Portrait of an LBX

A Uighur man stands on a pile of rubble in Kashgar's rapidly disappearing old town.

By Andy

We probably won’t be making it to Tibet or Xinjiang on this journey — the distances are simply too vast. A year seems like a long time to spend on a bicycle until you set the goal of circumnavigating a country of China’s size in that time frame. Evan’s recent post on our walk through the Tangyin old town got me thinking about my time in Xinjiang last year, and particularly in Kashgar, an old Silk Road trading town with a vibrant traditional section.

There is an apparent mindset among the Chinese leadership that anything of cultural and/or historical value in this country must simply be wiped out and as quickly as possible. Kashgar’s old town is a prominent target. A recent article in the Global Post puts a softer edge on what we on this blog would tend to describe as cultural rape:

Kashgar’s Old City is also an anomaly in modern China: A well-preserved, relatively untouched section of ancient but living architecture. Most of China’s cities have undergone sweeping facelifts amid the country’s economic boom, but the Old City of Kashgar, a small piece of the larger city of more than 3 million residents, is set off from modern city by a river and hills, distinctly unique and almost out-of-place.

A Uighur man hired to clear the rubble of Kashgar's old town tosses bricks into a dump truck.

I think part of this appetite for destruction stems from an incomprehensibly skewed incentive system for local officials. Despite years of promises for reform by the center, local government officials are still evaluated primarily on their ability to generate gross domestic product (GDP) growth. All other worries — the environment, quality of life, cultural and historical relics — are cast aside unless they can be easily harnessed and transformed into GDP growth.

This has all sorts of horrible implications, but I think one of the most interesting is the real estate industry. As most everyone is probably aware, despite thirty years of “reform and opening,” all land in China is still owned by the state (or by the “people,” as the state will tell you). In China’s cities you can own an apartment (read: a little concrete box way up in the sky), but the land on which the apartment building sits is owned by the state. Citizens can “lease” land for anywhere between 30 and a hundred years depending on the situation. Peasants generally till land on 30-year leases.

The thing is, there are no annual property taxes in China. Thus, the only direct way for local governments to make money off of real estate is through one-off sales of land to real estate developers. This usually involves confiscating land from peasants and offering them compensation amounting to less than they think their land is worth before flipping the lot to developers who then build luxury apartments that are sold mainly to investors at high prices — thereby locking even the middle class out of the real estate market.

A vendor sells bagels in Kashgar's vibrant, traditional old town.

I’d argue that this is one of the reasons for the apparent obsession with knocking down historic sections of towns and putting apartment buildings in their place. Local governments need to sell the land for fiscal revenue, and developers can make more money off of a plot of land if it has a 20-story apartment building with 300 families in it rather than a couple of two-story buildings with five families. Toss in all the secondary sales of renovation materials and furniture, and you’ve got yourself some career-boosting GDP growth.

In Kashgar, the government is basically proposing the leveling of the historic old town, to be replaced by a cheap, much taller imitation. The government argues that the old town in its current form is unsafe and could collapse in an earthquake and thus needs to be “renovated” (read: leveled and rebuilt). Maybe they’ve got a point, but the government didn’t seem to care that schools in Sichuan were far from earthquake-proof before they folded like pancakes trying to stand on end in May 2008. Those opposed to the “renovations” hold that the demolition is another one of the government’s measures to control and assimilate the local Uighur population, which the government accuses of having “separatist” tendencies.

As with numerous other cases in China, the government has resorted to ham-handed lies in an attempt to win over the local population:

Yet a public relations campaign boasting the benefits of tearing down the ancient Silk Road hub to replace it with a jazzier, new version of itself is underway, evidenced by a billboard affixed to a mud brick wall in town. The sign hints that demolition of Kashgar’s Old City — a controversial government undertaking facing international criticism from heritage and human rights groups – has the backing of Unesco, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.

. . .

The sign goes further, saying Kaldun and others agreed of the project: “We do consider it an action deserving of admiration internationally.”

Kaldun said the sign is just wrong. “I’m very concerned about this billboard,” said Kaldun.

The bulldozers have temporarily ground to a halt in Kashgar, possibly over worries about ethnic tensions after last year’s riots in Urumqi, the region’s capital, but of course no one can be sure as the Chinese government rarely feels the need to explain its actions.

“Kashgar Old City is as important to the Uighurs as Jerusalem is to Christians, Jews and Muslims,” said Henryk Szadziewski of the Washington, D.C.,-based Uyghur Human Rights Project. “It is a physical embodiment of the Uighur identity, signifying its past, present, and future.”

A Uighur boy stands in a courtyard entrance in Kashgar's rapidly disappearing old town.

This all ties back to Tangyin in that the town also has a unique old section we humbly believe is worthy of preservation, if lacking in spiritual significance to the locals. The town is literally disintegrating due to neglect. For local officials, letting the city collapse is a net neutral on the GDP-centric evaluation scale. I see two possible outcomes if, for some reason, a little money starts flowing into the town. In the first, the government preserves the old town. If the preservation of other similar old towns are any indication, that probably means razing most of it and rebuilding from scratch something vaguely similar. They then build a wall around it, pave over some adjacent farmland for a tour bus parking lot, and set up a ticketing booth. Voila, instant GDP growth. In the second, the government decides no one is likely to visit the town and pay to see it, so they kick the aging residents out, sell the land rights to a developer, and bam, GDP growth.

Unless China’s system of evaluation for local officials is changed to emphasize criteria like quality of life and cultural preservation, these are the only two routes I can imagine for any of the few remaining “unrestored” historic areas.

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