Fu has the air of a well-worn traveler, and already seems much older than he is. "All my classmates back in China who have never left, they tell me: ‘Your mind is very wild now.' It is true. If you visit different countries, different cultures, different languages, your mind changes ... In China, people just know Africa from TV. But if you go there yourself, walk the land, meet the people, you can know something that is real."
Urumqi: The Forever Crossroads
China's far western region of Xinjiang follows its own time. Officially, all of China recognizes a single time zone, but Urumqi's clocks are set two hours behind -- referred to unofficially as "Xinjiang time." It's just one more example of the ways in which history here has tended to move in fits and starts, out of sync, both accidentally and by design.
Each evening at sunset, the adhan, or Islamic call to prayer, briefly fills the streets of Xinjiang's capital, before being overtaken by the modern static of traffic noise and blaring horns. About this time one May evening, I met with Dilshat Yimirhan, a 57-year-old Uighur businessman, who ushered me into a restaurant in the city's minority district. The temperature had dropped quickly after sunset; in dry desert climates, temperatures swing dramatically between hot days and chill nights, and Urumqi is the farthest city in the world, in all directions, from any ocean.
In 1972, Yimirhan, then 17, had moved to Urumqi from the northern Xinjiang city of Altay, which today borders Russia, Kazakhstan, and Mongolia; he was soon assigned a government job repairing trucks for the Xinjiang import-export service. (For all the ills of the Cultural Revolution, he didn't feel that being a minority was an obstacle to finding work; before the recent influx of Han Chinese, "most people were still Uighurs" in Xinjiang.) At that time, China's relations were "very bad" with the Soviet Union, which shared hundreds of miles of closed border with the region. "Only the border with Pakistan was open." The trucks Yimirhan fixed took 24 hours to drive on bad roads to the border. At a drop-off point, the Chinese drivers handed over small manufactured goods in exchange for fur and raw materials.
For the next two decades, extraordinarily little changed in Urumqi, he recalled, pouring himself a second cup of Turkish tea. Even after the rest of the country began to modernize in 1979, Xinjiang was left deliberately dormant; its roads, rail lines, and airports were neglected, lest building infrastructure prove "a liability in the event of a Soviet invasion," as Xinjiang University professor Liang Zhang later explained to me. For many years, the tallest building was just eight stories, used for government conferences. The streets were narrow and quiet, with only the occasional rumble of Beijing jeeps shuttling officials between meetings.
But with the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, history, having been frozen in time, suddenly lurched forward. The long border went from being Xinjiang's biggest liability to its greatest asset. Within two years, borders had opened with 16 countries, and Yimirhan, who had by then been promoted to a driver, was soon driving across them. He recalls his first time navigating the "beautiful and frightening" hairpins turns of the famous Karakorum highway. (His 30-year-old daughter, translating for him, smiled at her father's youthful excitement.)
Sensing a power vacuum in Central Asia, Beijing soon turned its attention to strengthening economic and political ties with its western neighbors, as well as investing to extract Xinjiang's rich reserves of coal, gas, copper, and other minerals. If China's modern construction boom came 15 years late to Urumqi, building is now on overdrive here, for economic and political reasons: a 21st century form of manifest destiny.
Xinjiang is often compared to America's old Wild West, but while the American frontier was closed within a few decades, Xinjiang has been the frontier for centuries.
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