Xinjiang’s main radio station broadcast a curious announcement in mid-January2002:
At the end of a singing concert at the Xinjiang People’s Hall on 1 January, Tu’erxinjiang Aimaiti [Tursunjan Ämät], who was out of work, recited a poem written by him. The poem attacks social reality by innuendo, advocates ideas of ethnic separatism, and shows a strong tendency of opposing the society, the reality, and the government. It is really inflammatory and has produced a very bad influence on the society. The regional Party Committee paid great attention to the incident and immediately held a meeting of its Standing Committee to study the matter…. It instructed relevant departments to conduct an investigation … and to seriously mete out punishment. It also asked them to use the incident to conduct anti-separatism re-education. (BBC Monitoring Asia Pacific 2002)1
In the same broadcast Ablät Abdurišit, chairman of the XUAR government, professed characteristic amazement that “that such [an] incident has occurred in the most favourable situation of ethnic unity and social and political stability across the region.”2 The report should provoke a number of questions. First, how could a single poem recited at the end of a concert have caused such a stir? Second, what was so threatening about attacking social reality “by innuendo”? Third, even if government officials found the poem disturbing, why leap to the extreme of convening the Standing Committee and contacting other “relevant departments”? Fourth, if Xinjiang was so politically stable and intergroup relations were so “favourable,” how could the poem have caused “a very bad influence on society”?
These questions, couched more broadly, animate this chapter. Given the extraordinary range of powers and controls described in the last chapter, why does the regime fear Uyghur dissidence? Does the party-state intend ordinary citizens to conclude that the regime is so weak and brittle that oblique criticism and subversive ideas pose a grave threat, even in the most favorable of circumstances? Do officials really seek to inhibit—and can they possibly hope to stop—the use of innuendo, symbolism, allegory, and other stratagems common to artists and gossips alike? Does this not risk setting the bar for political offenses so low that great numbers of people end up behaving “criminally,” seemingly undermining the authority of the party-state?
In the summer of 2002 Professor Wang, a Han scholar I had known for years, shared his thoughts on why the party-state has put so much effort into ideological battles. He first hewed to the official line that only a small number of extremists pursued independence and that they spared no means. Then he changed his argument significantly:
In fact all minzu want independence. But it’s not just ordinary people doing this. It’s intellectuals. Some of them write history. Now [since the clampdown on historiography] they write novels and poems. And never directly. They always write indirectly, so that if you confront them, they can deny that they meant what you think they did. What they write is nonsense, but people believe it. So it must be corrected.
Revealing his intention to dedicate his scholarship to the task of correction, Wang told me that his target audience was Uyghur cadres. When I asked him whether scholarly work might reach ordinary people and banish their misconceptions, he threw up his hands and exclaimed, “Ordinary people are beyond our reach.”3
The poet Tursunjan’s performance clearly troubled officials. Perhaps they worried that he was able to reach ordinary people in a way that Professor Wang never could. In the summer of 2002, Bahargül, a service worker in her thirties employed in downtown Ürümci, spontaneously brought up Tursunjan’s recitation during an interview. She said he had chosen as his theme the expressive music of the very popular tambur player Nurmuhämmät Tursun: “Tursunjan decided to write a poem about his playing, about how the mournful quality of his playing expressed the spirit of the Uyghur people. Tursunjan wields a fierce pen (uning qälimi ötkür)! The poem was great…. All the Uyghur officials attended the meeting, and plenty of Han officials as well.”
Bahargül told me that because her friends privately shared their appreciation of Tursunjan’s small triumph, they also exchanged the news that within a week of his performance, officials filed a report saying his poem had “unacceptable content.”4 She had heard that either the poet or the musician—she wasn’t sure which—was confined to his home soon afterward. Foreign sources later announced that the poet had indeed been formally arrested, but released some time later (Amnesty International 2002, 2004).
As I argued in chapter 2, the key purpose of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s system of minzu regional autonomy initially was to avoid territorial loss by winning the political acquiescence of large, non-Han groups. It has been neither the aim nor the effect of the system to allow those groups substantial authority over their own affairs, however narrowly construed. From the beginning, aside from matters such as language use, folk custom, and limited religious practice, the political institutions of autonomy left most decisions in the hands of party secretaries, who were almost exclusively Han and answered to Beijing.
As it became clear in the 1950s that this was the design and not a distortion of the center’s policies, prominent Uyghur leaders and others in Xinjiang repeatedly raised increasingly vehement complaints. At a 1951 conference in Ghulja, the former seat of government of the Eastern Turkestan Republic, a group of Uyghur leaders proposed the establishment of a “republic of Uyghurstan” with the capacity to regulate all its internal affairs. On instructions from Beijing, Xinjiang’s CCP officials hastily convened a meeting to condemn the proposal and ensure that this “incorrect idea” not be spread widely. At the meeting, newly appointed minority minzu officials, who had graduated from a political training course that Wang Zhen referred to as a “factory for producing the people’s cadres,” reportedly “used the Marxist perspective they had just mastered” to oppose the erroneous proposal and side with the party (Zhu Peimin 2000:335).5 But the idea did not disappear. A speech by Zhou Enlai at a 1957 conference in Qingdao, released only in 1980, shows Beijing was aware that many Uyghurs continued to hope for a federal system and self-determination. At different points in his speech, Zhou told the assembled officials that China “could not” establish and “had no need” to establish a federal system on the Soviet model (Zhou Enlai 1980 [1957]). In an attempt to silence such proposals and the people making them, party officials initiated a “campaign against local nationalism,” which lasted from December 1957 through April 1958. Newspaper reports at the time announced that Ziya Sämädi, head of the Xinjiang Culture Bureau, and a number of other prominent Uyghurs had formed an “antiparty group.”6 They stood accused of proposing yet again the establishment of a “Uyghurstan republic “and of “insulting Hans by suggesting they were ‘rulers’ just like the GMD [Guomindang].” They also were charged with saying that too many Hans had immigrated and should be sent home and with claiming that “we could build our economy even without Hans” (“Gezu renmin fennu shengtao difang minzu zhuyi fenzi zuixing” 1958; Zhong Yu 1958; “Zizhiqu dangwei kuoda huiyi henhen de fandui difang minzu zhuyi; chedi fensui yi Ziya wei shou de dandang jituan” 1958; “Zizhiqu dangwei kuoda huiyi zuochu jueyi—Kaichu youpai fenzi” 1958). The massive campaign slapped “local nationalist” labels on more than 1,600 people and sent many to jail. It also conveyed the powerful message that criticisms of Xinjiang’s governance or the importation of Hans from the interior were forms of “incorrect speech” (cuowu de yanlun) subject to severe punishment (Dang Yulin and Zhang Yuxi 2003:190–92).7
The campaign did not eliminate Uyghur discontent with the way that Xinjiang was being governed but only drove it underground. Since then, organized and public resistance has sporadically reemerged, several times in the 1960s, once in 1975, again beginning in the 1980s and lasting through 2000, and, most recently, beginning in July 2009 (see chapter 4 and appendix). Given the difficulties of organizing opposition under the incursive single-party state and the harsh punishments dealt to open protestors, it makes little sense to argue, as party officials have, that the episodes of public unrest were paroxysms of baseless mob hysteria.
