A quarter century ago, many scholars believed that nationalism was no longer a major force in world politics. Although several highly influential books on the subject emerged in the 1980s, even their authors seemed to agree that they could finally get a clear view of the phenomenon because it was receding into the past (Anderson 1983; Gellner 1983; Hobsbawm 1990). Eric Hobsbawm echoed Hegel’s comment that the “owl of Minerva flies at dusk,” noting hopefully that nationalism’s importance had waned irreversibly (1990:183).
Events in the two years from 1989 to 1991, however, demonstrated that reports of nationalism’s demise were premature. The fall of communism in Eastern Europe, the unification of the two Germanys, the peaceful fission of Czechoslovakia, and the breakup of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia illustrated the enduring power of the national idea, as well as the brittleness of the socialist project. Hobsbawm rewrote the final chapter of his book for a revised 1992 edition, ruefully acknowledging that more new states had emerged in the two years since its first publication than in all the prior decades of the twentieth century combined (Hobsbawm 1992:163).
As the importance of nations and nationalism changed so dramatically, the status of sovereignty fluctuated as well. During the 1990s a series of humanitarian interventions by high-profile multilateral organizations buffeted the delicate armature that balanced competing values in international affairs, including the foundational principle of state sovereignty and the equally foundational, though more nebulous, principles of individual and collective human rights (Benhabib 2002). By the end of the decade, the balance appeared to have shifted substantially in favor of the latter two, to the detriment of sovereignty. High officials grumbled, and academics marveled, that governments could no longer shield their policies and populations behind sovereignty’s protective carapace. The very bedrock of the international system of states appeared to have rather serious fissures and, in fact, appeared to be a form of “organized hypocrisy” (Krasner 1999).
These parallel developments in the 1990s reinforced each other. The recrudescence of nationalism made it more plausible for international organizations to intervene on behalf of whole peoples, and the possibility of international intervention gave even numerically small nationalist movements much greater influence. If the leaders of nationalist movements believed it likely that powerful actors would lend a hand, they were likely to think and act more boldly; likewise, governments were likely to be more circumspect in countering such movements. Each of these consequences fed the other. Bosnia and Herzegovina broke off from Yugoslavia. Chechens twice mounted military challenges to Russian rule, and Quebec arranged a referendum on independence from Canada. At the end of the decade East Timor slipped from Jakarta’s control with the help of a UN military mission and a UN-sponsored plebiscite. And not too much later, Kosovo separated from rump Yugoslavia under a hail of NATO smart bombs.1 The message that national self-determination was again possible and that it might enjoy international support spread to other parts of the world. The fact that the Chechen and Quebec movements were less successful than those of the Timorese or Kosovars did not deter their participants—or the populations watching from other parts of the globe.
The September 11, 2001, attacks and subsequent attacks in Spain, Britain, and Indonesia gave yet another global phenomenon new (though not unprecedented) prominence. Suddenly, people were widely aware of political Islam and the threat that deep political disagreements rooted in religious values posed to world peace. Al-Qaeda and the Taliban gained more publicity than their leaders had ever dreamed of, and much of the non-Muslim world launched earnest and terrified discussions of the “problem of Islam” and “global terrorism.”
All these issues come together in China’s northwest. Just as the Soviet Union had been formed from the heterogeneous territories of the Russian czarist empire, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) had inherited most of the lands conquered by the Manchu Qing empire before its collapse in 1911. In the course of abandoning socialism, the Soviet Union disintegrated, finally disgorging many of the former imperial territories. In 1979 China’s leaders in Beijing embarked on ambitious reforms of the socialist system, and many foreign observers wondered whether China’s transition to postsocialism, if that was indeed what was taking place, would be similarly cataclysmic.
In 1759, Qing generals conquered the vast territory of what is today China’s northwestern region of Xinjiang and incorporated it into the empire. Even 190 years later when the PRC was founded, it remained culturally distinct and geographically remote from China proper. The substantial population of Muslim, Turkic-speaking Uyghurs, gave Xinjiang its full name: the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. Beijing claims Uyghurs as part of the “great family of the Chinese nation” and asserts that Xinjiang has been an integral piece of Chinese national territory “since ancient times.” Many Uyghurs, by contrast, believe themselves to be part of a distinct Uyghur nation, with its own rightful homeland, history, culture, and language. Having seen their Turkic-speaking, Muslim neighbors to the west—Kazakhs, Uzbeks, Qirghiz (Kyrgyz), Turkmens, and others—secede from the “eternal” Soviet Union and found independent states bearing their own names, many Uyghurs sought, and some still seek, to turn Xinjiang into a sovereign state. Learning of NATO’s intervention in Kosovo, many Uyghurs hoped that foreign assistance would make this possible, since they could not achieve independence on their own.
