Month: June 2018

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Uyghurstan

Uyghurstan

Uyghurstan

The millisphere of Uyghurstan is in China’s far western “Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous  Region” (XUAR) which can best be visualised as three millispheres: The city of Urumqi (3.5 million), the Dzungarian Basin to the north of the Tien Shan mountain range and Uyghurstan in the Tarim Basin, south of Tien Shan.

Uyghurstan borders India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, and sits on the historic Silk Road and China’s millennial One Belt – One Road infrastructure initiative. Because XUAR has one fifth of China’s coal, oil and natural gas reserves, and because the East/West pipeline from Central Asia passes through on its way to Shanghai, Uyghurstan is a very sensitive strategic zone for the People’s Republic of China.

In 1964 XUAR had a population  of seven million, twenty years later it had doubled to 14 million and in 2016 it stood at 22 million (roughly 10 million Uighur, 8.5 million Han, 1.5 million Kazakh and 1 million Hui). Much of this population growth came from Han Chinese immigration.

Mao Tse Tung’s brother, Mao Zemin, was executed by a local Han warlord when “East Turkestan” was invaded by the PLA in 1949. At the time three-quarters of the population were Uyghur, now they are a minority and treated as such by the Han invaders. In 2018 somewhere between half and one million Uyghurs are, or have been, detained in “political education camps”

China fears an East Turkestan independence movement fueled by religion and ethnicity. The Uyghurs are Sunni Muslim and speak a Turkic language rather than the Mandarin spoken by the Han. Since 2000 there have been attacks by Uyghurs on Han in XUAR and there is a small Uyghur diaspora living in Turkey. In 2015 attacks on the Chinese embassy in Ankara and their consulate in Istanbul were attributed to Uyghurs and it is estimated that 1500 Uyghurs fought for ISIS in the Middle East.

Faced with Islamic nationalism China engaged with its Central Asian neighbours to the west, and the Regional Anti-Terrorism Structure (RATS) meets regularly to discuss the “three evil forces”: separatism, extremism and terrorism. Chinese “Economic diplomacy” is wielded with loans from the Chinese government funded Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank.

In the new millennium China has been turning XUAN into one of the most surveilled places on earth and Uyghurstan into an open air prison. XUAR Communist Party Secretary, Chen Quanguo arrived in 2016 and in one year had rolled out a network of “convenience police stations” a grid-style social management system pioneered when Chen was Party Secretary in the Tibetan “Autonomous” Region from 2011 to 2016. Grid management was first trialled in Beijing in 2004 – but has its conceptional inception in Disneyland and in policing in LA, USA.

“Convenience police stations” segments urban communities into geometric zones so security staff can monitor all activities with the aid of new technologies. The system relies on big data analytics, connecting a grid of CCTV to the police database to achieve enhanced, automated surveillance. Where you go, who you talk to and what you read online is all monitored. Since 2017 all XUAR citizens are ranked (trustworthy-average-untrustworthy).

New methods of policing include collecting DNA data from the entire population and forcing all phones owners to download an app called “web cleaning soldier” which effectively monitors all phones for illegal social media use like Facebook and WhatsApp. Phones contents are regularly downloaded for monitoring at the pervasive checkpoints.

Iris scanners, facial recognition cameras and ID cards are required at petrol stations, and only the registered owner is allowed to drive a car – monitored by number plate recognition cameras.

Under the “Becoming Kin” program 1.1m (mostly Han) officials are teamed with 1.6m Uyghur families. The “adopted kin” visit or live in, teach mandarin and verify household information. Half of Uighur households have a spy/indoctrinator assigned to them.

The Fanghuiju program of “researching people’s conditions, improving people’s lives and winning people’s hearts,” includes demolition of traditional homes (for health and safety reasons) and shifting Uyghurs into “modern” apartments.

Despite the ban on fasting during Ramadan, headscarves, Islamic names and beards, the demolition of towers and crescents and some neighbourhood mosques Uyghurstan is experiencing a religious revival. The creation of a police state in Uyghurstan by the Chinese Communist Party has lead to mass human rights violations for the Uighurs, and growing resentment.