It is simply not plausible to reduce major protests to the work of a “handful of splittists” (and, since the winter of 2001, “terrorists”) who, aided by hostile foreign powers, repeatedly lured thousands of gullible people out into the streets to serve their own purposes. Rather, the sporadic protests reflected deep and enduring discontent among Uyghurs. Official pronouncements have insisted that most Uyghurs oppose separatism and also have implied that they reject political protests of any sort and that the party will triumph because it enjoys the firm support of the people. This depiction has grossly misrepresented the attitudes and actions of a sizable proportion of the population. In fact, while explicitly denying it in public, officials have acknowledged in internal circulation speeches and documents that disaffection for the party and hostility toward Hans have long pervaded the Uyghur community. In 1999, for instance, XUAR Party Secretary Wang Lequan told other party cadres in a secret speech that separatists had “immediate appeal” among Uyghurs in Khotän and admitted that the cadres had “no place in the hearts of the people” (Wang Lequan 1999:11, 17).8
We might argue that Beijing had completed its quest to establish unchallenged administrative and military control of Xinjiang by 2004 or so (Becquelin 2004b:374). Yet it has met continual defeat in its attempt to transform all Uyghurs into willing and loyal Chinese citizens. While officials have sought to eliminate not just troublemakers but even troublesome ideas, Uyghurs have refused to give them up. The mere fact of widespread dissent—expressed in acts of “everyday resistance” by ordinary citizens—is important because it gives the lie to the official story. But such resistance also has had political effects. Intellectuals and farmers, musicians and their fans, joke tellers and cooks, have collaborated in constructing and promulgating heterodox visions of Xinjiang’s past, present, and future. They have played an active role in shaping and transmitting Uyghur nationalism, and in that way they have affected the trajectory of politics in Xinjiang.
Uyghurs’ everyday resistance has targeted both ideas and policies. Religious Uyghurs have fought official attempts to fit religious practice and Qur’anic interpretation to party needs, by defying efforts to eliminate religiosity among the young. The vast majority of Uyghurs privately condemn, since they cannot hope to stop, policies governing immigration and resource exploitation. They have derided the system of minzu regional autonomy as a sham.9 Uyghurs have rejected the party-state’s insistent claims that they are Chinese. As discussed in chapter 1, they have rejected the imposition of a history that denies them a legacy of independent states or a claim to Xinjiang based on indigeneity. Furthermore, a substantial number have spurned the notion that their interests and their future are indissolubly bound with those of China as a whole.
James Scott (1985, 1990) introduced the concept of “everyday resistance” to capture the ways individuals privately defy authority when open, organized resistance is too dangerous or too difficult to arrange. He focused on acts of individual noncompliance and the use of private speech to transmit coded subversive messages out of the hearing of the powerful. Quite a few political scientists accustomed to looking for organized and public resistance have considered private grumbling and secret intransigence unworthy of attention. They have treated these behaviors as merely “prepolitical” or “epiphenomenal,” having no appreciable political effect and implying a resigned acceptance of the order of things (Scott 1986:23–24). But as Scott pointed out, the most oppressive or exploitative states often severely proscribe the kinds of collective action we would expect them to provoke. Because protest is sure to draw punishment, few dare to engage in it. To explain the apparent paradox of highly oppressive social systems that are outwardly placid, Scott posited that many ordinary people bow to authority in public yet mock it in private. He challenged the received notion that autocratic regimes enjoy hegemony by comparing the “public transcript,” consisting of people’s behavior in public settings, with the “hidden transcript,” recording their actions when they think themselves beyond the reach of surveillance (Scott 1985, 1990). Scott’s analytical and research methods are well suited to analyzing Uyghur resistance in Xinjiang, for both practical and intellectual reasons. On the one hand, the extreme limitations placed on all research conducted in Xinjiang have made obligatory a departure from the standard model of structured, official interviews. On the other hand, Scott’s distinction between public and private transcripts demonstrates quite well the jarringly different modes of expression encountered in Xinjiang, as well as the modes of domination and resistance they illustrate.10
Scott’s method helps us recognize the forms of everyday resistance, but determining the significance of that resistance is more difficult. What do people intend by resisting party stratagems? What are the consequences of acts of peaceful and individual resistance? Although I am a great admirer of Scott’s method, I believe we need to acknowledge and remedy an artificial assumption at its core. He posits a realm of resistance beyond the reach of oppressive or exploitative authority, a realm that may be as big as a coffeehouse or a plantation field, or as small as the inviolable interior space of an individual’s mind. Scott does not give sufficient attention to the ways that power can structure those physical spaces and even mold the mind. “Where there is power, there is resistance,” Michel Foucault once remarked, yet “resistance is never in a relationship of exteriority to power” (Foucault 1990:95).11 As a consequence, resistance takes particular forms under particular structures of domination, to use Scott’s expression, or what Foucault describes as relations of power. The nature of the CCP’s power has influenced both the form and the meaning of resistance. Beijing has, to a substantial degree, been able to structure the realm of dissent and even to influence the conceptual categories with which Uyghurs resist. Pierre Bourdieu observed that “the specifically symbolic power to impose the principles of the construction of reality—in particular, social reality—is a major dimension of political power” (Bourdieu 1977:165). Because the construction of social reality is such a nebulous concept, political scientists have generally been leery of using it. As I have been at pains to argue, however, Uyghurs, Hans, and the party-state have been vying in precisely this domain, seeking to define and shape social reality to serve political ends. Thus to elaborate on Bourdieu’s phrase, successfully altering the construction of social reality may in turn confer power on those resisting the party-state’s version of reality—and it is for this reason that CCP officials have cracked down so consistently on “challenges in the ideological sphere” (Adila Baikere [Adalät Bäkri?] 2002; Feng Dazhen 1992; He Fulin 2002; Xiaokaiti Yiming 2002; “Xinjiang shouci pilu minzu fenlie shili zai yishi xingtai lingyu pohuai huodong de liu zhong xingshi” 2002).
The second aspect of Scott’s theory that needs further exploration is its discussion of political effects. Scott and others have proposed that by engaging in “everyday resistance,” actors can preserve their dignity and sense of personal efficacy by puncturing the narratives justifying their subordination to elites.12 He also has suggested that they can challenge institutionalized discrimination or exploitation as well as insulate themselves against its harshest consequences. Scott has at least implied that such forms of resistance better serve the needs of the exploited and oppressed than some social revolutions have, but he allows that such strategies of resistance “are unlikely to do more than marginally affect … various forms of exploitation” (Scott 1985:29).