It is not surprising that well into the 1990s, few people in the wider world were aware that Uyghurs were Muslims, since very few people had even heard of Uyghurs. Within two years of the September 11 attacks and the subsequent incarceration of twenty-two Uyghurs in Guantánamo, anyone in the United States who knew of the Uyghurs also knew that they were Muslim. One lamentable consequence of the Uyghurs’ coming to international prominence during the “war on terror” has been that they have been fit into a ready-made grand narrative of culture clash, terrorism, and global Islamic threat. In fact, though, there is scant evidence that more than a few hundred Uyghurs, if that many, ever had any connection with al Qaeda or the Taliban.
One aim of this book is to demonstrate that most Uyghur resistance to Chinese rule is prompted by nationalism, not Islamism. But a wider purpose is to explore, first, how and why large numbers of Uyghurs have resisted their incorporation into the Chinese nation-state and, second, how and why the Chinese government has attempted to overcome that resistance. Finally, my main aim is to elucidate how the global currents just described—the renewed significance of nationalism, the tension between sovereignty and self-determination, the possibility of humanitarian intervention, and the heightened perception of an Islamic threat in the non-Muslim world—have combined to make the contention between Uyghurs and the Chinese state an international, rather than a merely national, problem.
Although for more than eighty years Chinese leaders have been telling the Uyghurs living in Xinjiang that they are an indissoluble part of the Chinese nation, many Uyghurs today disagree.2 A visitor to that contentious territory, known since 1955 as the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, is likely to be initiated into the conflict there through stories. I heard one such account on a winter afternoon in 1995. I was speaking with a young man whose parents had immigrated to Xinjiang from China’s interior but who himself had grown up in a small city in Xinjiang, speaking Uyghur so well, he claimed, that “without looking no one could tell I was Han” (that is, a member of China’s ethnonational majority). Remembering the harmonious relations between the groups in his childhood, he told me about a recent event that had left a deep impression on him.
As I rode the commuter bus one day, two Uyghurs and two Hans3 began yelling at each other. At first it wasn’t clear what the dispute was about. Listening more closely to what they were shouting, I pieced together the story: one Uyghur claimed that one of the Hans had knocked his stereo to the floor of the bus and demanded that they pay for it. The two Hans denied having touched the stereo. Another Han on the bus, trying to smooth things over, said, “Hey, we’re all Chinese, eh?” One of the Uyghurs responded venomously, “You Hans are Hans. We Uyghurs are Xinjiang people. We’re not one family.”4
That so seemingly trivial an event as a fight over a radio could elicit such an outburst indicates that a deep disagreement about the shape and membership of the Chinese nation lurks just beneath the surface of social life in Xinjiang. And while the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has gone to great lengths, and made substantial material investments, to persuade the Uyghurs of the benefits of being part of the People’s Republic of China, a considerable proportion remain deeply dissatisfied. Historians of China have argued for decades that the Communists forged a strongly united nation out of the heterogeneous peoples and lands conquered by the Qing empire (1644–1911). This book casts doubt on that proposition. CCP leaders claim to have completed the task of building the Chinese nation more than forty years ago. But in fact, they are still working strenuously on that project today, and in China’s far west they have not succeeded.
Nation building has unquestionably succeeded in China’s core provinces, often called “China proper.” The Hans who comprise more than nine-tenths of the population firmly believe in and strongly support the idea of the Chinese nation (Zhao 2004). Resistance to incorporation into that nation, and to the very idea of the nation, is most visible in Xinjiang and Tibet (see, for example, Goldstein 1997; Schwartz 1994), the two regions farthest from Beijing and in which Hans are a minority, and also in Inner Mongolia (Bulag 2000, 2002).5
Beijing also has incorporated Xinjiang into the state (Mackerras 2004a, 2004b; McMillen 1979; Shichor 2005). The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has maintained an uneasy peace in Xinjiang, as in Tibet, for much of the period from the late 1950s to the present. Yet Uyghurs have raised substantial challenges to the Chinese state in the past and may do so again. For several years after what Beijing afterward called the “peaceful liberation” of the region in 1949, PLA units remained hard at work fighting various insurgent groups that sought independence. The formation of several underground parties in the 1950s and 1960s and again in the post-Mao era, as well as the episodic bombings, riots, and protests since the 1980s, suggests that the government has often preserved the appearance of peace at the cost of heavy coercion. As Vivienne Shue points out, while a state must monopolize coercion to be successful, “constant reliance upon coercion to ensure popular compliance is not only an inefficient and expensive strategy, but probably ultimately a self-defeating one” (Shue 1991:218). The CCP has thus tuned its nation-building efforts precisely to the goal of reducing its dependence on military and bureaucratic coercion. At the same time, most Uyghurs lack the resources or gumption to openly defy the heavy hand of the state. Instead, they have challenged the CCP’s attempts to incorporate them into the nation by means of “everyday resistance” (Scott 1990; Scott and Kerkvliet 1986).
