from NY Times, 5 March 2014, by Dan Levin
Our guide in Urumqi was from Kashgar, and he had left there after the Afghan and Pakistan borders were closed post 11 Sept 2001 (911). He had been working in international trade until the border was closed. Kashgar is about 1,500 KM (900 miles) south and west of Urumqi.
Excerpt:
"The Chinese authorities set out five years ago to modernize Kashgar’s fabled Old City district while promising to preserve its dense Casbah-like charms. But the results underscore the growing divide between the government and the ethnic minority that lives here — the Uighurs, a Muslim, Turkic-speaking people who have chafed at Beijing’s rule since Communist troops took over their traditional homeland in 1949. The region, in China’s far west, is now known as Xinjiang, a Mandarin term meaning “new frontier.”
The official narrative of the modernization project justified tearing down 65,000 homes and resettling 220,000 Uighur residents as crucial to improving their lives. “Houses in the Old City of Kashgar are mostly old and dilapidated, extremely vulnerable to earthquakes and fire,” said a 2010 report by Xinhua, the state news agency, that was widely republished in the Chinese government-controlled media. “The renovation of the Old City zone in Kashgar is a project that complied with the wishes of the people,” the report claimed."
