By Professor David Goodman

A bustling street market at a dusty crossroads next to a mosque. The way people dress, shop, and move around point to  this unmistakeably as Central Asia. Instead it turns out to be Xunhua County in Qinghai Province, Northwest China: the  official homeland for the Salar People, one of the PRC’s [People’s Republic of China] officially designated minority nationalities. There are around 100,000 Salar located mainly in Xunhua County and neighbouring Gansu Province. Defined by the state as a Turkic and Islamic (Sunni) people, they are said to have migrated from around Samarkand (in today’s Uzbekistan) in the 14th Century. They have long been known throughout Northwest China as merchants and traders, with somewhat less comfortably, an older reputation for being ferocious and violent.

Exile is not only central to the definition of the Salar, a sense of banishment and of being ‘outsiders’ are also part of common consciousness in Xunhua County and indeed for the Salar as a whole. From 1958 to 1982 Salar identity was almost totally held under suspicion and repressed by the PRC. Throughout the 1950s Salar resistance to the new Chinese state was fairly intense and led to a series of armed attacks and uprisings. In the late 1950s the Salar raised the banner of armed resistance alongside local Tibetans, and the result was not only large scale imprisonment but also the suppression of things Salar. This included the removal of a 13th Century handwritten Koran – one of only three worldwide – to Beijing ‘for safe keeping.’

Repression continued for the best part of twenty-four years. In the early 1980s as the reform agenda started to emerge in Beijing, a new approach was adopted towards all minority nationalities, including those such as the Salar who had demonstrated their opposition in the more recent past. The more tolerant approach was almost certainly a pragmatic response to the needs of economic rationalism.

Nonetheless it was cautiously welcomed in Xunhua, especially when all but a few (those identified as ‘the leaders’) of those arrested for involvement in the rebellions of the 1950s were pardoned. This included those who were still in ‘Reform through labour camps’ as well as those who had already been released from other state security establishments or indeed who had subsequently died or been executed. Full religious expression was permitted once again, the Koran was returned from Beijing and local mosques became totally operational again. Salar community institutions came out from underground and indeed in many cases became the foundation for new economic enterprises.

At the same time, Salar acceptance of a more positive relationship with the PRC remains both cautious and a coexistence (rather than a closer integration) in some regards. A small act of resistance was the communal refusal to adopt the new state-provided script for the Salar language. Salars effectively use three languages: the Salar spoken language, which they speak routinely, but which was and remains written in Chinese characters; Linxia Chinese, which has many Mongolian and Turkic influences in any case; and Arabic which is used for religious purposes. In the early 1980s a new Salar alphabet was designed at the direction of the Central Nationalities Commission of the PRC Government. It did not achieve any acceptance and has been quietly shelved as an idea. Another example is the experience of schooling. State school enrolments in Xunhua are some of the lowest in the PRC. A major reason for this is that the Salar, like other Muslims in the Northwest, would prefer that the sexes are segregated at school and that in any case there should be more religious education for their children, as provided for through the madrasas attached to each mosque.

Interestingly though the Salar do not present themselves as victims. On the contrary, the evidence of recent surveys of Salar businessmen and community leaders suggests that stories of exile, migration and of being different are very much use as tools of Salar mobilisation and wealth creation. County leaders often describe Xunhua in terms of its poverty. While this is not inaccurate against the standard of China’s Eastern provinces, Xunhua has been one of the more successful economic stories among Qinghai counties since the early 1990s. The mainstays of the local economy are energy production, the export of labour outside the county, the wool industry and the production of cloths and clothing with Islamic religious significance.

There is a strong and growing electricity-generating industry, centred on two still fairly new hydroelectric stations on the Yellow River. It is common to meet Salar all over China’s Northwest. Some, as in the past, are travelling merchants and salesmen. In more recent developments Xunhua now also supports a substantial number of county-based construction companies with workers sourced from the county, as well as a number of transport companies that work throughout the Northwest. One consequence of this out-migration has been a demand for more Salar restaurants and eateries to support migrant Salars and this too has contributed to the export of labour.

The increased economic development of Xunhua is perhaps most apparent in the ways in which older, well-established industries have rapidly found new markets, and become mechanised and automated. In particular, the expansion of the woollen goods industry has been quite spectacular. Xunhua previously had one small and inefficient mill, spinning sheep’s wool. Since the late 1980s Xunhua has become a major centre in China for washing and spinning sheep and yaks wool. It now has five large-scale enterprises all recapitalised with new technology and all led by native Salars. This restructured and revitalised industry has contributed significantly to Xunhua’s wealth, with the mills producing a range of products, notably luxury products for export to Europe and North America. The woollen goods industry aside, mechanisation and automation have also come to older industries making religious cloth, hats and embroidery, some of which is specific to the Salar, and some of which has wider Muslim applicability.

Professor David Goodman is Professor of Contemporary China Studies in the Institute for International Studies, UTS.

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