These assertions provoke further questions. What is the lower threshold of “everyday resistance”? There is a wide range between absolute noncooperation and happy compliance with the demands of power. If most behavior is a mixture of grumbling and obliging, at what point can it be considered resistance? Is it true, as one skeptic claims, that in their “zeal to uncover seeds of hope and traces of freedom in the mundane business of everyday life,” devotees of Scott have focused on a range of “discourses and dispositions that range from expressions of alienated resentment to rueful complicity” (Maddox 1997:275–76)? If “everyday resistance” consists only of “discourses and dispositions,” its political significance must surely be negligible. Does it, in fact, amount to nothing more than chatter and attitude? Theoretical debate will continue; here I seek to answer these questions concretely. On one hand, as I described in chapter 2, the Uyghurs’ quiet struggles have had little perceptible impact on Beijing’s policies in Xinjiang: what many of them regard (in the Scottian mode) as modes of domination and exploitation. On the other hand, these acts of defiance have been efficacious in a subtler but perhaps no less important way. The various forms of everyday resistance have, I believe, strengthened Uyghurs’ collective identity and resolve to remain distinct from the “Chinese nation.”
The previous chapter described the various ways party officials in Beijing and Ürümci have limited Uyghurs’ capacity to exercise effective political authority and develop policies to protect their perceived collective interests in Xinjiang. Since 1957, officials also have tried to prevent Uyghurs and others from publicly discussing the absence of these crucial features of autonomy or from organizing to demand them. People’s congresses at the provincial level and below remain largely ceremonial bodies and do not question the guidelines handed down by the party.13 Never since the 1950s have there been institutions for freely airing, aggregating, and acting on the wishes of ordinary citizens, a fact about which Uyghurs have long been angry; nor are there any signs that party leaders intend to establish them. In the absence of such institutions, therefore, we must turn to the hidden transcript to find out Uyghurs’ political views.
One of the few state-sponsored surveys of political attitudes in Xinjiang makes clear that social scientists employed by the state felt bound to inculcate proper ideas rather than impartially report opinions.14 In 1990, researchers at the Xinjiang Academy of Social Sciences canvassed the views of some two hundred Uyghurs on the exploitation of resources, one of the most contentious matters in Xinjiang. Despite the risks of doing so, a handful of respondents admitted that they felt Xinjiang’s oil and cotton belonged to “a particular group.” The report heaped criticism on these people, contending that their views were mistaken and violated the constitution. When some respondents remarked that too many resources flowed out of Xinjiang and too few into the region, the authors observed that this “did not conform to reality.” Finally, confronted with a substantial number of respondents who said that resource exploitation had caused intergroup relations to deteriorate (fully one-third of teachers polled, for instance), the researchers observed that such views were temporary and superficial and would be resolved by the proper execution of existing policies. The text indicates that the researchers closely questioned those offering “incorrect” responses and then remonstrated with them. The researchers thus concluded that “the ‘resource psychology’ of the vast majority of Uyghurs and other fraternal minzu is correct” (Liu Yongqian 1992).15
For years, peasants and workers in China’s interior have sought to influence, by staging public protests, state policies that they opposed and have done so out of a deep conviction they were expressing legitimate objections. Social scientists have begun to give to this quest to register “rightful resistance” the attention it merits. Kevin O’Brien suggests that these groups have successfully articulated criticisms “couched in the language of loyal intentions” (O’Brien 1996:32). When actual practice has strayed from the state’s explicit commitments, some groups have pressed successfully for redress, a point that I address further in chapter 4.
Uyghurs have long known that it is dangerous both to criticize publicly the party-state’s policies and to speak publicly about the danger of speaking in public. Indeed, when the Han editors of the Xinjiang Daily, the party mouthpiece, published articles complaining that speech in Xinjiang was more restricted than in other parts of China and passed other articles along to the more widely read Wenhui bao in Shanghai, they were purged for doing so in the 1957 party “rectification” (McMillen 1979:90). A quarter century later, officials reversed the stifling repression of the Cultural Revolution and gave Uyghurs comparative freedom to assemble and speak in public in the 1980s (Rudelson 1997), but restrictions on speech clamped down again in the 1990s. The renewed restrictions both closed a possible outlet for discontent and further alienated many citizens.
Retaining some of the most strident language of the Mao era, the government has continued to speak of drawing a firm line between the people and their enemies in Xinjiang. It has shifted the line so dramatically and, at the same time, left it so ill defined that many peaceful people cannot help finding themselves on the wrong side. The atmosphere has become even more restrictive since September 11. In direct response to the imbroglio over Tursunjan Ämät with which this chapter began, Party Secretary Wang Lequan promulgated a document in February 2002 purporting to expose Uyghur separatists’ “six forms of splittist activities.” In condemning texts or performances that expressed or spread “dissatisfaction,” the document referred to the open expression of discontent as a form of “separatist thought” and linked it to terrorist organizations (Becquelin 2004a: 44; “Xinjiang shouci pilu minzu fenlie shili zai yishi xingtai lingyu pohuai huodong de liu zhong xingshi” 2002).
In their quest to eliminate Uyghur separatism and bind Xinjiang fully to China, officials have depended heavily on ideological work (sixiang zhengzhi gongzuo), conducted in schools and workplaces and reinforced by regular messages in various media. For decades, teachers and officials have attempted to inculcate in Uyghurs the idea that they are integral members of a culturally plural “Chinese nation.” They have relentlessly pressed the message of “minzu solidarity,” arguing that Uyghurs and Hans are bound together by strong ties of mutual affection, class, and patriotism. Building on both ideas, these authorities have insisted that Uyghurs’ highest interests are served by living in a united China and would be harmed by Xinjiang’s separation. Officials and the media have constantly repeated the claim that most Uyghurs are patriots deeply committed to China, while the separatists number only a tiny handful. Despite decades of official efforts, however, these ideas have not become deeply or widely rooted in the Uyghur community.
Signs that Uyghurs and Hans did not share strong ties of either affect or identity could be found everywhere in the 1990s and 2000s, casting doubt on the slogan of “minzu solidarity.”16 Both Hans and Uyghurs habitually distinguished members of the other group in speech. Hans frequently referred to Uyghurs colloquially—and without further explanation—as tamen (them), by cultural category as minzu (implying that Hans are not also minzu), or by the offensive term chantou (head wrapper). Uyghurs used such terms as mušu häqlär (these people), the sarcastic phrase bu akam (this big brother of mine—mocking the implicit ranking of groups), the slur Qitay (Chinese),17 or the religious expression kapir (infidel).
