelers must have felt centuries ago — at
the bustling markets, the food stalls redolent with kebabs and cumin and the
cool alleyways winding among mud-walled homes. The town was boisterous: Eid
al-Fitr, the three-day feast celebrating the end of Ramadan, was starting.
That year, officials were razing most of the
old town. Half-destroyed homes stood in dirt lots. When I arrived months ago on
my final trip, those parts of the old town had been rebuilt. There were wide
avenues and new concrete buildings. It was easier now for the police to monitor
the streets and deploy large units.
The police surveillance made a greater
impression on me than anything else. On earlier trips, I had not noticed being
followed by the police, even after hotels had handed copies of our visas to the
local police station. This time, I saw Mr. Yusuf and his companion tailing us
as soon as we walked out of the Chini Bagh Hotel.
That was nothing compared with the police
foot patrols, though. We ran into the first one in a market north of the Id Kah
Mosque. A couple of ethnic Han officers stopped us to ask for documents. They
zeroed in on Mr. Sabrié, the obvious foreigner in our group. He pulled out his
French passport, and they let us go.
Within an hour, we were confronted at the
city ramparts by another patrol. That was the one that had mistakenly hassled
Mr. Yusuf. They put us into their van when I said I did not have my travel
document. After a wait at the station, Mr. Yusuf showed up. “What are you doing
in Kashgar?” he asked in fluent English. He looked at the photos on Mr.
Sabrié’s camera and told him not to shoot anything related to the police or the
military.
Then they drove us back to the hotel so I
could show them my travel paper. We passed a grassy clearing by the ramparts.
“I took wedding photos there,” Mr. Yusuf said.
After I got the document from my room, they
said we were free to go. But Mr. Yusuf said he would keep an eye on us.
“Kashgar can be dangerous for foreigners,” he said. “We want to make sure you
are safe.”
Having covered the Iraq war for three and a
half years, I had some awareness of risk, and I never got the sense of being in
danger anywhere in Xinjiang.
We wandered more around the old city. A
plainclothes police detail of five followed us. When we glanced back, they
lowered their heads and pretended to check their phones.
The next day, a Uighur guide named Abdul
Wahid took us around Kashgar. We went first to the outdoor animal market,
outside town. When I first visited Kashgar, in 1999, the market had been in the
city center. There, Uighur, Kazakh, Kyrgyz and Tajik herders haggled over
horses, donkeys, sheep and camels. Our guide said the market had moved twice
since.
Mr. Yusuf and other officers followed us
around. We sat down to eat a bowl of noodles.
“Business is very good here, better than at
the old place,” said Kerimaji, the noodle seller, who had been working in the
market for 34 of his 62 years.
That afternoon, we walked inside the
15th-century Id Kah Mosque, where young men stabbed to death the imam in 2014.
We passed through metal detectors. In the courtyard, I noticed surveillance
cameras above paths. The same cameras were present throughout the old city.
In the plaza in front of the mosque, I saw a
mobile police station and officers milling around. One officer walked up to
Abdul Wahid and asked him for his papers. Abdul Wahid said he was taking us
foreigners around. The policeman then turned and walked over to a long line of
Uighur men whom he had rounded up. He led them away to register them.
What I saw was happening across Xinjiang. In
late 2016, regional officials established thousands of mobile police stations
and deployed tens of thousands of policemen to staff them, according to an
article last December in Foreign Affairs by two scholars, James Leibold and Adrian
Zenz. The Xinjiang party chief, Chen Quanguo, was putting in place the same
grid policing system he had used in Tibet.
Back at the hotel, I said goodbye to our
guide. An American diplomat I had met in Beijing was checking in.
In the evening, we took a final stroll. We
stopped at a carpet shop owned by the father of Abdul Wahab, a young Uighur man
who visited Beijing to sell carpets and whom I knew. He had just been in
eastern China and was on his way back to Kashgar to get married, but his flight
had been grounded in Urumqi because of fog. We would not see him on this trip.
As Abdul Wahab’s father, Ahmad, showed us
carpets, Mr. Yusuf walked into the room. A couple of police tails lingered
outside. Ahmad spread out a few carpets. Some had the classic pomegranate
design native to Xinjiang. I began negotiating for one.
“I think that’s a good one,” Mr. Yusuf said,
pointing to the piece that had caught my eye. But he shook his head at the
price.
Mr. Yusuf and his colleagues trailed us when
we left. We went into a restaurant to have a kebab dinner. They did not follow
us inside, and we saw no sign of them for the rest of the night.
Vanessa Piao contributed research.