Spatiocide as Spectacle, Part 2: Haussmannization, Ossification, and the Symbolic Death of Old Kashgar
This is the second article in a three-part series. Follow the link to read Part 1. NB: some links in this article may not work due to PRC firewalls designed to keep non-Chinese IP addresses off Chinese government websites.
In the first article in this three-part series on the reconstruction of Kashgar, I introduced the political logic of the Chinese party-state’s project to strip away the symbolic power of southern Xinjiang’s largest city and decenter it in the broader imaginary of the Uyghur homeland. I also argued that this was done through a two-pronged strategy: sprawling new-build development compelled by the central government and funded by wealthy coastal cities, and a program of physical redevelopment in Kashgar’s historical urban core (“Old Kashgar”) that depopulated Uyghur space while simultaneously making it more legible to the security apparatus.
This second installment examines local design and redevelopment practices during the first phase in Old Kashgar’s pacification, through its transformation into a quasi-theme park, from 2009 to 2014: a period book-ended by horrific moments of ethnopolitical violence, each met with horrifying new forms of state violence against Uyghur people and property.
Seeing Like a Party-state
In the mid-2000s, as involuntary relocation and demolition had begun in earnest, party-affiliated architects and designers from Urumqi meticulously documented Old Kashgar's built environment. The immediate result was a burst of Chinese-language academic articles and a half-dozen oversized, full-color Chinese-language volumes that, in retrospect, read like salvage archaeology of authentic Uyghur space. This research, however, also positioned the municipal government to exploit popular and official demands for increased building safety that followed the May 2008 Wenchuan earthquake in Sichuan Province. Its “Comprehensive Treatment Project Plan for the Reconstruction of Dilapidated and Old Houses in the Old City of Kashgar” published two months later—and most propaganda on the project thereafter—was framed as an apolitical effort to promote earthquake preparedness in a place that just so happened to be populated almost entirely by Uyghurs.
Then, a year later, came the July 2009 Urumqi riots, which made urbanization and urban redevelopment in Xinjiang matters of national security. It is impossible to say whether the appropriations requested in the 2008 plan would have been secured, or how quickly the plan would have been approved by higher authorities, without the riots. What is clear is that, in the words of one of Xinjiang’s most prominent architects, 2009 was “very special” for Kashgar and that “after years of exploration and practice, a new phase of the reconstruction of the old city of Kashgar began.”
The following summer, a consortium of eight ministries and national-level commissions jointly approved the project and its 7 billion RMB (US$1.1 billion) price. Tellingly, the city government was made responsible for less than one-tenth of the project’s costs, and it essentially became a side player in local redevelopment. In contrast, the central government and the property owners whose homes and businesses were to be involuntarily reconstructed were the largest expected sources funds, each contributing 2 billion RMB.
Plans for demolition targeted somewhere between half and all of Old Kashgar, depending on which government source one reads. A 2016 white paper, for instance, describes Old Kashgar as 8.36 sq. km with a population of 220,000. However, documents published by the Kashgar city government define it as 4.25 sq. km with a population of 130,000. This latter source also describes a five-year goal of renovating 49,043 units, covering 5.07 sq. km of residential space. If this is correct, and given that most residential structures in Old Kashgar are two or three stories, it is reasonable to conclude that the reconstruction project aimed to affect nearly the entire Uyghur city. That aligns with my observations made during multiple visits between 2011 and 2014 and with the estimates of amateur geographer Stefan Geens as early as 2010 (Figure 1).
Figure 1: A 2012 master plan called for historic preservation in four areas within Old Kashgar (marked in red) with “controlled construction” in most other areas (dark blue). By 2010, only the two poorer areas were preserved (marked in blue outline). Left: courtesy Shenzhen Urban Planning and Design Institute. Right: courtesy Stefen Geens.
Preservation as Ossification in Old Kashgar
Whatever the true scale of demolition, the relationship between planned and actual preservation is clearer. A 2011 planning map included four protected areas in the “historical urban district.” But in practice, only two were spared the bulldozer. One is Gaotai (Gaotai Jumin 高台居民, Uyghur Koziqiyar Beshi), an 800-year-old center of pottery production built among the city’s loess cliffs. The other is the northeast corner of Old City’s Yawagh District, an arbitrarily defined neighborhood designated in the mid-2000s architectural surveys as a particularly representative example of Uyghur vernacular architecture and urban design. Both areas featured terraced, or row, houses built into a steeply sloping cliff on opposite sides of an escarpment formed by the floodplain of the Tuman river. They were among the poorest areas in the old city—and, as best I could tell when visiting, had some of its most structurally precarious and environmentally hazardous housing stock.