My Uyghur informants regularly emphasized the immutable differences between the groups in daily discourse or action. They often scolded one another for speaking Chinese or adopting the habits of Han, saying, for instance, “Kapir! Xänzu bop kätmä!” (Infidel! Don’t go turning Chinese!).18 A college teacher from southern Xinjiang reported that because Uyghur children in the south were taught from an early age to look down on Hans and to follow their parents in calling them Qitay and kapir, whole classes of students in the south simply refused to study Chinese.19
Uyghurs frequently remarked on the visible physical differences between Hans and Uyghurs. A Uyghur policeman sitting in a Han stylist’s shop observed aloud to me that certain haircuts did not suit Hans because the “infidels had no noses to speak of”; he did not hesitate to say this openly because he knew the stylist understood no Uyghur.20 Pious Uyghurs overlaid cultural differences with religious ones. On one occasion I witnessed a muäzzin refusing to enter a dental clinic run by Uyghurs and insisting on remaining outside while his prosthesis was adjusted because there were Hans inside. The dentist who treated him explained to me later that the cleric always refused, regarding sitting with Hans or speaking Chinese as sins.21 Some held the difference between the groups to be racial as well as cultural.22 A Uyghur college teacher told me one day, “I think the Han race is an inferior race. I know it’s bad to say, but I think the whole race is a bad people.”23 People even spoke of Hans and Uyghurs as different species. An older Uyghur man on a crowded minibus told me the fundamental problem in Xinjiang was that “sheep and pigs are forced to live together in one pen” (sheep representing Uyghurs, pigs Hans), a line that elicited uproarious laughter from the other Uyghurs on the bus.24
On numerous occasions I heard Uyghurs insist that the fusion of the two groups was inconceivable, a point concretely reflected in the extremely low rates of intermarriage. A dissident intellectual living outside Qumul and distributing nationalist manifestos to friends in the 1990s told one of them that Uyghurs would never follow the example of the Hui and assimilate into Han culture because they “are stronger psychologically.”25 In 2002, on the heels of a discussion about Zordun Sabir’s nationalist novel, a Uyghur reporter said to me, “Uyghurs and Hans are totally different. This is this and that is that. They will never come together. Despite all the talk, there’s no way we’re ever going to blend into one. We’re absolutely unwilling to do so. This is impossible. So all this talk about minzu solidarity is nonsense.”26
The talk about belonging and difference, whether of the fusion of groups or a distinct Uyghur identity, should not be read as only chatter. It also is performative. Han or Uyghur, peasant or party historian, “invoked” solidary groups in order to “evoke them, summon them, call them into being” (Brubaker 2002:166, italics in original). And by calling some groups into being, they often sought thereby to banish or erase others. For instance, Uyghurs rejected the idea that they belonged to the officially multicultural “Chinese nation” (zhonghua minzu). The term had been promulgated by the victorious integralist Chinese nationalists early in the century to justify the retention of the five large culturally distinct groupings (Han, Manchu, Mongol, Tibetan, and Muslim)—and their territories—after the Qing collapse, as discussed in chapter 1 (and see Leibold 2007). After 1949, party propagandists preserved the term but attempted to purge it of Han chauvinist connotations. Scholars produced a small mountain of books on the zhonghua minzu beginning in the late 1980s, clearly with the government’s imprimatur, seeking to shore up national cohesiveness in the face of antistate protests in Xinjiang and Tibet and the fissiparous tendencies unleashed by China’s uneven capitalist development (see, for example, Chen Linguo 1994; Chen Yuning 1994; Fei Xiaotong 1989; Li Kangping 1994; Wu Xiongwu 1994).27
The tension between scholars’ and propagandists’ attempts to fill the term with cultural content and their endeavors to avoid alienating any cultural group was not resolved. Without cultural content, the term was unlikely to evoke the slightest loyalty in China’s citizens and thus to provide any cohesive force. If defined solely by attributes of Han culture, it would repel instead of attract the peripheral groups such as Tibetans and Uyghurs, thereby defeating its whole purpose. If propagandists delved too deeply into the cultural symbols and practices of non-Han groups, it would offend Hans, the crucial core constituency. The resultant hodgepodge had little power to attract the Uyghurs that I interviewed.
When asked the meaning of this concept, a high school teacher in Ürümci answered, “The term zhonghua minzu means Han; it has nothing to do with us.”28 On another occasion, a broadcast journalist analyzed the parts of the term: “‘Zhong means zhongguo; hua refers to huaxia.”29 He noted that party propagandists casting about for widely resonant symbols had hit upon Yan Huang zisun (the progeny of emperors Yan and Huang) or long zhi chuan (descendants of the dragon). “It makes it obvious we’re not included,” he continued; “If that’s China, we’re on the outside.”30 A graduate student explained that the government’s obvious intention in using the term was to assimilate non-Han groups into the Han, like an enormous grinding wheel. He was aware that Beijing had clearly set its sights on Uyghurs, yet he firmly believed they would not be drawn in.31
If scoffing at “minzu solidarity” and rejecting the idea of the zhonghua minzu were hazardous, advocating independence for Xinjiang was clearly much riskier. A number of my informants had spent time in jail either on suspicion of being separatists or for associating with those who were. Even so, they and others found moments while alone with me or among trusted friends to talk about the forbidden topic.32 I was taken by surprise the first time this happened. In December 1995 I met an editor in an Ürümci press for the first time through a mutual friend. As we looked over some rare historical materials in his possession, he began to speak about the history of the Uyghur independence movement beginning in the 1930s. Minutes later, he mentioned what would happen when China “disintegrated” (jieti), using the very term that had been applied to the Soviet breakup. Taking my lack of expression for skepticism, he assured me that China would follow the Soviet example. He went on to say that Xinjiang University, where he knew I was studying, was a hotbed of independence-minded teachers and students, the epicenter of most popular protests in the 1980s.33 While my later encounters confirmed his description, it was some time before I met anyone else as bold as he had been. A few months later, at a party in another section of Ürümci, a group of Uyghur intellectuals who were close friends shared their dissatisfaction with the lack of human rights in Xinjiang. One turned to me and observed that while there surely could not be electronic bugs everywhere, phone lines were definitely bugged; he regularly heard odd clicks on the line. “When someone talks about Xinjiang’s independence on the phone,” he said to me, “it’s best just to say ‘oh, hmm, I see.’ To respond is to invite trouble.”34
In October 1996, a student from Kashgar, herself an ardent advocate of independence in private settings, told me about three of her friends from that city, all top students, who had recently suffered for their outspokenness. One stayed in Kashgar for college, and his two friends went to universities in China proper. He wrote them both a letter complaining about the political situation in Xinjiang and imagining that if the region were independent, the three of them would be high officials. A classmate of one of the other students saw the letter, became alarmed, and turned the student in. Eventually all three were brought back to Ürümci and sentenced to eight years in prison.35
In the spring of 1997, many Uyghurs brought up the wish for independence as Hong Kong’s retrocession approached. It seems quaint more than a decade later, but there was a widespread belief, despite the constant barrage of triumphal messages emanating from Beijing and the gigantic clock ticking down the seconds in Tian’anmen Square, that Britain would not relinquish its colony without a fight. Xinjiang was rife with rumors that Uyghur organizations were preparing to take advantage of the ensuing chaos to stage a military uprising. At various points that spring, a baker told me cheerfully as I bought my daily bread that Xinjiang would soon be independent; a hotel guest assured me the cause would receive God’s help; a group of taxi drivers predicted to me at curbside that July would bring independence; and a gathering of police spent several hours alternately lamenting Xinjiang’s colonization by China instead of the Soviet Union and speaking hopefully about the possibility that the rumors of a planned uprising were true. At the end of April, a student quietly asked me, “How much time do Uyghurs have?” Mistaking this for a question about their eventual assimilation, I began to speak about language preservation and so on when he cut me off impatiently. He was sure that Uyghurs would become independent; he simply wanted my judgment of whether it would take ten years or fifty. In May a broadcast reporter told me privately that “all Uyghurs want independence,” even if the majority were too afraid to admit it.36
Hong Kong’s peaceful retrocession seemed to take many people by surprise. The morning after Hong Kong’s return, on July 1, I sat with a group of students utterly sick at heart that nothing had happened the night before. They explained that a significant portion of their university’s student body had been herded to a nearby park under the watchful eye of police to prevent them from participating in any potential uprising.37
It also was clear that more practical Uyghurs believed they would need outside help to bring about changes in Xinjiang and that they hoped it would come from the United States.38 At an evening party in January 1997, a Uyghur intellectual stated, “Every time Clinton criticizes the human rights situation in China, human rights improve. The United States really is the policeman of the world, and Uyghurs like that,” a sentiment readily confirmed by the other young men at the party.39 In early May of that year a rural cadre said to me at a gathering near Turpan, “We have no freedom. We place a lot of hope in Clinton and America,” only to be shushed by his colleagues for discussing politics with a foreigner.40 Several years later, NATO’s intervention in Kosovo inspired new hope of foreign support. In August 1999 a group of Uyghurs attacked the Public Security Bureau in Lop County after the sentencing of accused separatists. While attacking the bureau, the protestors are reported to have shouted, “We’ll invite the U.S. and NATO to come, and we’ll blow up Xinjiang” (J K P Š U A R komiteti täšwiqat bölümi 2000?:49). Such hopes would, of course, be dashed a few years later when Washington listed the obscure Uyghur independence group “Eastern Turkestan Islamic Movement” (ETIM) as a terrorist organization (see chapters 5 and 6).
