Standing in the middle of the bridge, I watched as the Yellow River rushed beneath me, snaking in great bends around the rocky, tree-less hills on the opposite bank. Rather than appearing in it's usual slow, muddy brown form, here in-between the craggy, scrub-covered hills, the river was an unrecognizable shade of brilliant blue-green. It coursed at great speed, presenting the hint of white rapids as it passed swiftly by underneath. I stared and watched, feeling, in that moment, truly far removed from the familiar scenes of a country I knew well. Rural Xunhua Salar Autonomous County felt distinctly different from the China I had long come to know.
***
West China is defined by many things: striking and rugged landscape, colorful and consequential history, cultural and linguistic diversity, and lagging economic development. When compared to the more prosperous and cosmopolitan cities of the eatsern Chinese heartland, the western regions of the country have less infrastructure, less industry, less financial capital, and a slower growth trajectory. Unsurprisingly, seeing this disparity between inland and coastal regions, the government undertook an expansive development plan called Xibu Da Kaifa (西部大开发), or "the Great Western Development Campaign." The effects of this multi-faceted strategy to bring the western regions on to a par with the rest of the country have been profound. In the last ten years large investments in development and city building transformed the face of cities like Xining as to make them almost unrecognizable to longtime residents. A common comment given by interviewees in this city is that the place is almost nothing like the city they remember growing up in. These changes are obvious and immediate. The city's skyline is now a forest of tall, 20-30 storey buildings. The small mud-plaster walled houses that dominated the city as recently as the late 1970s are mostly gone. New construction of shopping malls and office towers engulfs land that formerly used for farming in the city's western district.
While these changes to the physical landscape of Xining are the most obvious legacy of the push to bring development to the economically lagging west, perhaps the more profound changes are the less visible socio-cultural impact that the XiBu Da Kaifa has brought to the region. Specifically, the complicated social, political, cultural and economic impacts of migration are felt much more profoundly in Xining than elsewhere I've been this year. Why? Because rural Qinghai more than anywhere else I've traveled to this year, is an epicenter for the kind of mass internal migration seen throughout urban China. In particular, the autonomous counties of Xunhua (Salar Autonomous County) and Hualong (Hui Autonomous County) are places where migrant journeys begin.
The map above from The Economist in 2010 shows China's province's GDPs and lists their nearest equivalent in the international community. The map illustrates the gap between China's prosperous east and less prosperous west. Compare, for instance, Qinghai's GDP to that of Shandong, where I was earlier this year. Shandong has a GDP comparable to Switzerland, totaling over $400 billion. Qinghai, by contrast, totaled less than $50 billion in GDP in 2010 (another way to think of this: Bill Gates' net worth is estimated at $79.5 billion, or more than Qinghai's GDP in 2010). A district by district breakdown of per capita income shows this disparity even more clearly.
Xunhua and Hualong are located in the cluster of dark blue counties on the eastern edge of Qinghai. The average income in 2012 in that area, according to the China Statistical Yearbook, is just under $1,000. That's significantly below the national average, and trails the east coast. Again, compare eastern Qinghai the city of Jinan, in Shandong Province, where the average income is between $4,500 and $5,000-- well above the national average. Looking at these maps it's not difficult to understand why migrants from Eastern Qinghai might leave home in search of greater opportunity. But what are they leaving behind? And what effect does it have on the community?
***
The road from Xunhua city narrowed as it rolled out of town. The straight path that it cut through the county seat now became far more twisted. The path snaked along the Yellow River, occasionally running beside its bends before twisting away and rolling through small farmer's fields perched on hilly ground. Turkic-language pop music, which sounded as if it had been strongly influenced by both traditional Central Asian muqam and Indian Bollywood, blared from the driver's stereo as he barrelled around the sharp turns, and careened up and down over the dips and rises in the road. My contact in Xunhua, a late middle-aged Salar man, talked me through the county's history and heritage.
"This is the Salar homeland," he explained. "There are some other Salar living in places like Hualong, and some even in Xinjiang. But most of them are from Xuhua."
