Xinjiang is important to China not only because of what is beneath the ground—the country’s largest gas deposits and considerable oil—but also because of what moves across the ground. Much of China’s imports and some of its exports must pass through Xinjiang. A new rail line, already called the New Silk Road, is faster than shipping through the Suez Canal. Just as important, China increasingly gets its gas and oil through pipelines that cross Xinjiang west to east. If a reasonable, just, and humane solution to the “East Turkestan” problem is not found, China can expect the Uighur rebels to graduate from knives to explosives that can cut those rail and pipe lines.
Unlike the United States, which has no offshore neighbors able to interfere with its merchant shipping or the movements of its navy, China is not blessed with a safe and open coastline. A glance at a map shows that China’s coastline, though long and variegated, would not be particularly advantageous during periods of tension or conflict. China is still very dependent on oil from the Middle East that must pass through the Strait of Hormuz, which could easily be closed by the United States in the event of conflict with China. Any goods China imports (e.g., 82 percent of its crude oil) or exports by sea also have to run the gauntlet of the Strait of Malacca, also easy to choke off, not to mention passing several countries with which China has territorial conflicts: Vietnam, the Philippines, South Korea, and Japan. And then of course there is always Taiwan—that “unsinkable aircraft carrier”[354] off China’s coast, to use General Douglas MacArthur’s still relevant phrase.
In the event of serious conflict at sea, the western provinces, especially Xinjiang, will attain exceptional significance as the primary conduits of energy and raw materials for China. Then China’s survival will depend in large part on how well it has solved its Uighur problem. One example of how China is failing to solve that problem is Kashgar, the main city of the Uighur region. In the days of the Silk Road merchants traveling west from China would encounter a huge, forbidding desert called Taklimakan, meaning “Go In No Come Out.” At that point the Silk Road split into two routes, one skirting the desert from the north, the other from the south, with both reuniting in Kashgar. Fearing the role the city could play in a Uighur resurgence, the Chinese, under the pretext of earthquake safety, are currently dismantling Kashgar’s ancient labyrinth of streets and exiling their inhabitants to cheap, sterile high-rises where their culture dies.
The Uighurs are unlike the Tibetans, whose cause is better known because of the genial Dalai Lama and the support of Buddhism-embracing celebrities. The Uighurs have no such leader, no such followers. On the other hand, Tibet is for all its publicity still a world apart, whereas the Uighurs belong to the one-billion-plus Muslim world community and are subject to all that has convulsed that world in recent years. And China’s policy of “Strike hard” against the “three evils” of terrorism, separatism, and extremism has been applied too indiscriminately on the Uighurs. Beards have been forbidden, government employees forced to work and eat on holy days. And it is almost a given that where the green flag is trampled the black flag will soon be raised.
Dangerous enough in itself, the “East Turkestan” problem now has its force multiplied by events developing in Central Asia.
“The Kazakhs never had any statehood,”[355] said President Putin in August 2014 in what seemed a backhanded compliment to Kazakhstan’s President Nursultan Nazarbayev, whom Putin was trying to credit for creating “a state in a territory that never had a state before.”[356] These remarks caused outrage and alarm in Kazakhstan, especially in the wake of the Ukrainian incursion, which had been based in part on a similar sentiment. There are certain obvious and ominous similarities between the two countries. After the fall of the USSR both countries had voluntarily surrendered their nuclear weapons. At the time Kazakhstan had some fourteen hundred, making it the number four nuclear power in the world. However, as in the case of Ukraine, those weapons were not really operational, their codes being controlled by Moscow; but they could be repurposed for other weapon types or, falling into terrorist hands, be used for dirty bombs. Putin’s declaring neither country a real state, dubious in the case of Ukraine, is less so vis-à-vis Kazakhstan, since its people were mostly pastoral nomads until the Soviet era. Both Kazakhstan and Ukraine had significant clusters of populations that were Russian-speaking and/or identified as Russians. As a progressive twenty-first-century authoritarian, Putin would never use old-fashioned Stalinist methods of swallowing nations whole, preferring only to slice off the tranche that could be justified and would prove the most useful to his strategic aims. In his attitude toward Kazakhstan Putin derives a certain moral authority from the writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, on whom he bestowed the country’s highest award, the State Prize of the Russian Federation, in 2007. In Rebuilding Russia, written in 1990, Solzhenitsyn advocated a new post-Soviet state shorn of the burdens of empire and consisting of Russia, Belarus, parts of Ukraine, including Crimea, and the north and east of Kazakhstan, which he contends were “actually part of southern Siberia.”[357]
Often described as more than four times the size of Texas (though it’s hard enough to imagine the size of one Texas), Kazakhstan has copious quantities of gas, oil, and gold, and its uranium reserves rank second only to Australia’s. It sells fifty-five thousand tons of uranium to China a year, supplying nearly half its needs. China’s New Silk Road passes right through Kazakhstan, bringing goods to the market in the Netherlands two weeks faster than by sea. Energy flows to China through Kazakhstan. China has been assiduous in courting Kazakhstan and equally assiduous in avoiding the kind of contretemps caused by the insults, inadvertent or not, that Putin seems especially prone to.
By Central Asian standards, Kazakh president Nursultan Nazarbayev is a fairly reasonable autocrat. Early on he made a favorable impression on Margaret Thatcher, who saw him as a sort of Central Asian Gorbachev, a man you could do business with, telling Nazarbayev: “Mr. President, you seem to be moving from Communism to Thatcherism.”[358] (This incident alone gives some feel for how long Nazarbayev has been ruling Kazakhstan.) And Gorbachev himself liked Nazarbayev “very much. He had an energetic and attractive personality. He was open to new ideas.”[359] Though corrupt and authoritarian, like China and Russia, Kazakhstan is not an impossible place like its neighbor Uzbekistan, which has been called “Central Asia’s heart of darkness.”[360] There, critics of the regime are routinely tortured, including being boiled alive, according to Great Britain’s former ambassador to that country, Craig Murray, who documented a whole series of such appalling injustices in his book Murder in Samarkand.
Such misrule in Uzbekistan has led to greater resentment and resistance than in relatively unrepressive Kazakhstan. The Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) has been a problem since the 1990s and has now pledged its allegiance to the Islamic State. Many Uzbeks are fighting with ISIS in Syria and Iraq; an Uzbek was one of the three suicide bombers in the June 2016 attack on Istanbul’s airport. Terrorist groups exist within Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan and are ready to capitalize on a shift in circumstances, especially a sudden, dramatic one like the death of a leader, especially one with no named successor. Though the Uzbek president’s death in September 2016 passed without immediate incident, the death of Kazakhstan’s might not, and besides, as the FSB well knows, crises can be manufactured—a grievance, a slogan, some demonstrations, a few bombs, a video that goes viral.
355
Farangis Najbullah, “Putin Downplays Kazakh Independence, Sparks Angry Reaction,” RFE/RL, September 3, 2014.
356
Ian Traynor “Kazakhstan Is Latest Russia Neighbor to Feel Putin’s Chilly Nationalist Rhetoric,”
358
Jonathan Aiken,
360
Katrina Swett and M. Zuhdi Jasser, “CIS Has a Poor Record on Religious Freedom,”