On a return trip in the summer of 2002, only months before that announcement, I heard from a number of new informants about their hopes for independence, although both they and acquaintances from previous trips with whom I had reconnected were quite pessimistic. Two young professionals in Ürümci, speaking under the cover of crowd noise in a restaurant, used a formula I would hear on many occasions: that all or nearly all Uyghurs hoped for independence but that the government had successfully co-opted members of the elite with jobs and other perks.41 A short time later, as we spoke in a park, a soft-spoken young teacher brought up the gulf between very religious Uyghurs and others. Some people had responded to the call of proselytes and placed all their hope in religious salvation, giving up any interest in independence, but they were a small minority, he claimed. Asked whether people not drawn to reinvigorated Islam spoke of independence, he replied, “Of course, we all do. All of us Uyghur teachers talk about it privately among ourselves, when we know no one is listening. We all wish for it, but we never say anything publicly.”42
These anecdotes are illustrative in that they show that some Uyghurs sharply distinguish themselves from Hans, reject their inclusion in the Chinese nation, and wish for independence. They cannot, of course, tell us how widespread these views are or what their consequences might be. Two important surveys conducted in Xinjiang by Herbert Yee supplement these ethnographic findings, although the researcher himself acknowledged that the results must be regarded with some skepticism. Based on studies carried out in Ürümci in 2000 (with 393 respondents) and in five other Xinjiang cities in 2001 (with 367 respondents), Yee concluded that the relations between Uyghurs and Hans were tense and that Uyghurs identified very strongly with their group and with the territory of the XUAR.43 Yee also found in the first survey that whereas more than 70 percent of Hans strongly believed Xinjiang had been part of China since ancient times, only about 40 percent of Uyghurs said they did, and he speculated that because of the sensitivity of the question, many of the Uyghurs responding affirmatively were not being candid. In the same survey, only 36 percent of Uyghurs strongly agreed that separatist activities harmed everyone (compared with 64 percent of Hans), and fewer than half of the Uyghurs polled agreed at all with the government’s claim that separatism was the main threat to Xinjiang’s stability, while 80 percent of Hans supported that claim.44 While conducting the second survey, Yee and his collaborators met with intransigence from many local cadres. Officials eliminated some questions and changed others to look “like propaganda slogans,” prevented the random selection of informants, urged the researchers to abandon the study altogether, and actually withheld all the survey responses from two field sites. Under the circumstances, Yee was not surprised that 40 percent of those polled declined to respond at all, and he assumed that many of the remaining respondents gave “politically correct” responses. Yee therefore began his article with the caveat that the results should be read “with great caution.” Again, though, he found that Uyghurs identified more strongly with Xinjiang than did their Han counterparts and that the two groups were mutually hostile and mistrustful. Yee regarded as “inconceivable” the survey’s finding that 87 percent of Uyghurs were proud of being Chinese citizens (Yee 2003:35–36, 44, 50; 2005:438–39, 445).
Thus far we have considered individuals’ comments on politics in Xinjiang, captured in ethnographic interviews that may not be representative, and broad survey samples that may not be reliable. We can complement those findings by scrutinizing the messages in published music, poems, and novels. Because they require the collaboration of many individuals for their production and dissemination and because they circulate widely, such works offer a particularly valuable window into popular attitudes.
Many scholars have studied songs, poems, jokes, and literature in attempting to understand popular politics in Xinjiang.45 They have looked at these sources because so many other avenues for political speech or resistance have been closed off. The progressive confinement of public speech and action, combined with the administrative and economic policies described in the previous chapter, has increased popular resentment. By the late 1990s, popular culture was one of the only avenues for the public display of discontent.
Publicly circulating audiotapes are particularly rich resources for studying that discontent. Early in the reform era, several tapes containing veiled or oblique critiques of life and politics in Xinjiang made it through the gauntlet of censors and were published by officially sanctioned media organizations. In addition, street-side duplication stands in both northern and southern Xinjiang enabled the dissemination of songs, poems, and jokes, some recorded in private homes, away from state surveillance (Dautcher 2000; Harris 2001). If individual acts of everyday resistance sent ripples only among a circle of friends, songs and other performances could call a larger community into being. While listening to and sharing popular songs and poetry, Uyghurs could imagine that those in other neighborhoods and other towns were listening and seething or laughing, just as they were (Anderson 1991).
Furthermore, whereas private conversations remained firmly part of James Scott’s “hidden transcript,” taped performances provided more concrete, tangible tokens of resistance. Several features of the tapes caused them to occupy an ambiguous space in Scott’s schema. First, because officials abandoned policies strongly encouraging Hans to develop proficiency in Uyghur in the 1950s and the number who chose to learn the language thereafter was vanishingly small, performances in Uyghur were incomprehensible to the vast majority of Hans. We might describe them as private Uyghur conversations concealed in Han public space.46 Second, as the exasperated Professor Wang indicated, their imagery was allusive and ambiguous rather than direct. He expressed frustration that the authors and performers could always deny any secret meaning in their words. Uyghurs who were found with subversive recorded or printed materials could protect themselves by pointing out the words were not their own. They could also claim not to detect any hidden messages imputed to them.