Whereas earlier scholarship focused on everyday resistance to economic exploitation and uncontroversially oppressive institutions such as slavery, here I broaden the categories of both domination and resistance to include contestation over the “nation.” Even though ethnonational and economic cleavages may overlap (see, for example, the classic work by Hechter 1975), nation building by states need not be exploitative or involve outright subjugation for sub-or nonnational groups to chafe under their rule. One of my aims is to explore exactly how and why such groups contest state efforts to incorporate them into the nation.
By invoking nation building here, I move beyond the sense of the term employed by modernization theorists in the 1950s. At that point, a positivist conception of nations and states, combined with the staggering proliferation of new states in the period of decolonization following World War II, predicted the need and the possibility for governments to construct nations by design. Both government officials and scholars believed that states could, through the construction of roads and communications networks, bureaucratic recruitment, and the extension of the market economy into the hinterlands, draw peripheral and heterogeneous peoples into the dominant culture and thus build homogeneous nations.6 In retrospect, such work had several conspicuous problems: it was teleological, assuming that there was an identifiable end point and that nations actually “got built” in the end.7 Officials and scholars proved to have been overoptimistic about the capacity of states to reorient citizens’ identities at will. Finally, the government plan and its academic theorization were internally incoherent. If nations objectively existed, how could nationalities be altered? If identity was malleable, how could a stable identity ever be “built”?
Now the broad scholarly consensus is that nations are constructed, but not under conditions or with outcomes of states’ choosing. One direct implication is that the construction process never ends, that nations are never finished but are always in the making (Beissinger 1995; Brubaker 1996; Kolst⊘ 2000; Suny 1995). Some scholars even suggest that “there is nothing to prevent homogenized nations from separating out into different peoples, and raising new claims of nationhood … [which] threatens even apparently successful nation-states with a recurring crisis of legitimation” (Suny 1995:190).
The peoples “raising new claims of nationhood” are engaging in nation building as well. Nationalist activists disputing their membership in existing states attempt at the same time to constitute cohesive, politically mobilized nations through their labors. Uyghur intellectuals have sought to build a collective identity embracing all Uyghurs (Rudelson 1997), and I argue that ordinary Uyghurs have also participated in constituting the nation through acts of individual resistance. I therefore focus on both the CCP’s nation-building strategies and the Uyghurs’ counterstrategies, capturing in a single framework both the Chinese state’s bid to incorporate Uyghurs into the Chinese nation and the Uyghurs’ attempts to resist it.8 In this contest, the state is neither entirely helpless nor so strong that it can simply impose its will on Uyghurs and others, restructuring society according to a national blueprint, as the modernization school once predicted. Similarly, while Uyghurs lack the power to separate from China at will and found a new state, many have found ways to challenge the Chinese nation-building project, to Beijing’s immense frustration. Both the Chinese state and defiant Uyghurs engage in representational politics.
This book is centrally concerned with the role of narrative in politics and narratives of a particular kind. I contend that narratives of what is going on in Xinjiang play a leading role in Xinjiang’s politics. Like many other observers, I am interested in the determinants of both the conflict in Xinjiang and the Uyghurs’ collective identity. Of the many important factors, I concentrate on a particular class of them. “Representational politics” is implicated in both the emergence and the hardening of the Uyghurs’ collective identity and in the conduct of the contention among the Chinese party-state, the Uyghurs in Xinjiang, and the Uyghur diaspora. Various actors have engaged in representational politics to conjure certain identities or thwart the emergence of others, and to strengthen or protect the identities so conjured against external assaults and internal conflicts. Other actors have employed these strategies to galvanize the groups for political purposes. Indeed, focusing on representational politics helps us trace processes crucial to the emergence and survival of distinct identities, and the conflicts that ensue as entrepreneurial actors mobilize them for diverse ends.