The capital of Uyghurstan, Kashgar, was until recently a living heritage gem and a legendary stop on the Silk Road. Kashgar has had its soul ripped out in the name of Chinese modernity, and is being turned into a tacky eastern Disneyland for mass Chinese tourism – controlled by a darkly dystopian police surveillance state.

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Shikoku

The Last Column

I had proposed to write this, my last column for the Wanganui Chronicle, on the millisphere of Shikoku, the smallest, and least populous of Japan’s four major islands. An old friend had recently returned from the 88 temple pilgrimage around the island, but he got called away before I could interview him in depth, his mother was dying.

I was following a trail of populations with negative growth. In 2010 Japan’s population peaked at 128.5 million, it is now around 127 million. In 1990 Shikoku Island had a population of 4.2 million, now it is 3.9 million.

My friend said that in mountainous Shikoku, where hydrangeas grow naturally, it was common to see abandoned homes complete with furniture and ornaments, and elderly farmers, bent double, still working their vegetable gardens. I learned that “natural farmer” Mansanobu Fukuoka, the author of The One-Straw Revolution (1975), was from Shikoku.

Signing off made me reflect on what I’d learned writing columns. Generally they were about “place”, from local (Mosquito Point) to global (Donetsk). In the last two years I have managed to chronicle 66 millispheres and at this rate it will take me another thirty years to write up all one thousand – a millisphere being a discrete region inhabited by roughly one thousandth of the world population – that would make me one hundred when I publish the last one. At 700 words per millisphere that’s a 700,000 word book, almost as many as the 780,000 word King James Authorised Version of the bible.

By definition every millisphere has roughly the same number of inhabitants (now an average of around 7.8 million) but they all have quite different geographies, both physical and human. All millispheres have connections with other millispheres and change is inevitable.

Some millispheres are also states: The Central African Republic is the world’s poorest, Switzerland the wealthiest and Hong Kong has the highest average income. Israel is a millisphere but so is “Palestine” (Israel, Gaza and the West Bank combined). The millisphere is merely a lens to examine human geography and different lenses see different things. New Zealand is a millisphere, but so is “Te Moananui” (New Zealand plus all the other islands of the Pacific).

Some millisphere columns have dwelt on war and the arms industry, and the evidence points to competing empires causing most major conflicts in the world. Religion and nationalism are marshalled to give a conflict legitimacy but it’s usually about a few grabbing the money and resources. Last century’s Cold War between America and the Soviet Union is still playing itself out, for no other reason than profits and “jobs, jobs, jobs,” to quote Donald Trump. The conclusion that the world would be a better place without “the great powers” is a hard one to avoid.

Religion is a dangerous topic but also a defining component of the geography of a millisphere – along with its rocks, plants and animals. I’ve been taken to the Press Council for “gratuitous references” to Jews, and found not guilty. I try be to tolerant but seeing a Russian Orthodox Christian minister in full beard and Byzantine robes, on a Vice News video, sprinkling holy water on a Ukrainian missile launcher, makes me want to say something rude, and that goes for Muslims shouting “Allahu akbar” as they pull the trigger.

I’m not a Buddhist but I want to write up Bodhgaya in India where the Buddha had his moment of realisation. I’ve just met a dancer from Moscow and I want to write up relevant millispheres for the coming football World Cup in Russia. I’ve started researching Sonora in Mexico in preparation for the trial in New York of Chapo Guzman and I still want to do Shanghai, Kyoto, Laos, Alexandria, Mosul and the millispheres that make up the Netherlands (17 million).

Tempting as it is to travel again, my garden, friends, family and a small black-and-white dog are keeping me close to home. It will be good to take a break from writing – I’ve got a couple of building projects on – but I’ve set up a blog at millisphere.blogtown.co.nz and I will continue “mapping millispheres,” some that I’ve seen, some not.