Uyghur musicians in the 1980s and early 1990s made a specialty of allegorical jeremiads. For instance, in a 1993 recording, the hugely popular male vocalist Abdulla Abdurehim sang, “I stand by the waterside, longing for a drink, but when I lick my lips, they smack my mouth / … As I lie on the riverbank, the stones prick me; the unjust ones throw more stones at me.” After describing each form of abuse, Abdulla moaned, “I said thanks, I said a thousand thanks.” Another popular singer, Mähmud Sulayman, lamented that “I can’t go where I want / they’ve chained my neck and I can’t move / … these mountains are tall / I want to ascend them / but my wings are bound, so I can’t.”47 In language that was necessarily vague and allegorical, these singers described a life of suffering and confinement. Prevented from slaking thirst, stoned without cause, immobilized in full sight of their goal, they could do nothing but sing of defeat and frustration.48 These songs quickly achieved wide currency. Concerts were mobbed. Shop speakers inundated bazaars with their refrains, and groups of college students still sang them with great feeling in the mid-1990s.
But by that time, the period of relative openness ushered in by Deng Xiaoping and Hu Yaobang a decade earlier was already coming to a close. Some of the tapes approved for distribution were later banned or taken out of the market. Pighan (Rooster’s Cry), a widely circulated tape of allegorical poems all legally published in the 1980s, includes one that describes the anger of a generous host whose guest occupies the best seat at the table and never leaves. In another poem, a Uyghur narrator speaks caustically to a statue of a Han soldier of how comradely cooperation had turned into domination and promises of abundant meals had been followed by a Barmecide feast. Another tape collected poems by Rozi Sayit entitled Dehqan bolmaq täs (It’s Hard to Be a Peasant) and described the excruciating labor and grinding poverty of peasants, understood to symbolize Uyghurs. Pärwayim peläk (Destiny Is My Concern), a tape by the popular musician Ömärjan Alim, contains another song about a guest who never left, but it was banned after its release.49
The singers also faced censorship of their public performances. Abdulla Abdurehim was forbidden by 1996 to sing either of the songs just described. Another singer, Küräš Sultan, given to laments about the plight of peasants, had his music banned and his equipment taken away in 1993, and indeed could not perform at all until he left the country in 1996 (Hoh 2004).50 Enforcement has not always been consistent, nor have the guidelines been clear.51 Two writers in Ürümci said in 1997 that they had heard “pro-independence” songs performed at weddings on several occasions, but one also said he had seen a singer led away from a wedding in handcuffs.52 In 1996, the popular singer Abdurehim Häyit was not allowed to tour and had difficulty releasing his recordings (Smith 2007). Yet in 1999 he was unsure what the government would do about his political songs, like “Stubborn Guest,” another song about a guest who would not leave, or “Rooster,” which described awakening the people—a classic nationalist trope (Fitzgerald 1996a).53 Abdurehim Häyit told a foreign reporter that officials had not yet said anything about the songs that he acknowledged were political, “so I don’t know if I have a problem” (Strauss 1999). Within three years he had a problem. Censors had forbidden him to record or perform many of his songs. In March 2002 he reported that he “hadn’t performed for months” and was permitted to play only previously approved songs as part of an officially sponsored musical troupe (Forney 2002b).
Evidence from the early 2000s indicates that the government had changed its tactics. Rather than waiting to determine the “social impact” of songs, Ürümci officials required professional singers to submit their lyrics to a censorship committee before performing them in public or recording them. Censors could instruct artists to change gloomy images into more positive ones—for instance, replacing regret at the approach of winter with hopeful anticipation of spring—and song lists for concerts also faced official scrutiny to guard against too negative a performance (Taynen 2004:33).
The censorship of humbler musicians had stepped up as well. The very tunes forbidden by the government remained the ones that people wanted hired musicians to play at weddings. Bahargül, the Ürümci service worker introduced at the beginning of this chapter, told me that by the end of the 1990s when she and her friends negotiated with wedding musicians, they were given long lists of proscribed songs. She complained that “whenever a good song comes along, they ban it.”54
The party’s forbidding the publication or performance of songs was not unexpected. The year 1991 had begun with the public vilification of poet and historian Turghun Almas, who had published a series of articles and books limning a “national” history for Uyghurs completely distinct from those of Hans and China.55 In a week-long conference, officials and scholars condemned his work for factual and political errors. As party secretaries led criticisms of Turghun in work units throughout Xinjiang, agents of the News and Publications Bureau cleared his books from shops and later ostentatiously burned them along with other offending texts.56
A decade later, officials launched several new rounds of clampdowns on publications. In April 1998, officials in Xinjiang seized the opportunity of the tenth annual national campaign against pornography to round up “illegal publications” with suspect political and religious content (“China: Xinjiang Confiscates Publications Which Undermine Unity” 1998). In March 2002, the government announced a new phase in the “struggle against splittists on the terrain of ideology.”57 Officials burned thousands of books in late March, and in April police and other bureaucrats again made the rounds of bookstalls to “clean up the market in printed matter.” The campaign officially aimed at eliminating pornography and illegal reproductions of copyright books. A news story at the time explained the plan to close down 52 of 118 periodicals in Xinjiang because of their low circulation and “poor quality” (Agence France-Presse 2002b). Uyghurs understood the principal targets to be religious texts published outside state supervision and other works that might foment antiparty feelings. Informants reported in 2002 that these included more copies of Turghun Almas’s work, which up until then had apparently evaded the braziers, as well as works of history and fiction by the younger author Abduwäli Äli. Officials reportedly took the trouble to locate and destroy the printer’s plates. Yet as one Kashgar resident remarked with pleasure, “copies remain in private hands.”58
The successful posthumous release of Zordun Sabir’s trilogy Ana yurt (Motherland) might well have been one of the provocations for this new official initiative. As with the highly popular novels of Abdurehim Ötkür, Zordun’s final book was a broadly drawn historical novel, but one about a subject that no previous author had dared touch: the Ghulja Revolution of 1944 that established the independent Eastern Turkestan Republic (1944–1949). The historical setting allowed Zordun to insert critical passages appealing to Uyghurs—and later appalling to state censors, even though they had gone over it many times. A professional with inside knowledge of the publishing industry claimed that the book had been scrutinized at twenty official meetings, revised at least sixteen times, retracted soon after its first printing, divested of two pages in the third volume, and only then released to the public.59 Another informant pointed to the publisher’s introduction, which observed that the revolution achieved “glorious victory after accepting the correct leadership of the CCP” and had properly been labeled a part of the Chinese people’s revolution by Mao (Zordun Sabir 2000:1).60 “They had to put this in to get the thing published,” she said.
