Brian Greenspun visits the Muslim Uygur minority in China and one of the country’s polluted urban areas

Thursday, Nov. 23, 2006 | 6:56 a.m.

People who travel to China miss a great deal if they go only to Shanghai, the economic capital, or Beijing, the political capital. They miss that part of China that doesn't seem to belong.

We went to Kashgar, a city next to the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. It is part of one of China's autonomous regions, which seems to be a designation for huge masses of land and people that the leadership really doesn't know what to do with just yet.

It is more famous for what it once was, a major trading city along the Silk Road in the days of Marco Polo.

The people are called Uygurs and they seem more at home on the other side of the border than in China. Their Muslim religion and old farming and trading ways are more in sync with their neighbors than with the economically supercharged ways of their urban, Han Chinese countrymen.

They are important, though, because they provide a buffer for China in what has proved to be a very volatile neighborhood. That's why the simple things in life such as clean air and water, indoor plumbing and basic health care are essential because they will help keep the Uygur people happy and content not to look to others for answers to life's challenges. Those basics also set a minimum standard of governmental service that Chinese leaders feel is their mission to provide.

One of the rarely discussed issues - at least with us and I assume other foreigners - is the deep concern Chinese leaders have regarding terrorist elements from Pakistan, Afghanistan and the other bordering states, which have and continue to infiltrate what appears to be an otherwise happy and content population. Yet another reason to provide the necessities of life to a people who don't ask for much.

Sounds simple to us on this side of the Pacific. Clean air, proper sewer systems and potable water. But China's ability to provide the things we take for granted and that are in scarce supply in large parts of the country are the great and unmet challenge.

For without those things - without the belief that tomorrow will bring air they can breathe and not see, water they can drink without getting sick and sewer systems that work and are not a constant reminder that the country is still a long way from being fixed - China remains ripe for terrorist-based enticements and what could be worse, the headlong rush of tens of millions of people from the rural countryside into already overcrowded and overwrought cities.

As it is, the predictions are that 400 million Chinese people will move from the country to the cities - old ones and brand new ones - in the next few years. For a little perspective, that's the entire population of the United States, plus 100 million people, moving to the cities. Can you imagine the infrastructure costs? Think of what we have to build in Las Vegas every year for just 60,000 new people and the roads, sewers and other systems that are in a constant state of repair and rebuilding.

So much for the far western autonomous zone and its predominantly Muslim population with very little infrastructure. If there is one thought that struck everyone on that trip about the people of Kashgar, it is that they all seemed happy. Happy to see us, happy with their lives and content to do things the same way in 2006 that their fathers, grandfathers and great-grandfathers did 100 and even 1,000 years ago.

From there we traveled to what is referred to as Western China, a mere four or five hours by plane from the Western borders. I know it sounds like fuzzy geography. It is. But what we found in that part of China was mind-boggling. We found a city with 32 million people!

Chongqing, what we in the West have known as Chung-king, is a vast sprawling area that I think could be one of the more beautiful cityscapes on the planet.

The tragedy is that we could not see the city! If ever there were a poster town for environmental madness it is Chong-qing. Forget the weather that caused a fog to hang over the city; this could be the one place on Earth that gives the lie to eighth-grade science where we learn that we can't see air.

We saw it and it was ugly, brown and thick with the certain knowledge that what we were breathing would, or should, one day kill us. And therein lies one of the great and uncertain challenges of a modern China - air pollution and its ugly sisters, water and sewer pollution. If we thought things were bad in the desert lands of Kashgar, we hadn't seen anything until we got to Chong- qing, the largest city in the world.

The environment is well beyond unhealthy, and it is far from certain that it can be fixed. If China is unable to clean up the mess, the danger is that far more than the 32 million people who live in the world's most populated city will die. The entire planet will be affected.

Is there good news in Chongqing? Of course there is.