The main renewal efforts here were limited to careful mapping and study, upgraded signage, and some perfunctory tourist infrastructure. In the latter area, which sits to the west of the Tuman river, a massive propaganda banner welcoming Chinese-speaking visitors to the newly branded “Old City Scenic District” (Laocheng Jingqu老城景区) was erected along with an easily avoided ticket booth charging visitors US$3 to enter what was still a living community. Houses and shops serving locals were fitted with bilingual English and Chinese placards in an effort to curate the spaces of everyday life for an audience of tourists imagined to be utterly ignorant of Uyghur or Central Asian ways of life. (Outside one baker’s home, for example, I learned that na’an is a Uyghur “bagel.”) Chinese visitors soon arrived, dutifully reading the signage and taking photographs inside and outside of homes with no regard for the distinction between public and private space. The whole experience sat somewhere between slum tourism and a role-playing game for fans of Victorian ethnography.
“Physical redevelopment in Kashgar’s historical urban core (“Old Kashgar”) . . . depopulated Uyghur space while simultaneously making it more legible to the security apparatus.”
In the other two areas designated for protection—the neighborhood to the immediate southwest of the Id Kah mosque, which contained some of Old Kashgar’s most thoughtfully designed and best-built housing, and the more commercial space to its southeast—entire blocks were razed and re-built in their own(ish) image. Here, residents were compelled to take an active role in the reconstruction: the “one-on-one design” (一对一设计) policy established in the 2008 plan charged Uyghur families with salvaging distinctive and authentic Uyghur architectural features and building materials from their homes prior to demolition. These items would become the sometimes figurative, sometimes literal window dressing for the Han architects tasked with rebuilding.
Accompanying this intensive campaign to "modernize" Uyghur domestic space was an equally totalizing effort to secularize the architectural elements stripped from Uyghur homes by reusing them to stylize building façades and public space. As part of this program, for example, the pointed-dome shape and intricately carved woodwork of a traditional Uyghur mihrab—a decorative niche in the formal entertaining room—was recycled into purposeless (but attractive) arches on residential side streets. In a parallel move, greenery, once common in private courtyards but absent from Kashgar’s narrow (though functional) alleys, came to decorate the sun-filled, and thus more easily surveilled, doorways of reconstructed houses (Figure 2).
Figure 2: In a partially demolished home, the functional heart, the mihrab, is visible. In reconstructed space, it becomes a design motif on exterior walls. Left: photograph by Lauren Restrepo, 2010. Right: courtesy Shutterstock, 2017.
Other design choices de-emphasized local aesthetic traditions and, instead, appropriated elements from one of the few Muslim nations from which the PRC does not fear a radicalizing influence on Uyghurs: Morocco. Building façades under this program became far more colorful, as the smooth stucco that replaced exposed brick or natural clay plaster was painted in various shades of warm pastels and the occasional pop of Tiffany blue, giving Kashgar a color scheme that invokes—both in my imagination and Google Lens’s algorithms—Marrakech. More recently, Han-owned "boutique homestays" (bed and breakfasts that simulate Uyghur domesticity and hospitality) have self-consciously borrowed a palette of white and lapis blue from Tangiers (Figure 3).
Figure 3: The skyline of reconstructed Old Kashgar. Courtesy Shutterstock, n.d.
In a further act of aggression, official discourse implied that all of this reconstruction was as much about psychological transformation as physical. Success was measured not just in material terms, but also in the shift in residents’ attitudes, with Chinese journalists describing the rebuilding as evidence of how local leaders “won the hearts” of affected homeowners. Accounts often made a point of noting that the mindset of residents had been transformed from “[they] want me to change” (yao wo gai 要我改) into “I want to change” (wo yao gai 我要改).