"They originally migrated here from Samarkand during the Yuan Dynasty, right?" I asked.
"No," he corrected me. "That's what everyone says, but it's not the case. In that era Samarkand was the most famous city in Central Asia. So we say we're from Samarkand because everyone knows where that is. But our ancestors are from Turkmenistan."
"So do you still have relationships with communities in Turkmenistan?" I asked.
"Yes. These days the relationship is very good. We have strong ties," he told me.
"What about with the rest of the global Islamic Community?"
"People from Xunhua have very strong relationships with Arab states, particularly with Saudi Arabia," he remarked.
"Oh, is that because people are interested in gaining a greater understanding of traditional Islam?"
"Actually, no," he said. "When we go on the hajj the Saudis all tell us that they're impressed by how strongly traditional our faith is."
As we wound away from the river, and into the ruddy reddish hills, we found ourselves in the midst of rural Xunhua. The car plowed further back into the countryside onto tiny village back roads and clusters of old mud-plaster and brick houses. In many places strings of chilis hung from the cross beams of door frames, drying in the sun, soon to be made into powder for seasoning dishes. Small fields of unknown crops lined either side of the road.
“What kinds of crops do people farm here?” I asked, curious.
“This land isn’t really that good for farming,” my host responded. “Mostly, people grow corn or barley. Some people herd sheep. But farming is difficult.”
Gazing out the window at the houses, I wondered about their age. Many looked as if their beige walls might crumble into dust at any moment.
“How old are these houses?” I finally asked.
“Those? They’re not that old,” my contact assured me. “Maybe 50 or 60 years.”
They sure do look older, I thought to myself. Ancient, even. As we drove onward, it was becoming clearer to me why people might leave this area. Despite the fact that Xunhua was stunningly beautiful, economic opportunities seemed incredibly scarce.
***
When walking around in Xunhua and Hualong, the difference between them, and other places I’ve been in rural China isn’t totally apparent. In many ways, the 5th and 6th tier cities of China tend to share a set of similarities, regardless of their location: lots of recent construction, a slightly less orderly flow of traffic than larger cities, etc. What’s notable about places like Xunhua, and Hualong, and other communities in rural, western China, however, is the fact that agriculture plays a much lesser role here than elsewhere in the country. Though these communities are rural, many of the people who live here make a living through engaging in the process of 打工 (dagong), which may be approximately translated as “working a temp. job.” Often, this means moving east to work in construction, in a restaurant kitchen, or as wait-staff. Others open restaurants, or shops that sell specialty items from out west. Others still sell things off of street carts, or flatbed bikes. Xunhua has a historical reputation for trade and merchants. Recently, Hualong County is making its mark on China by exporting west China’s famous handmade beef noodles (niurou lamian, 牛肉拉面). In fact, by some estimates, nearly 1/10 of all of China’s noodle restaurants are run by migrants from Hualong. Another estimate suggests that more than 1/3 of Hualong’s population is living outside the county, making lamian in cities across China.
The net effect is that these migrants not only influence local Islamic culture in the cities they migrate to, but they also influence the economic and cultural landscape of the communities they call home. A man selling yak butter out of a small stall in Xining told me that most of these migrants spend less than 10 years in the developed cities on China’s. They make enough money for their families to live comfortably, and then move back to west China to open new and different businesses there: more upscale restaurants making traditional halal food, or other various types of small business. Most often, however, these migrants return to cities like Xining or Lanzhou rather than their small hometowns. After years in the big city, the yak butter vendor suggested, migrants are unwilling to return to the slower social and economic pace of the country. More problematic, he suggested, is the fact that the children of these migrants grow up in the cities of east China, away from the traditions and folkways of their parents homes. Many speak standard Mandarin rather than the local dialect, and find it difficult to readjust to life in west China upon returning. While in cities like Beijing or Shanghai, they are not treated as locals, but upon arriving back in Qinghai, they feel just as alienated from a place that is, technically, home.
