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The Role of the International Community in East Turkestan / Prof Dru C. Gladneylike foreigners than the local Han, they are often less suspect. “We use the hardcurrency to go on the Hajj”, one young Uighur in the central market square ofKunming, Yunnan Province, once told me, “Allah will protect you if you exchangemoney with me”. While some may save for the Hajj, most purchase imported orluxury goods with their hard currency and take them back to Xinjiang, selling ortrading them for profit -a practice that keeps them away from home six monthsout of the year. As Uighurs continue to travel throughout China they return toXinjiang with a firmer sense of their own pan-Uighur identity vis-a-vis the Hanand the other minorities they encounter on their travels.International travel has also resumed for the Uighur. An importantdevelopment in the last decade was the opening of a rail line between China andKazakstan through the Ili corridor to Almaty, and the opening of several officialgateways with the surrounding five nations on its borders. With the resumptionof normal Sino-Central Asian relations in 1991, trade and personal contacts haveexpanded enormously. This expansion has led many Uighur to see themselves asimportant players in the improved Sino-Central Asian exchanges. On a 1988 tripfrom Moscow to Beijing through the Ili corridor, I was surprised to find that manyof the imported Hong Kong-made electronic goods purchased by Uighur withhard currency in Canton and Shenzhen found their way into the market placeand hands of relatives across the border in Almaty - who are also identified by theKazakstan state as Uighur. However, since the late 1990s, Uighur travel abroadhas been more restricted due to security concerns, and it is nearly impossible formost average Uighur citizens to obtain a passport.Uighur response: Struggles to sustain cultural survivalIncreasing integration with China has not been smooth. Many Uighursresent the threats to their cultural survival and have resorted to violence. Afterdenying them for decades and stressing instead China’s “national unity”, officialreports have detailed Tibetan and Muslim conflict activities in the border regionsof Tibet, Yunnan, Xinjiang, Ningxia and Inner Mongolia. With the March 1997bus bombings in Beijing, widely attributed (although this has never been verified)to Uighur separatists, coupled with the Urumqi bus bombings on the day of DengXiaoping’s 1997 memorial on 25 February, Beijing can no longer keep such reportssecret. The Yining uprising on 7 February 1997, which left at least nine dead and469