China. The Taklamakan Desert. 2009

The ‘Sea of Death’ is the not-so affectionate name that has been given by the Chinese people to the Taklamakan desert, a desert of such epic proportions and intimidating size, that its name in the local Uygur language translates as ‘You can go in, but you will never come out’.

I visited the Taklamakan desert as part of my work on the issue of desertification in China for the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting in April of this year and this is one of my favourote images, that I’d like to share with you as this week’s ‘Photo of the Week’.

Photographing in the Taklamakan

The trees in the images are dead poplar trees, on the edges of the Taklamakan. As the desert moves, whole forests of trees are engulfed by the sand and huge swathes of land are reduced to no more than forest graveyards. It is an eerie and unnerving place, conjuring up the image of the aftermath of some epic disaster. Well, this is a disaster, an environmental disaster in China on the grandest scale. The significance of which is slowly dawning on people. This is where I have tried to come in by visually communicating the scale of this under-reported issue.

There are some interesting and exciting developments happening for this work at the moment that I’d love to share with you but I dare not talk about it, in case I jinx it. If and when these developments happen, the news will be out here on my blog first, so stay tuned. In the meantime, please spread the word about this issue.

*Update* – A.M. Wed 8th July 2009 – Twitter continues to be blocked and now FACEBOOK is also inaccessible. To those who follow my updates through Facebook, please do not think I have disappeared. It’s just my outlets for contact are decreasing by the day! Can’t help but feel all of this just makes the ‘powers that be’ look more and more silly. A little like this.

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So, another day, another website is blocked in China.

Anyone who has spent any length of time here will know of the restrictions that are levied against the internet on a fairly regular basis. For years the BBC was well and truly blocked, rumoured to be because a BBC article made insinuations about the nocturnal private life of  a very famous former Chinese leader. Blogs are a frequent target of blocking, as they provide a venue for their users to express opinions on anything they want. Not something which is exactly encouraged here.

Twitter seems to be the new enemy here in China and one which has been noticed quickly and has become a favourite for the ‘blockers’. The ability for the instant spreading of information is quite remarkable and the evidence for which appeared on Sunday night when the events in Xinjiang took place.

On Sunday night at around 10:30 p.m., I received a call from a friend who is a foreign correspondent here in China.  They were on the way to the airport in Urumqi to go home, having been covering a story and were calling contacts in China as they had heard through twitter that something was happening in Urumqi, Xinjiang’s capital. Had I heard anything? No I hadn’t, but I jumped onto my computer, logged into Twitter, punched in the key words ‘Urumqi’ and ‘riot’ and up popped lots of ‘tweets’ reporting crowds were gathering and something serious was happening. A link led me to a Chinese blog where the writer claimed he had heard gunfire on a street in central Urumqi. Another blog posted a photo claiming to show the bodies of 5 victims lying in the street. I relayed this information via sms to my colleague and as a result of this, and no doubt other information they received, they turned the car around and headed back to Urumqi to get the story.

I personally think this is quite amazing. Of course, as a journalist, you can’t take these ‘tweets’ as fact, but they are the modern-day equivalent of a tip-off. Some will turn out to be worth following, others won’t. In this example, it enabled journalists to be onto an event as it was happening when they probably would of left, being none the wiser until their plane landed.

So, my Twitter life ended after 6 days. Well, it is not over at all actually. My page still exists, all my tweets are still there, I just can’t get to them until either (a) I leave the country or (b) China decides to lift the restrictions. I will be back though. Even after 6 days, I have amassed nearly 100 followers, so thankyou!

In the meantime, I shall continue my posting here. Just keep your fingers crossed this site doesn’t get blocked anytime soon. Long live the free flow of information!

China. Hetian. The uncomfortable co-existence of Han and Uyghurs in Xinjiang Province. May 2009

This week’s photo comes from a region of China that has shot straight into the headlines over the past 24 hours. The region is Xinjiang, China’s westernmost province . In Chinese, its name means “new land” or “new frontier” and it is one of the most exciting, beautiful and interesting provinces in the whole of the country, however it is also one of the country’s most volatile.

Last night, clashes broke out on the streets of the province’s capital, Urumqi, between crowds of Uyghurs (the province’s Turkic ethnic group) and the police. Initial reports stated only 3 people had died, but reports are now saying that at least 140 have been killed. Violence and unrest are not new to the province. Just last year, eight people were killed in a series of bomb attacks, launched by supposed separatist militants at local police in the town of Kuqa in the south of Xinjiang. This new wave of violence is not a surprise to China watchers as tensions in the province have continued to simmer and occasionally, like last night, started to boil over.

The tensions stem from the uneasy co-existence between the Uyghur ethnic groups of the region and the Han Chinese, whose numbers increase in the province year-on-year. Historically there have been clashes between the two groups as a result of their differences in terms of religion and politics, pushing them further apart and causing a level of distrust and dislike between the two groups. Separatist groups in the region and their alleged links to the Taleban (China borders Afghanistan and Pakistan) have given the authorities the excuse to clamp down on the region since September 11th and the ‘war on terror’ , enabling them to keep a watchful eye on the Muslim Uyghur population.

I spent two weeks in Xinjiang in May, during my coverage of ‘China’s Growing Sands’. What I discovered was a unique  land so different to the east of the country, that it was easy to forget that you were in China. The influence of Islam in the province has created a special culture, which in many ways seems completely separated from the rest of the country. Also, depending on where you are in the province, you can palpably feel the divide between the two groups. In the eastern city of Korla for example, the town is dominated by Han (with a ratio of Han to Uyghur at about 4:1),  a result of the increasing exploitation of oil in the region, drawing Han from the east, to capitalise on the financial opportunities in the city. Travelling to the south of the province, approaching the borders with Pakistan and Nepal, the balance is switched with Uyghurs becoming the majority and Han the minority.

For most of the world, unrest in China has always recently been associated with other areas of the country , however the recent unrest in Xinjiang should remind the world there is yet another region of instability in China.

Covering nearly one-sixth of China’s land area, bordering 8 countries and sitting on vast oil reserves, Xinjiang is not a province that China is going to give up lightly or a place where it will allow instability to grow. For the people of Xinjiang, both Uyghur and Han, these are dangerous and worrying times.