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Donbass

Donbass

Millisphere (abstract noun): a discrete region inhabited by roughly 1000th of the world population. A lens to examine human geography.

In 2014 Malaysia Air flight MH17 was shot down by a Russian BUK-telar missile, near the village of Hrabove, in the Ukraine (population 44 million), killing all 298 crew and passengers (including 27 Australians and one New Zealander) – beating the precious record of 290 when the USS Vincennes shot down Dubai bound Iran Air IR655 in 1988, mistaking it for a missile.

Hrabove is in Ukraine’s Donetsk Oblast (population 4.6 million) near the border with the Luhansk Oblast (population 2.3 million). Both oblasts (regions) are claimed by Ukrainian-Russian separatists who refer to this entire region as “the Confederation of Novorossiya” (population 6.9 million and shrinking).

I call this millishere “Donbass”, a local term for the Donets River basin. The Donets flows southeast and across the border into Russia where it joins the River Don. The Donbass is a centre for coal mining and heavy industry.

Once the breadbasket of the USSR, Ukraine has a population that is shrinking at the rate of -0.6 percent per year; the fastest decline of all countries with negative population growth rates – Eastern Europe, Russia and Japan – as measured by the sum of all births and deaths and not including emigration and immigration.

During the  Second World War, seven million of Ukraine’s eight million Jews were captured and murdered by the Nazi German occupation forces. After the war half the survivors left, mostly for Israel, where three of Israel’s Prime Ministers have been Ukrainian Jews. Roseanne Barr, Noam Chomsky, Carl Sagan, Leon Trotsky, and Simon Wiesenthal were all Ukrainian Jews or their descendants.

Since the collapse of the USSR in 1991 the Ukraine has engaged in a difficult, and sometimes brutal, political and economic separation from Russia. Two decades of cronyism, corruption and censorship, including the murder of journalists, followed independence as gangs fought for control of state businesses, which included arms manufacturers.

Under the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, the US, UK and Russia agreed to guarantee Ukraine’s territorial integrity in return for Ukraine giving up its Soviet-era nuclear weapons (the then third largest stockpile) and transferring them to Russia.

The Ukraine is roughly three-quarters ethnic Ukrainian and around 30 percent (mostly in the east) speak Russian as their first language. Pro-Russia Viktor Yanukovych, who was from Donetsk and backed by Putin, was followed as President by pro-EU Viktor Yushchenko, who suffered dioxin poisoning during the Orange Revolution. Then it was Yanukovych again which led to the pro-EU Maidan Square protests, during which 100 protesters were shot by government snipers, before Yanukovych fled his ostentatious, bad taste villa in Kiev for exile in Russia.

In 2010 Ukraine was the world’s ninth largest arms exporter – one above Israel. America and Russia were first and second. Since losing Donetsk in 2014 Ukraine has slipped to eleventh, being replaced by the Netherlands in the top ten and Israel has moved up to eighth place.

Donetsk city (metropolitan area over two million) is roughly 50/50 Russian/Ukrainian. Roughly one third of the residents of Donbass identify as Russian, one third Ukrainian and one third neither, calling themselves Slav, who can be either Ukrainian or Russian. Pre-2014 seventy percent of Ukraine’s arms exports were to Russia, a market Donbass arms manufacturers still supply.

The Dutch team investigating MH17 have traced the missile launcher that fired the BUK-telar to Kursk in Russia and they want to talk to Igor Girkin who claimed on social media to have shot down a Ukrainian military aircraft above Hrabove, before taking down the post the same day, and also Oleg Vladimirovich Ivannikov, who commanded the launcher.

With Russian paratroopers and American Paratroopers in the country and “alcoholics, dodgers, drug addicts and morons” on both sides manning dangerously heavy arms and the Ukrainian Mafia involved with the arms industry the people of the Ukraine find themselves between a rock and a hard place.

One is reminded of the words of Bob Dylan, whose paternal grandparents were Ukrainian, “You’ve thrown the worst fear that can ever be hurled. Fear to bring children into the world,” (Masters of War, 1963).