I was lent a copy of the novel that had fortunately been annotated by one of its previous readers, described by the lender as “really nationalist” (bäk millätci). The annotations pointed me to the passages that reader had found most provocative. As expected, the underlined sections exploited the ambiguity of the novel form: in context they addressed matters of the time, but out of context they could have been written about the present, as the reader’s marginalia made clear. Next I discuss three of the twelve heavily annotated passages in the nearly six-hundred-page first volume.
Early in the book, the narrator admires the verdant Ili River valley, seat of the Ghulja Revolution, and soliloquizes about Xinjiang’s violent history:
Hey Uyghur, you’re just a sheep feeding in the pastures. Even when a wolf or bear comes, you think that any animal is a sheep just like you, you just think it, too, should graze in the fields. Its target is not green grass, but you. It plans to make a meal of you, to wipe away your pastures. You don’t know this. (Zordun Sabir 2000:99)
A few pages later, the narrator silently curses the driver of the cart he rides:
This guy knows nothing but eating and sleeping. What is a people (xälq)? What are their burdens, what are their hopes? What is a millät,61 and how is it faring? These kinds of questions he’s never thought about; 99.99 percent of the [people] are just like that. It is for this reason that other millät rule this people. (103)
The reader heavily underlined these passages, which clearly lament Uyghurs’ being ruled by Hans (though the latter word is never used) and attribute this to naïveté or inattention. A third passage questions official claims of equality between Hans and Uyghurs:
Are there Uyghurs in government positions and among soldiers and police? Even if there are a few here and there, do they have power? None, absolutely none…. Immigrants are esteemed, locals despised. The owner of the house starves while the guest is full, the home’s proprietor is the servant while the alley cat is master! … Whoever bemoans the people’s crying dies easily. Whoever sells out the people wins, whoever speaks the truth has his tongue cut out, whoever fixes a glance on dirty dealings has his eyes dug out. (382–83)
The narrator names Sheng Shicai, governor of Xinjiang at the time, as the target of his wrath. But the descriptions of token powerless Uyghur officials, guests who fatten themselves on the host’s wealth, truth tellers who are brutally punished, and traitors who are rewarded clearly excited other associations in the reader. He underlined the passage twice and wrote several exclamation points in the margin. The reader gave the same treatment to a passage in the final pages of the first volume. A frustrated Uyghur officer bemoans the lack of strategic knowledge among the populace:
Anger, resentment, and heroism have ripened within us. But military knowledge is lacking. Younger brother, turn your children into soldiers; they should study firing rifles, fighting battles, vanquishing enemies. Unless we do this, we will always and everywhere be bullied. (577)
In sum, the reader found and marked passages in the long novel that explain why Uyghurs are ruled by others, describe the terrible results, and cry out for a military solution to their problems. It is not a surprise, either, that many Uyghurs read the work voraciously62 or that the Publications and News Bureau quietly removed the book from the market only a few months after its release.63
Since the late 1990s the party-state has punished heterodoxy with increasing rigor, advancing from merely banning or censoring works to actually imprisoning their authors. Three more examples from recent years are particularly striking. In 1998, the historian Tokhti Tunyaz returned from Japan, where he was in a PhD program, to his home region to conduct research. State Security officials immediately took him into custody and, after holding him incommunicado for thirty months, sentenced him to eleven years in prison on the charge of “revealing state secrets.” All available evidence suggests that the so-called state secrets consisted of a fifty-year old document given to him by a government library employee. A report in a Chinese national security periodical in 2001 further accused Tokhti of “absorbing Western ideas” and engaging in “minzu splittism”: the first charge is rather laughable on its face, and the second one, intentionally vague (RFA 2006c). Apparently, Tokhti posed a threat only because he was researching Uyghur history, a subject closely regulated by the party-state, as I discussed in chapter 1. His arrest and lengthy sentence offer eloquent testimony to the importance that Beijing and Ürümci attribute to historiography.
The second example is that of Tursunjan Ämät, the poet mentioned at the beginning of the chapter who was arrested in January 2002 for reciting a subversive poem at a public event. A party official in Xinjiang later told a foreign reporter that Tursunjan had challenged government policies toward non-Hans. The official charged that the act of reading critical poetry was “terrorism in the spiritual form” (Marquand 2003). Tursunjan was thrown in jail, and the officials who allowed him to perform were reprimanded. As mentioned earlier, Wang Lequan codified the crime less than a month after, and directly because of, Tursunjan’s performance (“Xinjiang shouci pilu minzu fenlie shili zai yishi xingtai lingyu pohuai huodong de liu zhong xingshi” 2002). His offense was airing discontent in public performance. In other words, he was guilty of inviting people to think about their dissatisfaction.
In late 2004, the writer Nurmuhämmät Yasin published a story in Qäšqär ädäbiyati (Kashgar Literature) entitled “The Wild Pigeon.” The protagonist in the story is a young wild pigeon who inadvertently flies into a region inhabited by tame pigeons living among humans who fed, captured, and sometimes ate them. The undomesticated bird quizzes his tame counterparts about their souls, only to find to his amazement that they don’t know the word. Fed and watered by their keepers, the birds neither know nor seek freedom. Puzzled and frightened by the things the locals tell him and his father’s prior warnings against straying into the region, he tries to fly home, only to find himself trapped by the keepers; he clearly was betrayed by one of the local pigeons. Tortured and broken while in captivity, he decides in the end to eat a poisoned strawberry provided by a thoughtful friend and thus escape his condition by dying (Nurmuhämmät Yasin 2004).
Caught flat-footed again, the censors must have realized in retrospect that the allegory was stuffed full of political barbs.64 The wild pigeon could represent a rebellious Uyghur youth born locally and unbowed by local pressures, although it seems likelier that he stood for an activist from Central Asia who had succeeded in, or blundered into, crossing the border. The tame pigeons with no concept of the soul clearly represented the majority of Xinjiang’s Uyghurs, lulled by state jobs or material comforts into an illusory sense of contentment. Their lack of understanding of the soul might be a reference to the consequences of atheism education and the crackdown on religious practice. No longer allowed to study the Qur’an or receive private religious instruction and subjected to years of education in atheism, ordinary Uyghurs might be seen as having been stripped of appreciation for spiritual life and thus divested of spirit. The soul might also have represented the inclination to live independently rather than under the keepers’ control. The pigeon keepers clearly were Hans, and this had two implications. First, it made Uyghurs and Hans different species. Second, it cast Hans as their jailers and exploiters, and Uyghurs as beasts living eternally separate lives, literally fattened to feed Hans. In a particularly sharp exchange, an old pigeon explains to the young pigeon that “it is a necessity for mankind to be able to catch us and eat us…. No pigeon among us is permitted to object to this arrangement.” The poisoned strawberry might be one of several things: it could represent open political activity, alluring and satisfying but deadly. It might symbolize a drug, such as alcohol or heroin, which provides a temporary thrill but eventually kills its users. One important feature of the story is the pessimistic conclusion that the protagonist can escape from this intolerable condition only by dying.
