Xinjiang: Beijing’s chilling attempt to erase and replace Uyghur identity
The sky is pitch black in this town in China’s far western region of Xinjiang. Streets are quiet and empty apart from police vans flashing red and blue lights – part of a mazelike security grid of patrols, stations, and checkpoints. Suddenly, the predawn stillness is shattered as “Ode to the Motherland,” a classic Communist propaganda song, blasts from loudspeakers, issuing a shrill wake-up call for miles around.
It is only 5:40 am local time in Hotan, an oasis town that was once a junction along the historic Silk Road and is closer to Kabul than Beijing. The barrage of patriotic music is a jarring reminder to townspeople – mostly Muslim, Turkic-speaking ethnic Uyghurs – that their clocks, and marching orders, are set two time zones away in China’s capital.
Beijing has worked since the 1949 Communist takeover to consolidate control over Xinjiang, a vast borderland of desert and mountains that occupies about one-sixth of China’s territory and contains large deposits of coal, oil, and natural gas. “In the Karamay wilderness, you can see the oil rolling to the sea,” the singers belt out in Mandarin, referring to Xinjiang’s Karamay oil reserves flowing to China proper – a source
One-language policy Change ‘under the barrel of a gun’
