Spatiocide as Spectacle, Part 1: Planning and the Symbolic Death of Old Kashgar
This is the first in a series of three articles.
Spatiocide, a term coined in the early 2000s to describe Israeli state violence against the Palestinian built environment, generally implies uncreative destruction: gaping mortal wounds to the spaces of an “other” by artillery—or, just as often, bulldozers. In some parts of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, in China’s far northwest, this is exactly what has been happening for the last several years: state violence against spaces of symbolic importance to Uyghur ethnic minorities, achieved by building parking lots on cemeteries and razing mosques to make space for public toilets.
Xinjiang's Kashgar, however, is an exceptional place—and China has treated it as such. In a so-called renewal process that began in the mid-2000s, accelerated rapidly in 2010, and reached an entirely new level of dystopian placemaking after 2014, a once-viable city was not simply destroyed or rebuilt, but remade into a historicized simulacra of itself. Spatiocide in Kashgar’s historical urban core began with a period of rubble-making. But it ended with the construction of something entirely new: a sort of Uyghur version of Medieval Times or Colonial Williamsburg “set” in nineteenth century, at the apex of Chinese Imperial power in the region (Figure 1).
Figure 1: A morning “gate opening ceremony” at the reconstructed Imperial-era city wall, 2019. The woman’s sash reads: “The home of ancient beauty welcomes you.” Courtesy Shutterstock.
As part of this process, earthen-façade houses were rebuilt in their own image—albeit one that Han design firms deemed “purer”—and populated with old-timey ironsmiths, na’an bakers, and barbers who perform everyday Uyghur life for Han tourists. Here, however, there are no actors who leave at closing time. And thanks to digital surveillance, the residents cannot leave either, unless they break “character,” by engaging in suspicious behavior, such as entering buildings through side doors (less easily monitored than front) or not socializing with neighbors. In such cases, they are disappeared for re-education in the region’s infamous network of concentration camps, prisons, and factories of forced labor. Perhaps a more apt comparison than Colonial Williamsburg, then, is with a totalitarian version of Westworld, in which the satisfaction of dark human impulses comes second to that of dark statist visions (Figure 2).
Figure 2: By 2017, unmonitored contact between hostel guests and locals was stymied by barbed wire. Courtesy Gene Bunin.
In this three-part series of articles, I critically examine this shift in urban land-use planning and design by a party-state whose aim has become nothing less than rendering Kashgar the territorial equivalent of bare life: that is to say, stripping it of its symbolic power as the urban heart of the Uyghur homeland while allowing it to remain a space in which (some) indigenous life—at least biological, if not social—exists.
This first piece introduces the symbolic importance and built form of the city before spatiocide, as it existed at the turn of the twenty-first century. It also discusses the sorts of spatial interventions that ossified and peripheralized Uyghur space in Kashgar from 2000 to 2014. Parts two and three focus on the shift in techniques of spatial development and control in the pre-modern Uyghur city (hereafter referred to as “Old Kashgar”) as governance, including the management of land itself, evolved from a sort of everyday authoritarianism to something that can only be described as totalitarian.
Why Kashgar?
One could imagine a purely economic argument for Chinese-style redevelopment efforts in Kashgar. The city’s per capita GDP is, even now, just a bit more than one-third that of the regional capital, Urumqi, which itself is half that of Beijing. But the scale, speed, and especially the timing of what state planning documents call “reconstruction” belie any rationale other than a vision of national security that demands both total cultural assimilation and an unflinching acceptance of a Han-dominated social hierarchy.
The most prominent oasis town on the southern Silk Road trading route, Kashgar remains southern Xinjiang’s largest city and the last urban center on the Chinese side of two border crossings: the Torugart pass to Kyrgyzstan and the treacherous Karakorum highway to Pakistan. How much of Old Kashgar remains today I cannot say. Like others, it’s been years since I felt that travel there would be safe for me or my Uyghur contacts. What I do know is that as late as 2014, the city that has served as the setting for a major Hollywood movie and a century of English-language travel writing was still an extraordinary place—one whose buildings and streets revealed the profound diversity of the human experience. To the party-state in the era of Xi Jinping, Kashgar was a nail screaming to be hammered down (Figure 3).
