For at least 250 years, Beijing has treated the vast region -- more than four times the size of Germany -- as alternately a conduit and a buffer. "Diverse goods converge like the spokes on a wheel," the official He Sen wrote of Xinjiang in 1784, not long after the Qing dynasty had claimed the region as part of its empire and begun to transform Urumqi, formerly a Han military encampment in a land traditionally home to Uighurs, into a proper walled city. When times were good with the USSR in the 1950s, Urumqi and Xinjiang became a staging ground for cooperation, including joint air force training and oil exploration; and when they were bad, after the Sino-Soviet split, the Soviet engineers closed up the wells and withdrew.
In 1994, the Soviet threat removed, Prime Minister Li Peng declared China's intention to "open up a modern version of the Silk Road." Soon Urumqi became the focal point of Beijing's investment and planned transportation links, the hub of its western development strategy. Today the paved road from Urumqi to Yili takes 10 hours, not 24. New rail lines have opened between Urumqi and Altay, and between Kashgar and Hotan, and there's even talk of extending the Urumqi-Kashgar rail line all the way to Istanbul. There's also a plan floated to build a rail link between Urumqi and the port of Gwadar in Pakistan. The overall goal, as Professor Zhang put it, is "to integrate Central Asia into China, not the other way around" -- to keep Xinjiang's economy "at least 20 percent stronger" than neighboring countries so that investment and people flow into, not out of, western China.
Some neighborhoods in Urumqi today look astonishingly modern, at least from the outside. (When I arranged to meet one young professional, she told me: "I would like to invite you to our house, but the electricity is out. I do not know when it will be back on." We went to a restaurant instead.) A high-end shopping street marks the city center; that's where you'll find the Southern China Airlines Pearl Hotel and the large Gucci billboards. Near the airport is the corridor known as the "Economical and Technological Development Zone," where Urumqi's building boom is most evident: Row after row of high-rise apartments ensconced in construction scaffolding; a new sports stadium; a monumental China Telecom building, and new police station. Perhaps surprisingly for a city known for its coal-darkened winters, Urumqi also has one of the most impressive rapid bus transit systems in China, with covered stations, automated tellers, and a fleet of new buses that look packed most hours of the day.
Another example of the government's investment is the Xinjiang Institute of Ecology and Geography, a research center under the Chinese Academy of Sciences focused on arid climates; in purely geologic terms, Xinjiang is more appropriately regarded as an extension of Central Asia than of China. The institute has seen its operating budget grow quickly in recent years, exceeding $30 million in 2010, a staff member told me, with more than 1,000 employees. Inside the new building complex, the laboratory director, wearing jeans, a white lab coat, and waving a cigarette in one hand, explained that its function was both scientific and strategic, as it was now forging partnerships with scientists in neighboring countries, on everything from meteorological monitoring to glacier studies. "We are the bridge to Central Asia," he told me.
Alas, Urumqi's new wealth has not been evenly distributed. The man appointed in 1994 to be Xinjiang Party Secretary was Wang Lequan; until his ouster following the 2009 ethnic riots in Urumqi, which left roughly 200 people dead, he was a chief architect of Xinjiang's modernization: well-connected, savvy and adept at wrangling funding from Beijing. He was also a hardliner whose policies toward ethnic minorities -- including restricting religious fasting, praying, and other observances in schools and government offices -- earned him no love from the city's Uighur Muslims. One professor told me that the most harmful result of his policies was to systematically deny Uighurs opportunities and promotions in government agencies. If Han and Uighur were more or less equal when everyone was poor -- back when Uighur trucker Dilshat Yimirhan first moved to the city -- the gap grew quickly as Urumqi grew richer. The Asian Development Bank has found income inequality to be higher in Xinjiang than any other Chinese province or autonomous zone, with new Han Chinese arrivals disproportionately reaping the benefits of modernization.
Urumqi today is a divided city. Government investment is flowing into the northern part of the city, but the southern part, the Uighur corridor, has seen little development since the 2009 riots. One Saturday evening, I went to a Uighur wedding, held in a third-floor hotel ballroom, with fraying rugs and chipping paint. The guests, dressed in everything from gowns to jeans, danced to a mix of pulsing techno music and traditional Uighur songs; groomsmen sprayed the happy couple with silly string from a can. The bride and groom had met at Xinjiang University, and although they and their guests were also mostly well educated, they lived in a world apart; there were no Han Chinese guests. (As a Han friend put it: "Even in the same city, Han and Uighur barely talk to each other; segregation is not an ongoing process, it is a fact.")
Another afternoon I visited the famous Border Hotel complex, where Central Asian traders come to do business. Typically, I was mistaken for Russian. With me was a young Uighur guide, whose own language is close enough that he can understand most Central Asian languages. But as we entered one hotel lobby, the doorman, a pale, sweaty Han Chinese man with a receding hairline and a nervous manner, stopped him: "What are you doing? Where are you going?" Behind us, an assortment of unshaven Uzbeks, Kazakhs, and Tajiks passed by unmolested. "To be Uighur is to be under constant suspicion," my guide hissed through his teeth. I could easily see that a negative feedback loop was at work. He waited for me outside, puffing nervously on his cigarette; when I came back, he complained: "It's getting worse."
I asked if he'd ever been to any of the bordering countries, but he shook his head. "I can't get a passport." Fearful that Uighurs will radicalize if they travel abroad, the government has limited their ability to cross borders -- a policy that raises the uncomfortable question of just who is supposed to benefit from the "New Silk Road" strategy.
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