The Subplot by Megan Walsh

Author:Megan Walsh
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Columbia Global Reports

Wolf Totem’s legacy, including its blockbuster movie adaptation, has inadvertently been seen as a call to arms for Han dominance. “Wolf culture” is now ubiquitous, with a slew of lupine-themed self-help books and business manuals piggybacking on the success of Wolf Totem, not to mention the recent nationalist action movie franchise Wolf Warrior. The phrase “wolf warrior diplomacy” is bandied around to describe Beijing’s more combative world presence; tech giant Huawei’s success has been credited to its “wolf culture,” which has, in turn, been described as “the desire to conquer, the worship of power and, in China, [the belief] that ‘money is everything.’” Jiang’s reductive “wolf” and “sheep” metaphors have contributed to what many see as a predatory and merciless presence in ethnic borderlands.

Inner Mongolian author Guo Xuebo deeply resents the false attribution of “wolf culture” to Mongolian people. He describes wolves as “greedy, selfish, cold, and cruel,” and says that “advocating the spirit of wolves is [a kind of] fascist thought that goes against humanity.” It also goes against ethnic diversity, and reaffirms the need “to safeguard the history of our ancestors and our ethnic culture.” According to Wang Lixiong, an ethnic Han democracy activist and author of the 1991 science fiction novel China Tidal Wave, the surge of Han culture in China’s semiautonomous regions has already overwhelmed ethnic minority history and culture. He believes that Han Chinese immigration is the government’s preferred method of control in “separatist” ethnic regions. “Inner Mongolia is considered the most successful,” he says, “It has a population of about 25 million and 20 million are now Han … so the government feels that basically there is no minority problem in Inner Mongolia.”

The situation could not be more precarious for China’s 12 million ethnic Uyghurs in the northwestern autonomous region of Xinjiang, which in Mandarin means “new frontier.” Their language is Turkic in origin, and very different from Chinese. The majority are Muslim, and a tiny group have committed deadly terrorist attacks. And yet the very act of writing in their native tongue can lead to their “disappearance” into one of Xinjiang’s well-documented detention or, as the CCP calls them, “re-education” camps. The long list of imprisoned publishers, scholars, poets, and writers includes, Ablet Abdurishit Berqi (pen name Tarim), Adil Tuniyaz, and Aburehim Heyit, while Haji Mirzahid Kerimi and Nurmuhemmet Tohti have died in prison. This is far from a roundup of dangerous terrorists and criminals, but what has been widely referred to as “cultural genocide,” with an estimated 1.8 million detainees.

The consequences of speaking plainly, let alone in one’s mother tongue, are increasingly an existential threat. Tarim, who is currently detained, usually writes about love in Uyghur, yet in Chinese his words are focused and political:

Friends say

the beauty of Chinese

is its subtlety

I ask

Is that because there is no freedom of speech?

Friends say

Chinese poetry needs metaphor

I ask

Is that the same as a bat liking the dark?

Friends say

You are too blunt

I ask

is daring to speak the truth

not poetry?

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