***
At last, the car pulled to a stop in front of the entrance to the mosque. From behind an elaborate carved stone wall, the gently sloping dome of a minaret peered out. We all stepped out of the car.
“This is the Zhangga Mosque (张尕清真寺) and it’s the oldest in Xunhua County. It was built when the Salars first arrived here in the Yuan Dynasty about 700 years ago,” my contanct explained. “This mosque is very famous. The stonework here is exceptional. Have a look”
He led me inside the courtyard, and ushered me over to the prayer hall. The old wooden planks of its walls looked weatherbeaten. The sturdy wooden beams holding up the ceiling felt as if they might have been there forever. Pulling aside the curtains that covered the doorway, my contact motioned me inside the hall. The walls were covered in elaborately carved wood panels. Carvings shaped like vines twisted into calligraphic Arabic script. Ornate wooden flowers covered the walls. On one side wall a faded fresco of trees, flowers, and buildings was just visible. Gesturing toward the faded and peeling paint, my contact remarked, “Those paintings are from the 1300s during the Ming Dynasty. They’re in bad shape right now, but we hope that maybe we can restore them soon.”
After a few minutes of looking around inside, my contact directed my attention the crossbeams on the ceiling.
“Look up there,” he said. “Do you see woodwork above the center beam?”
I nodded. On top of the central crossbeam that ran horizontally across the hall, sat a set of interlocking rings that looked almost like a figure 8 turned on its side. The carved wood was almost a centerpiece of the old mosque.
“Do you know what that means?” my contact asked.
“No,” I said. “What is it?”
“Those rings represent the friendship between the Salars who founded this mosque, and the Tibetans who built it. The relationship between Salars and Tibetans has always been very close.”
***
One of the defining features of eastern Qinghai province is the high-level of inter-ethnic interaction in the region. The region is home to populations of the Salar, Tibetan, Dongxiang, Bao’an, Mongol, and Tu ethnicities as well as the Hui and majority Han. It’s a place where religions, languages, and cultures merge and blend. In some cases, the interactions have yielded strong and positive relationships between groups. A few respondents emphasized that in the Salar language (a Turkic language related to Turkmen and Uyghur) the word for Tibetan means, roughly, ‘uncle’ and vice versa for the word for Salar in the local dialect of Amdo Tibetan. The interlocking rings in carved wood in the interior of the mosque in Xunhua stands as a testament to the strength of the ties between the two communities. In Hualong County, a large proportion of the local Hui population are descendants of Tibetans converted to Islam by the Hui Sufi mystic leader, Ma Laichi in the 1700s. These ‘Tibetan-Hui’ speak a dialect of Amdo Tibetan peppered with Islamic expressions. Some wear traditional Tibetan dress.
However, ethnic relations have not always been so peaceful. Hui Warlords (particularly Ma Bufang, who I’ve written about before) and their armies were largely responsible for forceful integration of Tibetan regions of Qinghai into Chinese control during the Republican Era. Salar militias, mobilized by religious conflicts, took up arms and marched on the gates of Lanzhou in the 1700s. Doctrinal and sectarian differences sparked vicious, brutal conflict between different Muslim groups in the 18th and 19th centuries, the largest of which were famously suppressed in 1878 by Qing Dynasty General Zuo Zongtang (for whom that most American of Chinese dishes, General Tso’s Chicken, is named).
Relationships have settled since these more contentious days. But fundamental problems still exist, especially in the face of the wave of modernization and standardization brought by the development projects. Salar I interviewed in Xining often expressed worry over the prospect of the disappearance of the Salar language. Salar, which does not have its own system of written characters but is frequently written using Latin or Arabic alphabets, is not taught to children in public schools. Further, when children migrate away from Xunuha, they do not often speak Salar outside the home. Many of the Salar I met and talked with in Xining expressed deep regret that they were not frequently able to speak their mother tongue. Many suggested that, in fact, they had become more proficient in speaking Chinese than Salar. Similar issues were on display in Hualong. Though older villagers most often responded to us in a blend of Tibetan and local Chinese dialect, the younger kids in the area all spoke flawless Mandarin in a standard accent. Such quandaries, which will only intensify in the face of increased development and further migration, may have a profound impact on how locals understand their own identity.