I am not arguing that identities are just narrative constructions or that conflicts might easily be resolved by the expedient of changing representations. It is clear that differences of physiognomy, habitus, religion, and socioeconomic status distinguish Uyghurs from Hans and that the differential treatment of these groups by the party-state has contributed to the gulf between them; this is one of the main points of chapter 2. I also recognize the importance of political organizations, political action, and episodes of violence and brutality that members of each group have visited on the other, as chapters 4 and 5 show. Nevertheless, to put it the other way around, were we to focus only on those matters, we would miss a crucial realm of political action and contention.
The various actors in the book narrate such matters as what the government is doing, what the “splittists” are up to, what the broad masses really believe, which “hostile foreign powers” are plotting to carve up China, and how Xinjiang’s present squares with its “true” past. Narrative representations are not figments we need to peel away, false leads we need to eschew in our quest to understand the goings-on in this contentious region. They are not mere misrepresentations (although they often are also that); they are the very stuff of politics in Xinjiang. All the main actors are consciously engaged in representing their own actions and those of their opponents as they pursue their political aims. For many actors, principally Uyghurs, this is the only means they have to do so.
State actors, like the political organs in Beijing and their counterparts in Xinjiang, deploy representation as a vital supplement to other tools at their disposal. They can call in military and police forces, initiate campaigns with the force of law, mobilize party cadres, turn on or off the spigot of state largesse, and offer or withhold jobs, schooling, or other social goods. These tools endow officials’ representational strategies with consequences. One example is that after a series of large-scale student demonstrations that began on December 12, 1985, officials concluded that “Xinjiang’s principal threat comes from minzu splittism at home and abroad.”9 No mere analytical judgment, this decision quickly became an official “set phrase” (tifa) and thus the obligatory frame of interpretation for subsequent disturbances (Dang Yulin and Zhang Yuxi 2003:357; Schoenhals 1992). In other words, when students and other groups held protests in later years, regardless of the slogans shouted or the likely provocations, government and public security officials were instructed to interpret—and treat—the protests as separatist actions, inviting harsh responses.
Other groups have far fewer options as they contend with the state. Ordinary Han citizens have very few avenues available for influencing politics or even expressing their discontent. Uyghurs in Xinjiang have fewer still. They have no legitimate political parties outside the CCP that they may join.10 Elections are limited to the village level, and reports from around the country indicate that party officials still have an influential hand in selecting (and excluding) candidates, so contestation is limited. Higher offices are filled by appointment, and the few Uyghurs selected for prominent positions have been carefully vetted for their tractability after decades of service in the bureaucracy. Demonstrations are formally legal but suppressed in practice; until July 2009, no major organized protest had taken place in Xinjiang since 1997. Even recorded expressions of criticism, dissent, or discontent are thwarted. All mass media, including electronic media, newspapers, magazines, and even books and pamphlets, are censored. Every poem, every song, every short story, essay, and novel must pass through a battery of censors before being published. Even those items that succeed in passing the censors can later be judged harmful because of their “social effects” and be banned.
Because other forms of political participation are closed off and the open expression of dissent is punished by the state, ordinary Uyghurs have been forced to speak and write obliquely—in the margins and interstitially—to represent their views and share them with others. A Uyghur scholar discussing the novels of Zunun Qadir, a famous Uyghur novelist, aptly cited Edward Said (1993:xiii, quoted in Walia 2001:21), to the effect that “stories … become the method colonized peoples use to assert their own identity and the existence of their own history” (Thwaites 2005:24).
I use the phrase representational politics to denote these practices, having in mind two distinct but related senses. The first is the use of mimetic representations in politics—narratives of history and contemporary politics, the labeling of groups, particular explications of historical relationships, and trends—and as a tool of politics. The second is what is more commonly called representative politics, the selection of an individual or a party to represent the views and press for the aims of a group. The central problematic uniting the two is the assumption that something can stand for something else, simply and without distortion.
The discursive sense of representational politics focuses on the shaky premise that words stand simply for reality and capture political reality without distortion. All official studies of modern Xinjiang published in China (and unofficial studies have been extraordinarily rare) espouse this premise implicitly or explicitly. Many of the texts I use purport to express the views of Uyghurs and the “people of various minzu” or to explain what the CCP has done for the peoples of Xinjiang. In several chapters I illustrate that skeptical consumers of such works—many Uyghurs and some Hans as well—skillfully pick them apart.
