I

We are currently living in a world surrounded, trespassed, and organized by multiple uncertainties. Speaking of sustainability today implies to situate, temporally and spatially, the needs that a given society has, as well as the path to cover such needs. At the same time, as a concept, sustainability, that, in general terms, I am going to define here as the achievement of well-being in a way that it does not imply subordinating human beings, environment, or economies regionally linked following a transnational logic, is one of the biggest challenges that people concerned about developing an empathetic approach in the global resolution of social problems have to face.

I was born in Mexico City in the 1980s, and my teenage years were deeply impacted and influenced by neozapatist movement that, on the first of January of 1994, started a guerrilla movement that became a movement to promote changes from the arena of civil society. One of the mottos of Zapatista movement has accompanied me during my whole life: “we want to build up a world inside which many worlds fit.” This call came from one of the best-known indigenous movements in the world. I am not indigenous, but, nowadays, I cannot avoid seeing this call as a historical need that is unavoidable if we want to talk about a well-being constructed taking sustainability as a prerequisite.

Zapatista movement was not alone in the 1990s in Latin America. The commemoration of the 5th Century of the arrival of Christopher Columbus, on October the 12th, 1992, brought a revisionism of the European presence in the whole American continent. Before 1992, I remember that commemoration to be called “race day” (día de la raza); afterwards, it became the day of the fight of indigenous peoples against colonialism. Five centuries later, colonialism was put into the plate again to discuss the meaning of Spanish presence in Mexican culture, the one I was growing up at. Thirty years later, many of the arguments that Zapatistas made us to see are the ones that worry us while speaking of sustainability.

Sustainability is about avoiding a colonial approach in getting social well-being; therefore, it is also about empathy with ways of seeing the world that might radically differ from our own. Empathy allows, not to feel the emotions of the other as if they were our own, but to embrace the fact that those emotions are equally valid as our own.

II

I grew up, graduated from the Latin American Studies Program at National Autonomous University of Mexico, got a MA in Asian and African Studies, specialization on China, from El Colegio de México, and decided to devote my life to the study of Central Asia. In order to build a world where many worlds fit, we need people who are able to accommodate multiple worlds inside themselves. I decided to incorporate Dungan people inside me for my PhD.

Dungan people are an ethnic minority that speaks a couple of northern regional variations of Chinese as were spoken during the last third of 19th Century China, mixed with Russian, and loanwords from local Central Asian Turkic languages, mostly, Kazakh and Kyrgyz. Besides that, they are Sunni Muslims. Dungans in Central Asia number around 120 thousand people, most of them in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan (about 50 thousand each), although in Uzbekistan there are another 20 thousand. Dungans went away from China after several Muslim rebellions that took place in the West, in the current provinces of Gansu, Shaanxi, and the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR). At that time, those Muslims spoke both regional variations from the Sinitic linguistic family, as well as several Turkic languages, mostly, old Uyghur, also known as Chaghatay.

Since “Chinese” is more a linguistic family rather than a single language, authors such as Shu-mei Shih have proposed the term “Sinophone” to refer to ways of cultural domination that can be exerted over a population through language as a means of cultural penetration. We can say very safely that Central Asian Dungans are Sinophone Muslims without assuming that they have anything to do with “China,” but for historical links that have been instrumentalized in different ways depending on the geopolitical situation at a given point during the 20th and 21st Centuries. It is important not to forget that to be associated with “China” in Central Asia recalls memories of colonial expansion, invasion, deprivation, as well as to be comrades in socialism, during the 1950s, and, since the 1960s-1991, rivals inside socialist world. After 1991, “China” has given help and invested a lot in the whole Central Asia region, an investment that has grown exponentially since the launching of One Belt One Road Initiative, in 2013. In all these moments, to be related to “China” has very divergent meanings.

Those Sinophone Muslims that arrived in the Romanov empire during the last third of 19th Century came to be called “Dungans” after their arrival to the Romanov Empire. There are several hypotheses about the origin of the word, most of them see geographical references in current Chinese, but I think it is more plausible the one related to the Central Asian Turkic speaking world, in which “Dungan” is a generic term to refer to Sinophone Muslims. If you believe me, my dear reader, we are speaking of a Turkic sense of a people that are Sinophone that entered the Russian language during the Romanov imperial period. In the same way that Sinophone approach studies linguistic imperialism and ways of dealing with otherness in the world where Sinitic languages are spoken or in cases in which, although not expressed in “Chinese”, at least are related somehow to “China”, Naomi Caffee proposes to follow Shu-mei Shih’s Sinophone framework and start speaking of a “Russophone” to study the Russian language expressions of non-ethnic Russians. Dungans, as Central Asian, former Soviet, Sinophone Muslims, embody the most extremely remote otherness in both sociolinguistic universes. Dungans are the Russo-Sinophone Muslims. They are such a uniqueness.

It has taken me more than 15 years to get acquainted with this world inside me. Zapatista recalls: to build up a world (this time, myself) in which many worlds fit (only Dungan world seemed enough complexity to my limitations).

III

I spent about 18 months living with Dungans in Kazakhstan (KZ), right on the border with Kyrgyzstan (KG), five kilometers away from Tokmok city (KG). I also met them in Xi’an, People’s Republic of China (PRC), where many of them went to study back in 2011-13. That fieldwork, however, had to become a PhD thesis that I was writing up at Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Social Anthropology, situated in the beautiful post-socialist city of Halle an der Saale, where I was based for a bit more than five years. Even though I had to learn basic German language for survival, I got used to speaking several languages in the pluri-ethnic and multi-confessional environment that MPI offered. I had to explain, in English language, the Russo-Sinophone Muslim world to an audience that basically came from all around the world. Also, I had to do it in a format that fitted German academic standards. Got my PhD in 2014, a couple of years later I went back to Mexico.