In November 2004, when the critical content of the story came to the officials’ attention, Nurmuhämmät Yasin was jailed and was sentenced to ten years for splittism in a February 2005 trial (RFA 2005b). In November 2005 it was revealed that the journal’s editor, Küräš Husäyin, himself had received a three-year sentence for agreeing to publish the story (RFA 2005a).
Uyghurs share their displeasure with the political order in Xinjiang through private talk; they listen to subversive songs and read heterodox literature and share them with their friends. They also find ways to resist by refusing to respond to the official media in the expected way. In 1997, Hans viewed the televised Hong Kong retrocession ceremony with great enthusiasm, while Uyghurs, resenting the outpouring of Han nationalism, waited for a political opportunity that failed to appear (Bovingdon 2002a:67).65 Five years later, it was the Uyghurs who celebrated while Hans groaned at the results of the 2002 World Cup competition. An otherwise politically circumspect informant described to me watching the Turkish–Chinese match in a room of both Uyghurs and Hans. Uyghurs showed their delight each time Turkey surged ahead, and the Hans became increasingly angry. My informant recalled with amusement that one Han had chastised the Uyghurs in the room, saying, “Since you’re Chinese citizens, you should cheer for China. Aren’t you loyal to China?”66 Another participant in the conversation asked, grinning, whether I had appreciated the blue flag of the Uyghur independence movement that someone had contrived to drape behind the Chinese goal and that therefore appeared on the television screen during the Turks’ offensive attacks.67 On another occasion, several teachers reported the disturbing (and, it should be said, suspicious) news that officials at schools in Ürümci had disciplined students for cheering the Turkish team, claiming that three students at the Normal University had even been expelled and arrested.68
Uyghurs even defied the regime by selecting radio stations. Immediately following the 1949 revolution, Beijing imposed strict party control of the media in the name of guarding against ideological attack from lingering counterrevolutionary elements. Although the reform era produced an explosion of new popular magazines and presses and some observers have speculated that Beijing is gradually losing (if not willingly relinquishing) its overall control of the media (BBC Monitoring 2006; Lynch 1999), it also is quite clear that party officials have kept a close watch on their political content. Hu Jintao’s administration has stepped up pressure on various media, appointing tens of thousands of “Internet cops,” closing maverick newspapers, and jailing outspoken journalists (French 2006; Goldman 2006; Hong Yan 2006; RFA 2006b).69 The job of maintaining a monopoly on the media has always been more difficult on the periphery, whether in the southeast, where residents in coastal Fujian or Guangdong could receive signals from Taiwan and Hong Kong, or in Xinjiang. Radio stations in Central Asia had been beaming programs in Uyghur and Qazaq into Xinjiang since the Sino-Soviet split in the 1960s and stopped doing so only during the rapprochement in the 1980s. In the 1980s and beyond, broadcasts from the BBC and the Voice of America continued to provide outside news. The top secret Document no. 7 promulgated by the Politburo in 1996 proposed that the government greatly expand the construction of broadcast and relays stations in order to extend coverage to the remotest parts of the region. The aim was to “firmly occupy the ideological and cultural stronghold” (Human Rights Watch 1999:11).
Nonetheless, by listening to those foreign radio reports, many Uyghurs have continued to reject the party’s attempt to impose a single interpretation of Xinjiang’s politics. There is strong evidence that even though the government invested heavily in jamming equipment, many people in Xinjiang not only could receive radio from abroad but went to some lengths to do so. One foreign journalist found in interviews that people tired of propaganda relished news from the outside world, even though some felt the broadcasts raised false hopes. Many were saving up for the best shortwave radios they could buy in order to pull in signals through the jamming (Ingram 2001). A secret XUAR party report revealed officials’ concern that citizens were listening to foreign stations. It observed that in southern Xinjiang, cadres and masses “listen one after another to the radio programs, and in Aqto, [Khotän], [Qaraqash], Lop, and other counties and cities, stores have sold out of small radios” (J K P Š U A R komiteti täšwiqat bölümi 2000?:52). Another report from the same year claimed that throughout the 1990s, separatists inside Xinjiang had been listening to broadcasts from “enemy stations” nearby and then distributing the contents in handbills (Yang Faren 2000:243). Citizens have also taken advantage of foreign media outlets to report on local events themselves, making frequent use of the toll-free call-in numbers broadcast by Radio Free Asia. On a 2003 trip to Xinjiang, a foreign reporter agreed to allow a local to use his cellular phone to place a call and then later learned it had been to the Radio Free Asia number (Reuters 2003).70 Subsequent reports indicate the government has attempted to paralyze the call-in line by attacking it with robot callers (Southerland 2005). The government also reportedly spent $40 million in 2004 to purchase more powerful jamming antennas from France (Agence France-Presse 2004a; Southerland 2005).71
There is little doubt that people have kept track of the doings of émigrés through the international media. A young translator from southern Xinjiang told me proudly that his former teacher, now on the faculty of a university in Japan, announced soon after moving there that he opposed the Chinese government.72 Some Uyghurs have even visited dissident Web sites abroad and disseminated their contents, despite China’s blocking system. Enterprising computer users inside Xinjiang were able to work around the Internet police and post pictures and a story about Räbiya Qadir’s reunion with her husband, the well-known Uyghur dissident Sidiq Rozi. Her children in Xinjiang later told her that they had seen the pictures (Southerland 2005).73
What have Uyghurs achieved by engaging in everyday resistance? Have they managed to influence official policy or governance in Xinjiang? Have they marginally improved life in Xinjiang, as James Scott might have predicted? Or have the singing, joking, and chatter in fact had “no practical effect,” as a pessimistic dissident official put it to me privately in 1997? The evidence suggests that in the face of Uyghur intransigence, Beijing’s regulation of religious and cultural life in Xinjiang has grown tighter over time. Restrictions on religious practice have increased; arrests for suspicious behavior or ideas have gone up; and the government recently all but eliminated the use of Uyghur as a language of instruction in college while simultaneously mandating that Uyghur children begin studying Chinese in kindergarten (Dwyer 2005). It would be hard to say the resistance had slowed, let alone reversed, the tightening rigor of laws and regulations. The CCP has had little incentive to grant greater freedom.
In sum, everyday resistance has availed Uyghurs little in moderating Chinese policies, and there is scant evidence that it has improved the material lot of individual Uyghurs. What the various forms of resistance have done is strengthen and keep in circulation the ideas that Uyghurs are fundamentally distinct from Hans, that they are not part of the Chinese nation but constitute a nation unto themselves, and that they would be best suited by another political order. It is safe to predict that party-state will not eliminate everyday resistance even if it succeeds in blanketing the airwaves of Xinjiang with its own messages, blocking unwanted messages from outside with jammers, arresting writers, burning books, silencing singers, and confiscating tapes. Uyghurs have engaged in everyday resistance even when they had no opportunity or did not dare to take part in open and organized resistance, and they have continued to resist even after state security organs have virtually eliminated acts of organized public defiance anywhere in Xinjiang. Under conditions of extreme repression, it may be the only index of the depth and breadth of Uyghur discontent.