The other China

THE EMPEROR FAR AWAY
Travels at the edge of China
David Eimer
Bloomsbury
336 pages; Rs 522

Even as the number of travelogues on China increases rapidly, David Eimer's trip round the massive landlocked borders brings out a cross section of a country that is practically invisible to people outside the world's most populated nation - the country's minority communities. The Emperor Far Away is a piece of reportage about nearly a hundred million Chinese who live off the scraps of the world's second largest economy - people, who irrespective of their engineering degrees, can only work as barbers or waiters because they belong to a particular community.

Mr Eimer's familiarity with the terrain, the people and the politics is evident. What is also evident is how he cherishes the fact that he is no longer bound by the demands of diplomacy now that he has left China (he is a former Beijing correspondent for The Sunday Times, and now a journalist based in Bangkok). His terminology is blunt, and there is a palpable sense of scorn for China's Han-dominated government. "Giving the different ethnic groups a voice - something mostly denied them in China itself" is "the principal motivation for this book,"

Mr Eimer tells the reader. For him, China is a "huge, unwieldy and unstable empire," with the Han at the centre and above everyone else.

The author befriends young Uighurs, Tibetan monks, Dai land lords and Wa drug traffickers - and characters from across China's 55 recognised minority communities who, as one character in the book mentions, are like pandas - coddled yet endangered. He finds himself in nightclubs, pubs, hostile jungles and drug joints. As he hops and skips his way from Xinjiang to Tibet to the China-Myanmar border and Manchuria, there are several delectably vivid descriptions of landscapes and people. "The intricate mesh of winding, cobblestoned lanes" in Kashgar are replaced by concrete apartment blocks. Mount Kailash rises like a diamond on the face of the earth. Mr Eimer's navigates the Mekong on a barge with a crew of "wiry, dark-skinned Dai" sailors, and sings karaoke with a Wa warlord-cum-drug kingpin operating on both sides of the China-Myanmar border.

Given the wide range of people, customs and socio-political realities that Mr Eimer brushes by, the journey is bound to produce such colourful anecdotes. What, however, emerges as a constant and disturbing presence is the realisation that none of these cultures are compatible or comfortable with the highly centralised consumerism of Shanghai or the "governmentality" of Beijing. There is a mixture of resentment, despair, resignation and anomie among all the anecdotes that Mr Eimer's encounters produce. The central government has never managed to reconcile the region's inhabitants, and their cultural needs, to the rules or policies of Beijing. The minority groups have no right to be educated in their native languages. There is no freedom in practicing their religions. They are made to do menial jobs, and are ruthlessly repressed if they complain against such inequalities.

"We are Muslims, we believe in Allah," Billy the Uighur tells Mr Eimer in Xinjiang, in the far west. "The Chinese believe only in money."

Neither side can be painted in black and white, though. While Tibet and Xinjiang tells the story of Chinese paranoia that these regions might choose to separate from China, and how that motivates them to assimilate and engulf these cultures by practically obliterating them, there is also the Wa district at the border of China and Burma, and which uses the Chinese currency, but is effectively independent. Here jungles and rivers force the Chinese state to exert negligible control, even as the soil just right for poppy cultivation, sprouts "child soldiers and teenage hookers" and "precious gems are sold next to vegetables".

There is also Heihe in the north-east, whose close proximity to the Russian city of Blagoveshchensk means a steady stream of Russians crossing borders to enjoy the cheaper lifestyle in Heihe. It is also in the north-east, along the Korean border, that the reader finds a minority community starkly different in the treatment it receives from the Chinese State. "China's Koreans enjoy advantages denied to other minorities," Mr Eimer writes, and adds that "on the surface at least," the government's policies here "seemed to me to be a model which if followed elsewhere would certainly reduce, while not eliminating, tensions between the Chinese and the most restive minorities."

Finally, there are the Manchus, a community existent only in name. The Manchus were made Han over time, so that their native language "became redundant, while their tribal culture and customs faded away. Even so, Mr Eimer's survey of China's minorities is not complete. Certain communities like the Mongol and the Hui, he mentions only in passing.

Mr Eimer's enthusiasm to highlight the plight of China's minorities, and exposing Beijing's Han-centred authoritarianism, however, sometimes leads to rank stereotyping and blatant generalisations. The reader might feel put off with certain sentences like: "Smart, pretty but single women are an increasingly common phenomenon in China", or "China is a cruel and unpredictable country, so it is understandable why most of its people concentrate on the immediate - the next meal, the next bus ride - and leave the rest to fate."

The book manages to assert that China remains an incompletely baked nation. It highlights a China that is hardly ever discussed and urges a deeper analysis of the living conditions and political status of the nation's minorities.