Figure 3: Map of Xinjiang, with Kashgar indicated by a star. Courtesy Shutterstock.
Kashgar is, if not the spiritual center of the Uyghurs, then, at least, the symbolic cradle of its intellectual life and body politic. It is the place where Qing Imperial occupation never managed the sort of permanency that it did along other parts of the Silk Road to the north, and where a nineteenth-century Muslim leader offered the only real challenge to non-Turkic warlord rule west of the Great Wall. It is also the place from which the ideological and political force behind Xinjiang’s first of two, if brief, experiments in sovereignty originated in the twentieth century. Even today it remains the urban node connecting a vast rural population—one deemed so ripe for ethnopolitical violence that the state openly promotes among it “optimization” strategies such as targeted birth restrictions (Figure 4).
Figure 4: In both 2005 (left) and 2021 (right), all roads in Old Kashgar led to Id Kah Mosque. The post-reconstruction space, however, is markedly less dense. Courtesy Google Earth.
And then there is practical and symbolic risk to the state represented by Kashgar’s built environment itself. Until recently, Islam—not the state—provided the organizing logic of space, with the city’s more than one hundred neighborhood mosques each serving a community as small as ten families. At the cultural and geographic center of old city itself is the fifteenth-century Id Kah mosque, from which half a dozen arterial roads radiate to skirt—but not penetrate—residential space. In short, Old Kashgar was neither legible nor traversable to the state security apparatus (Figure 5).
Figure 5: A community mosque surrounded by shophouse-style buildings in 2007. Such spaces no longer exist. Courtesy Joshua Kucera.
Indeed, it was barely visible to the state. Beyond those arterial roads, most of Old Kashgar was almost impossible to monitor with the CCTV surveillance technology available in the 2000s, when efforts to secure the city’s Uyghur space began in earnest. On roads and sidewalks, horizontal sight lines were limited by winding alleys, or cut off completely by dark, narrow dead ends. Monitoring domestic space was even more challenging, given that Uyghur residential design typically organizes houses around private courtyards.
One approach could have been to simply flatten the place. But that would imply defeat—or, at least, a recognition on the part of the state that it cannot properly manage the perceived risks of Uyghur space. Instead, for a state with almost imperial ambitions at and beyond its Western border, Baron Haussmann was a natural a source of inspiration. The comparison, of course, comes with a major caveat. Haussmann set about securing a capital (Paris) that would come to serve as the metropole of a vast colonial empire. In Kashgar, by contrast, the state’s imperative was to undermine the city’s symbolic import and to peripheralize its political power.
From City to District: The Peripheralization of “Old Kashgar” (2000-2014)
Urban “renewal” in Old Kashgar was so well timed with ethnopolitical violence that the state’s attempts to frame its work in other terms (mainly earthquake preparedness) were, even then, absurd. The earliest effort—a “building reinforcement” program in the early 2000s—fell well short of its goal to voluntarily relocate five thousand households out of Old Kashgar. In 2006, it was replaced by the “mass-demolition and construction” scheme (dachai dajian大拆大 建), which aimed to involuntarily relocate ten thousand households to Han-style high-rises on the urban periphery. Still, it was not until 2008, following a spate of Uyghur-led terrorist-style attacks on both state and civilian targets, that demolition picked up. Then, underground spaces were filled in, and informal vertical construction was razed entirely. Meanwhile, the vast majority of structures deemed legal were subject to a program of “(Uyghur) style-protecting” (fengmao baohu 风貌保护), which meant demolishing them and rebuilding them using stylistically “correct” plans by Han architects (Figure 6).
Figure 6: Typical Uyghur-style homes feature a gated private courtyard and self-built vertical construction. New state-approved designs exclusively open to the street. Left: Courtesy Wikimedia Commons. Right: photograph by Lauren Restrepo, 2013.
