TESSA KESWICK Xining Qinghai province, China Ivhat is up with
the once superb Blue Guide that it fails to so much as mention beautiful Qinghai province, up in China's northwest? Here a lively mix of minorities make up 46 per cent of the population. Tibetans and Muslim Hui are the most prominent, alongside a sprinkling of Kazakhs and Mongols. At Xining, Ta'er Si (Kumbum) is one of the largest and most important (Tibetan Yellow Hat) Buddhist sites. Labrang, on the grasslands bordering Gansu, another. The exquisite Qutan monastery in Ledu county yet another. This is an early Ming complex built with the blessing of the first Ming emperor and the symbols on its roof are gifts in the Han style. At Xining the Great Mosque, the largest in China, has golden emblems on its roof, gifts from the Tibetan lamaserie next door. To ensure further harmony, two out of its four minarets are small Chinese pagodas.
In Qinghai province the average yearly income for the Tibetan or Hui farmers is between $300 and $400. In this vast province, larger than Texas, with a population of only five million, many are nomadic and the remote villages are desperately poor. A year ago Beijing, determined now to improve standards, announced that all those living on the land should have free education. This was greeted at provincial level with wry smiles. But since parents normally pay, their children are now flooding the schools (rural boarding) and the intakes of these have risen over 30 per cent. Many classes have increased to 60 or even 100. This intensifies the crisis in the supply of teachers throughout China: sometimes well trained in an urban environment, young teachers are appalled at having to teach out in the sticks, obliged to live in mediaeval conditions on the most basic wage.
Though government spending has doubled in China in the five years to 2003, people still pay for their health care. A 'noncomplex' operation, such as an appendectomy, costs about $150, and drugs cost more. Government only funds up to 8 per cent of hospitals costs, the rest is raised from patients, often making modern treatment prohibitive. Untrained rural doctors are paid around $400 a year. Mothers are encouraged to have their babies in the city hospitals but these are often inaccessible. Mothers prefer home births. Data does not reliably report what happens to these births — or deaths. However there is now in place a health insurance scheme which is popular. Similar to French health insurance, individuals pay ten yuan (60p) a year to the local authorities; they still pay for their operation but receive a proportion (unspecified) of the costs back later. Unfortunately, slow and unpredictable return payments from the local bureaucracy hamper this imaginative scheme. Fr hough roads in China are now remark1 ably good, they have a tendency to suddenly run out: yes, driving in China is dangerous. To pass a driving test you can pay 2,000 yuan (£70) to an accredited (private) driving school which guarantees to deliver your driving licence within three months. You need do no more than that and it shows. Even the most basic rules of the road are not observed except to ensure personal survival. Driving one evening we discover that our car has no headlights and we have to slow to a stop every time a huge vehicle pounds past. This is considered quite normal by Lao Wang, who is under the illusion that he is saving petrol. He also considers it normal to drive us 1,600 miles in third gear.
We follow the fertile banks of the Yellow River, known as China's Pride and also as China's Sorrow. Responsible over time for more deaths than any other single geographical feature in the world, this golden turbulence which helps to water plains and cities across northern China originates here. But it is diminishing partly because the Qinghai and Tibetan mountains no longer provide a sufficient flow of water. In almost every year since 1985 the Yellow River has failed to reach the sea. To help rectify this environmental disaster the government is planning to pump water up over 1,000 kilometres from the Yangtze. The trouble is that much of this water is seriously polluted. Meanwhile there is panic to ensure that Beijing's increasingly inadequate water supply copes with the Olympic rush in 2008.
Aparticularly colourful individual whose family dominated Qinghai politics for decades was the Hui warlord, General Ma Bufang. As governor of Qinghai, Ma's appetite for high living was legendary. On one spectacular occasion in 1940 he cheekily negotiated an allocation of 439,000 silver dollars from Tibet to ensure safe passage for the 14th Dalai Lama. In Linxia or Little Mecca, a neighbouring town sporting over 110 mosques, we find a great courtyard house and rose garden, built for his third wife but now a restaurant. Later at Xining we see another, the extensive Jade Mansion (Xinlu) built with pearly jade tiles in 1942 where the General lived and fought a fierce rearguard action against the Communists until forced to flee in 1949. Today, with 56 recognised nationalities, the sub-ethnic diversity in China is as great as the nationalities of Europe — though with 92 per cent the Han race reigns supreme and, as ever, they make sure it stays that way.
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