***
The yak in the middle of the road seemed, at best, indifferent to the fact that it obstructed the way forward. As our car flew around the bend in the road overlooking one of Hualong County's many tiny farm villages in the valley deep below, a collision with the rather indifferent beast seemed inevitable. Then, as if by pure luck, the yak picked up its head, and grudgingly shuffled far enough towards the side of the road to allow the driver to drive around.
About twenty minutes later, the cab pulled to a stop in the dusty village of Dehenglong (德恒隆). As the cab driver grumbled something about hurrying back because he did not want to linger for too long in the village lest he miss out on afternoon riders in the county seat, my friend Hannah, a fellow scholar of the history of the region in the Qing Dynasty, and I, rolled out of the car and began to explore. The heat of mid-afternoon beat down on the streets, and the low, sun-baked houses that clung to the sides of the surrounding hills. The town seemed curiously empty. A few middle aged women sat in the shade under the eaves of one storefront. A man in the middle of the main road was busy tinkering with the engine of his vehicle, a small flat-bed truck. In front of one small shop, a tea kettle sat unattended on a large dish covered in solar panels, a small, blue flame burning underneath.
Fifteen minutes of scurrying around in the hills surrounding the town provided very little in the way of information. A small mosque perched on the edge of a hillside seemed deserted. A handful of weatherbeaten books on Arabic language and Qur’anic interpretation sat on a table outside, but no one greeted us at the entrance gate. Somewhere near the edge of the village, a group of middle aged women wearing dark black hijabs sat in the shade of a tree overlooking the valley. We approached them, quickly discovering that communicating in standard Mandarin would be difficult. Hannah’s use of Lhasa-dialect Tibetan proved somewhat more fruitful. Where was everyone? The answer (which Hannah said came in a blend of Amdo-Tibetan, regionally accented Mandarin, and something which sounded suspiciously like Salar) was that most of the town had gone to a funeral at “The Big Mosque” across the valley.
We pressed onward, hurriedly, over the road and back to the cab. After much handwringing and protestation from the cab driver, we sped towards the mosque over the narrowing dirt and gravel path. Suddenly the path opened onto a wider spot in the road where dozens of cars were parked in rows. Ahead, people, most of them long-bearded men wearing white hats and long, gray, robe-like coats, had begun to pour out through a front gate. The funeral had clearly just ended. Many of the men hopped on board motorbikes and sped away up the path. Others piled into sedans and soon the narrow path was clogged with traffic. We walked up the path, suddenly finding ourselves the objects of much attention. At the gate, a middle aged man stood around in the midst of the throng leaving the mosque, chatting with his friends. We approached, trying to appear as normal as possible for two foreigners plopped down unannounced in the middle of the rural countryside.
“Hello,” Hannah began, “we’re both researching Islam in Qinghai, and we wanted to know if we can tour your mosque.”
The man looked puzzled, but nodded in assent.
“Do you know when this mosque was built?” I asked.
“No, I’m not really sure about that,” he said in response.
“Oh, well, can you tell me what sect this mosque belongs to?”
“Yes, We’re xinjiao (新教, “new school”) here.”
Hannah looked surprised, and explained to me that the area was historically dominated by the various Sufi lineages of the “Old School.”
“Was it always XinJiao?” she asked the man. “Do you know when it changed?”
The man frowned a little. “I really don’t know anything about that. You should probably ask the imam. He’s gone up the mountain to the burial site, but he’ll be back in an hour.”
Given the impatience of driver, an hour of waiting seemed unlikely to work. Instead we ventured inside the mosque, and began to look around. A group of students (called “manla”, 满拉, in Chinese) most of whom were in their mid-teens stood around in the courtyard, nervously watching.
“Do you think maybe we should ask some of them?” Hannah asked.