Reengineering Society with Mortar and Mortgages
Given their protected status and the relatively high quality of the original construction, it might seem counterintuitive that the areas to the immediate southwest and southeast of Id Kah mosque were among the first and most thoroughly reconstructed. Targeting these areas, however, followed a clear logic of political economy. It helped ensure that those who remained in Old Kashgar were loyal to Beijing (Figure 4).
Figure 4: The Islamic School of Kashgar, within the formally protected Id Kah mosque district, during demolition. Photograph by Lauren Restrepo, 2013.
In part one of this series, I describe how reconstruction prioritized surveillance and circulation (think: opening up the city to small armored tanks). But so, too, was the exercise a marvel of social re-engineering. Remaining in one’s home (or, more precisely, in a new home on the site of one’s old home) meant negotiating a complicated and possibly contentious administrative process requiring linguistic competencies, informal connections, and experience navigating Chinese bureaucracy that few outside the state sector possessed.
It was also extremely expensive. Bearing the costs of design, materials, and construction dictated by design firms accountable only to state institutions required financial capital available mainly through three sources: 1) a steady government paycheck, 2) savings in an employer-matched provident housing fund and/or access to below-market provident housing fund home improvement loans that, in Xinjiang, are perks only of government work, and 3) a business so successful that it surely had strong informal ties with—and thus existed at the pleasure of—local political leaders (Figure 5).
Figure 5: High-end new residential construction in the Id Kah mosque district. Photograph by Lauren Restrepo, 2013.
Those whose homes were deemed unsuitable for reconstruction, as well as many of those without the financial or political capital needed to buy back into Old Kashgar, were displaced: offered the choice of very low-quality, poorly located new housing or a modest cash payment. One man I spoke with in 2011 observed that his compensation was exactly one-third of the cost of a new Chinese-style high-rise on Kashgar’s fringe (this is the typical down payment needed to purchase residential real estate in China). For him, redevelopment traded a modest Uyghur-style house for a mortgaged space in a Sinicized residential compound at the edge of the desert.
From Security to Spectacle
By mid-2014, the razing and reconstruction of Old Kashgar were largely complete. Sight lines were broad, alleys were wide and sunny, and private courtyards within residential units were all but eliminated. The city became flatter, as underground tunnels were filled in and informal vertical construction—the once ubiquitous way people added extra stories to their houses—was razed. CCTV cameras blanked the streets, and the streets become inescapable for those who managed to remain.
The story of Old Kashgar’s redevelopment should have ended here, at the precise moment when efforts at social control metastasized into, and were largely superseded by, a broader program of state violence against the Uyghurs somewhere between cultural genocide and, well, genocide. But in the spring and summer of 2014, a string of terrorist incidents—including mass-casualty attacks on civilians in the Kunming train station, the Urumqi train station, and in public spaces within Urumqi, as well as the assassination of the state-approved head imam at Kashgar’s Id Kah mosque—compelled the highest levels of the party-state to re-assess governance in the region yet again. Leaked documents cite Xi Jinping calling for “the organs of dictatorship” to show “absolutely no mercy” in securing the nation against “terrorism, infiltration, and separatism.”
To implement this in Kashgar’s reconstructed built environment, it would have been enough to collect biometric data, introduce facial recognition software and pre-crime detection algorithms to the infrastructure of optical surveillance, and erect a network of security checkpoints. Building Kashgar’s total security state after 2014 did not, strictly speaking, require more architects or urban designers. Yet the transformation of the city continued. All of which makes the creativity and careful attention to detail that these professionals next brought to the re-reimagining of Old Kashgar terrifying—in the full and rarely-used sense of the word.
If the 2009-14 phase of redevelopment was about distancing Kashgaris from their built environment, what followed proceeded from an impulse to bring them suffocatingly close to a space now re-signified as inextricably Chinese. In the final piece of this series, I explore the ways in which spatial interventions after 2014 recast Uyghur residents as late-nineteenth-century Imperial subjects, dancing with gratitude for their privileged position inside the walls the Qing dynasty’s largest and most fortified administrative position in the Tarim basin.
Banner image: Schoolchildren play in a street scene typical of the new normal, 2017. Courtesy Gene Bunin.
Citation
Lauren Restrepo, “Spatiocide as Spectacle, Part 2: Haussmannization, Ossification, and the Symbolic Death of Old Kashgar,” PLATFORM, October 24, 2022
