China is a large country with an area of 3.7 million square miles and, though the majority Han ethnic group make up 90% of its population, has over 50 ethnic groups. As a result, beyond the heavily-populated Han-majority provinces with teeming megacities and factory zones, there is a lot of ethnic and cultural diversity on the periphery of China.
This is what former Sunday Telegraphy China correspondent David Eimer explores in The Emperor Far Away: Travels at the Edge of China as he travels to the edges of modern China. A well-known Chinese proverb goes “The mountains are high and the emperor far away.” What this meant is that in the outer reaches of the empire, the emperor was a remote figure and so was his rule. To an extent, that saying is still true in areas like Yunnan Province and the fringes of the Northeast. In these places, the government’s rule is not as firm as everywhere else in the country, and local non-Han minorities and cultures still thrive.
In Tibet and Xinjiang, the very opposite is true as the full force of the regime has been imposed, ranging from heavy army and police presence to repressive measures limiting or banning local religious practices and languages. Not surprisingly, these areas – Xinjiang, Tibet, Yunnan and the edges of the Northeast – are often considered exotic to both foreigners and the Han Chinese. But there is also a tragic element to several of the peoples in these areas, as Eimer examines how these minorities like the Tibetans and Uyghurs fare after decades of Communist rule.
The situation in Tibet and Xinjiang, the most restive and repressed areas in China, is not surprisingly, bleak. Heavy-handed policing and harsh measures enacted against the locals have generated significant anger, the result of which can be seen now and again in the news with “terrorist” attacks in Xinjiang, which raise fears of an insurgency, no doubt played up by the government to justify their taking even harsher measures. Not only are Tibetans and Uyghurs not able to speak their language at schools or freely practice their religion, but their movements are restricted through measures like making it extremely hard for them to get passports, and they are unable to integrate into mainstream Chinese society.
In Yunnan, the province that has the most minority peoples in China and borders Thailand and Myanmar, a Wild-West atmosphere prevails in much of the borderlands. Here, the government practices a looser form of border control as there are several tribes who live across different countries like the Tais (their name gives a clue to which other neighboring country they reside in). A thriving cross-border criminal trade exists, especially in narcotics. Eimer manages to travel across to Myanmar where he visits areas populated by minority tribes and controlled by drug armies, descendants of KMT soldiers who fled to Burma and stayed to cultivate opium.
The Northeast is more sedate, though the vast icy landscape belies the economic dominance of China compared to Russia just across the northerneastern-most border. In this area, Small ethnic groups, including the descendants of nomads, cling on while facing the obsolescence of their language and customs due to decreasing numbers, intermarriage with the Han, and modern-day integration. This is already the fate of the Manchus, a Northeast people who ruled all of China as the Qing Dynasty for over 250 years up to 1911. Interestingly, the ethnic Koreans in the Northeast provinces are allowed to have their own schools where classes are taught in their own language. There is also interaction with North Koreans across the border in the form of trade, people smuggling and marriages, but this is starting to get clamped down on by the government.
The book is rich in travel, historical and ethnographic details about a China so much different from the one portrayed in conventional travel books, whilst not shying away from illustrating the repressive rule of the Communist Party. It is also sad to ponder the fate of all the peoples mentioned in the book, many of whose cultures and languages are under threat in one way or the other. Simply put, The Emperor Far Away is about a China that is rapidly disappearing.
Year published: 2014