The scope of this demolition, however, paled in comparison to what followed the Urumqi riots of July 2009: the deadliest incident of ethnic violence in China in the Communist era, committed, according to official accounts, by migrants from southern Xinjiang. According to estimates by amateur geographer Stefen Geens, the state demolished as much as ten times the residential area of Old Kashgar between fall 2009 and summer 2010 as in the entire decade prior.
The obliteration of authentic Uyghur space was only part of the plan to tame Kashgar. Under the guidance of an ultra-hardline regional party secretary, demographic re-engineering and the introduction of Han-dominated, state-led capitalism in the region became matters of national security. By mid-2010, Beijing announced a new “partner assistance program” (PAP) which required direct transfers of cash, personnel, and technical expertise from wealthy Han cities and provinces to specific geographies within Xinjiang. In a symbolically laden move, Kashgar was paired with Shenzhen, the manufacturing giant and export hub of southeast China. At the same time, Guangdong Province (in which Shenzhen is located) was tasked with developing several rural counties in Kashgar Prefecture. To give a sense of the scale of PAP: Shenzhen’s annual transfers totaled approximately US$50 million in 2010 and increased to US$122 million by 2016. Guangdong’s cash transfers were between three and four times as large—for a vast, water-poor, and sparsely populated set of rural counties.
“To the party-state in the era of Xi Jinping, Kashgar was a nail screaming to be hammered down.”
Because much of this “aid” could be structured as investments in land and business development, coastal localities had every incentive to do their part to make real the so-called “Silk Road Economic Belt” by bringing export-oriented manufacturing to Xinjiang. At the same time, because they were also expected to offer technical expertise in development, land-use planning quickly became a tool of rent-seeking coastal governments.
By 2010 it was impossible to speak of Kashgar in the singular. The central government nullified the city’s 1998 master plan for 2000 to 2020 and replaced it with one created by experts from Guangdong Province’s other mega-city, Guangzhou. In the new plan, the entire existing city would now form the smaller half of the Kashgar Urban District. To the east of the existing city would rise Kashgar New City (or New City Area), with a shock-and-awe smattering of iconic commercial skyscrapers flanked by cut-rate, cookie-cutter residential high-rises.
Figure 7: Comparison of the planning area of the 1998 Kashgar master plan (left) and the 2012 plan (right). The approximate planning area of the 1998 plan is outlined in yellow in the 2012 plan. The red zones mark the existing “Old City District” and the then-planned “New City District.” Blue dots represent the manufacturing zones planned and paid for by Shenzhen and Guangzhou. Left: courtesy Xinjiang Youth Press. Right: courtesy Shenzhen Urban Planning and Design Institute.
Kashgar Urban District, in turn, became dwarfed by new industrial parks. Shenzhen built the Kashgar Economic Development Zone to the north. At the same time, Guangzhou developed the ambitiously-branded "New Guangzhou” to Kashgar’s south. All told, these projects expanded the footprint of Kashgar ten-fold while rendering it a colonial periphery to rich metropoles on the South China Sea (Figure 8).
Figure 8: Left: in 2013, New Guangzhou felt raw and in-progress. Now, Old Kashgar is bounded by green space and utterly dwarfed by Chinese-style, new-build development. Left: photograph by Lauren Restrepo. Right: Shenzhen Urban Planning and Design Institute, year unknown.
Intriguingly and perhaps unexpectedly given the pattern of spatiocide familiar from Iraq, Palestine, and, more recently, Syria, development of these new Han areas was not accompanied by neglect or simple erasure of Uyghur space. Instead, as I will discuss in the next article in this series, Old Kashgar was painstakingly embalmed alive and offered up to Han influencers as a backdrop for the sorts of Orientalist travel posts that would lure domestic tourists.
Banner image: Early evening street scene in pre-reconstruction Old Kashgar, August 2010. Courtesy Stefan Geens.
Citation
Lauren Restrepo, “Spatiocide as Spectacle, Part 1: Planning and the Symbolic Death of Old Kashgar,” PLATFORM, October 10, 2022.