So far, I kept fulfilling my profile of what Édouard Glissant called the whole-world. The true freedom is to be able to contain and be able to activate the whole world that is contained in each of us in a very specific combination. Our perceptions of the world matter because they calibrate us and become emotions. What matters in the process is to be able to share it with the other developing an empathy: whatever the emotion that any event produced in each of us, to be able to embrace all emotions as valid as long as sharing them happens in a respectful dialogue with the other, even if situation ends in the interruption of exchange of any kind. Since it is emotional, it is related to aesthetics: it is poetically, metaphorically, that we can communicate better in our whole-world-ness, or the specific way in which the whole-world leans out from ourselves. It is coherent with the world in which many worlds fit. It is not coherent, though, with a cartesian scientificist point of view, It is not universalistic.

Time to go back to sustainability: is it the aesthetic solution, the construction of the whole-world to connect with each other? I defined above sustainability as the achievement of well-being in a way that it does not imply any kind of subordination following an empathetic logic. The reference to my career is to show that I have experienced in my body plenty of different (very often, even divergent) ways of understanding well-being, and the challenge to build up the world that Zapatistas claimed looks yet distant to reach.

Unless such a world was never about a romantic idea of globalized well-being (which would, actually, be colonial, i.e. no sustainable) but a well-being designed empathically at a lesser scale, in which we can share emotions, no matter which, with each other, because we know each other and conflict at a local scale is part of everyday life, so it is the solution.

To be whole-world is not to be global; to be global is to adopt ways of consumption that enslave us to transnational capital. To be whole-world is to embrace multiple (even divergent) ways of well-being as long as it does not imply any kind of subordination in any direction. From our scale, we can be whole-world by connecting empathically with the others around us and wait for the better, it seems. However, even at a micro-scale, it is already changing something, taking a step towards real sustainability.

IV

Empathy is a matter of intimacy. The more intimacy we share, the more we can recognize in each other, no matter how distant we might appear to be. I learned that with my patient teacher of contemporary Uyghur language. Adeeb Khalid has told us the atrocities that have been happening in what is currently the XUAR. The study of Central Asia, so far, has been divided into the Russophone and the Sinophone as colonizing, convergent yet complementary, logics. The current tendency in the study of Central Asia is, now, the perspective of the locals who have experienced and/or experienced both imperialities. In both cases, Central Asia was the periphery in which several social and productive campaigns were implemented to achieve development that, during the 1960s and 1970s was industrialized production of cotton, monoculture that impeded food sovereignty and gave place to the desiccation of the Aral Sea. Besides nuclear tests performed in both colonial arenas. Russophone and Sinophone colonization of Central Asia has had several moments, but it has to be added to the current problems that most recent colonial past, in some cases, or the exacerbation of the colonial domination in other cases, affect current and future times of a population who was famished, repressed, invaded, whose land was severely, irremediably polluted. So, it looks post-socialist Central Asia. It is a rather different situation from the one in Mexico where I grew up, but there is also a coloniality to fix.

Post-socialist Germany, in turn, looked much better recovered during the 2010’s. Social support provided by the State allowed society to keep working. There was a nostalgia of the past, but the economic help coming from West Germany, that eventually became controversial, really made the East rebuild. People complained, but, while compared with what I listened to during my fieldwork amongst people from several ethnicities across the years, the situation did not seem to me as urgent to solve in post-socialist 2010s East Germany as it required in post-socialist KZ and KG during the same period. Not to mention what was happening in Mexico back then.

A way of accomplishing the decolonization, from KZ perspective, is to diminish Russian influence over national culture and promote Kazakh language and traditions as a common culture, while promoting interethnic peace. Revival of the Kazakh language, as intensive as it has been over this century, has been very successful. However, this success did not bring peace in one incredibly unfortunate occasion.

On February 5-8th, 2020, there were some riots between ethnic Kazakhs and Dungans that ended up in 11 casualties, 185 injured people and 47 arrests. 20 thousand Dungans left for neighboring KG. That is almost the whole Dungan population in the villages I did my fieldwork: Sortobe, Masanchi and the little villages around, that constitute the landscape of a very important part of my intellectual and emotional path. And my loss is just irrelevant while comparing it with Dungans’ loss, who have been expelled again from their home. Not to mention the loss of Uyghur people in XUAR.

However, I have to share that my world included a world that no longer exists. That is my pain. But we are speaking of sustainability, and there is a pain there as well. After 1991, the industrial production developed in Tokmok suddenly disappeared, together with the whole Soviet production chain. Dungans were one of the sedentary peoples that were brought to the region known as Zhetisu/Semirech’e to develop agriculture. The other peoples were Russians, Poles, and Ukrainians, amongst the Christians, and the Turkophone Muslims that arrived together with Dungans, classified in Soviet times as Uyghurs.

In the Tokmok region, Germans arrived from the Volga region, where they were living since the 18th century, during the Worl War II. In 1991, From these groups, the Slavs and the Germans left massively from the Tokmok region, so, Dungans kept producing food and gave work in their fields to people from neighboring villages, regardless ethnicity. Irrigation system was built by Dungans at their arrival, last third of the 19th Century, following engineering brought from China at that time. Deleting Dungans from this region is attempting to maintain sustainability there: it is erasing food sovereignty and negating the whole-world to stay inside. Is it that Dungan world became a cultural insight to be expelled in the current Kazakh nationalism?

But KZ has made an effort to overcome this huge loss. And I am going to investigate it. Sustainability is about building peace in a globalizing world.