“Yeah, probably a good idea,” I responded.
We walked over to the students, setting the group aflutter. I began to ask about the age of the mosque, but was greeted entirely with nervous laughter. The older boys, who must have been 16, giggling and talking amongst themselves in a local dialect inflected with Tibetan, pushed a small boy forward. He could not have been more than 11. Like all of his older friends, he wore a long white robe and a white turban, the tail of which draped over his shoulder. His answers came in crystal clear Mandarin, but the story was much the same: nobody aside from the imam really knew much about the history of the place.
Unable to wait for the imam to finish his funerary work due to our increasingly impatient cab driver (who by this point was sitting in the driver’s seat of his vehicle, running the engine, and glowering, perhaps hoping to make a quick getaway and score more passengers on the way back to the county seat) we decided to cut our losses. We hopped into the car, and fell in behind the line of motorcycles that zipped around the twisting corners of the road, and sped away over the hills, into the distance against the a background of an enormous, open sky.
***
The relative isolation of places like Xunhua and Hualong impacts local traditions in profound ways. As my friend and colleague who studies Qinghai and Southern Gansu during the late Qing Dynasty (approximately the 18th and 19th centuries), Hannah Theaker, notes, the diffusion of religious tradition in the area tends to follow a familiar pattern: a charismatic holy man goes to the Middle East to study, receives the latest in religious training from the region, and returns to upend the locally established religious order, occasionally through violence. Rinse and repeat frequently. At the minimum, every hundred years or so. Regions like Xunhua and Hualong get swept up in these shifts of religious tradition, and become the breeding ground for sectarian discord. The history of these communities in the 18th and 19th centuries is filled with tales of religious militias, rebellion against the state, violent re-establishment of order and deep-seated, lingering resentments between rival religious communities. The past matters quite a lot in these communities.
And yet, in recent decades, even these old wounds have begun to heal, and memories have begun to recede into the half-remembered distance. The children of Dehenglong Village, and Xunhua City all speak perfect standard Mandarin. Hualong no longer manufactures guns and weapons, and instead has turned to exporting noodle restaurants throughout China. Salars from Xunhua move to Xining open stores in the ChengDong District near the Dongguan Grand Mosque, and pray alongside their Hui counterparts. Now, instead of being the face of a restive and troublesome western frontier, these communities have become models of both Islamic piety, and the opportunities presented by the development in “New China.”
The exact course of the future of places like Hualong and Xunhua is hard to predict. As the urge to move east in search of profit grows, these communities may well lose their vitality. Already fairly poor and isolated, Xunhua and Hulaong may, indeed, suffer as young people seek their lives and fortunes elsewhere. Those who spend significant portions of their lives working in urban spaces in coastal regions may find the prospect of returning to the Qinghai countryside less appealing than before. Countless respondents in each city I visited this year remarked that taking part in the mass migration from China’s west does, indeed, impact the attitudes of migrants. In Yinchuan, a respondent talked about how the influx of migrants to the city was creating a “new Yinchuanese” identity, one that blended various facets of the various communities who now found a home in the city. The children of these migrants would be a “new generation of Yinchuanese” (新一代的银川人), not born in Yinchuan, but indisputably of Yinchuan.
In places like Xunhua and Hualong, the picture looks different. The story of migration, when told from the point of view of the places migrants are leaving from, is one in which residents must weigh economic opportunity against cultural preservation. Though the development of the west means that now everyone has plenty to eat, and access and connectedness to the larger world, it also means that the next generation of Salars may speak their native language with less frequency than standard Mandarin, or that the children of noodle-shop owners from Hualong choose not to return to the yak-filled hills where their parents were born.
In this sense, understanding the full scope of issues related to urbanization and urban development requires an understanding of this context. Xunhua and Hualong are reminders that the policies which build up cities also have ripple effects that are felt in the countryside. While much of the focus on China’s migration has rightly highlighted the conditions migrants face when arriving in large cities, we also must not forget to take a long look at what happens in the places they leave behind.