The political arrangement in Xinjiang also rests uneasily on the assumption that a small number of people, identified as political representatives, can stand for many more people and articulate their wishes faithfully (Bourdieu 1991; Williams 1998). This is exemplified in the state’s claim that the top Uyghur (and other non-Han) leaders in various government bodies were selected and promoted democratically and that thus they are legitimate representatives of the peoples from which they sprang. Curiously, although such leaders are explicitly chosen and raised through the ranks on the basis of minzu affiliation—a Uyghur must head the Xinjiang Uyghur autonomous regional government; a Qazaq, the Ili prefectural government; and so on—the state also maintains that such leaders are able and expected to represent the common interests of all. Leaders who focus on the interests of their respective minzu have frequently been condemned as “narrow nationalists” by the party-state and stripped of their offices. A third important facet of the problem of political representation in Xinjiang concerns the place of the party and party officials in politics. Top party officials at all levels in Xinjiang have been overwhelmingly Han, and yet it is forbidden to suggest that the selection of Hans over Uyghurs and others vitiates the system of autonomy. Chapter 2 takes up this problem in the discussion of how government and party leaders are recruited and promoted and, more broadly, in the construction of the system of “minzu regional autonomy.”
Several common themes emerge from the study of both forms of representational politics. The first is selection: Hans outside Xinjiang, or brought in from outside the region, have the power to choose which individuals will represent the wider population, which texts will depict social realities, and with what “formulations” (tifa) they will do so. The second common theme is the consistency of the selectors’ aims and preferences in choosing individuals or narrative frames. This consistency is reflected in intentional elisions or gaps. In discursive representation, this includes topics not raised, interpretive frames excluded or condemned, and voices not heard. With regard to the selection of political representatives, we find individuals who are not promoted or are moved to less threatening positions, striking imbalances in the proportion of officials chosen from different minzu, and the extreme rarity of officials who speak out about these elisions and exclusions.
Although I use the concept of representational politics to illuminate politics in modern Xinjiang, I believe it can be applied far beyond this relatively little known region in Central Asia. Because antistate movements often lack military or organizational resources that would facilitate their struggles, stronger states can successfully deny these tools to all but the most fearless and motivated. The more ruthless and autocratic states seek to strip separatists even of rhetorical weapons, but no actual state has yet succeeded in squelching dissidence completely. Even George Orwell’s nightmare vision of a socialist polity with a chicken in every pot and a surveillance camera in every wall allowed that citizens might organize themselves against the state in the interstices of the invigilatory system.11
The Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (also referred to as Xinjiang or the XUAR), as it is officially known to the Chinese (most Uyghur nationalists call it Eastern Turkestan or Uyghurstan), is a vast swath of territory on the inland border of today’s People’s Republic of China. Occupying one-sixth the total area of China, it holds only a fraction more than 1 percent of China’s population (see map of China).12 Lying as it does near the center of the Eurasian landmass, most of the land area of Xinjiang is desert or extremely arid, so most of the population is concentrated in oases dotting the region. Compounding the isolating effects of distance are the four mountain ranges dividing the province itself and separating it from Tibet, the countries to its southwest, and those to the north (Rudelson 1992). The northern part of the autonomous region is wedged between Kazakhstan and Mongolia, and the southwestern part abuts on Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and a sliver of India. Within China it touches Gansu and Qinghai provinces and the Tibet Autonomous Region, themselves largely arid and sparsely populated. As recently as 1935, the journey from Beijing to the region’s capital, Ürümci, took two months by car (Teichman 1937), and in 1951, it still took a month to drive to the rail spur in Xi’an.13 Until the late 1950s, the northern rail line from Beijing extended only into Gansu (with an initial gap of more than six hundred miles to Ürümci) and reached Ürümci only in 1962. Today the trip from the capital takes two days by train or five hours by plane. Even though modern transportation and communication networks have narrowed the distance considerably, Xinjiang remains remote in the popular Chinese imagination.
Nevertheless, several of Xinjiang’s features make it “integral” to China in the eyes of the leadership. It possesses rich reserves of natural gas and oil, estimated by Beijing to be one-third of the country’s total. China has been a net oil importer of oil since 1993, and Xinjiang’s production can satisfy only part of domestic demand, but the region remains vital to the country’s economic security (Downs 2004). Other mineral resources include substantial quantities of gold, other nonferrous metals, and uranium. Xinjiang’s climate makes it attractive for cotton cultivation, and the CCP intends to turn it into the country’s “cotton basket,” despite the scarcity of water and the obvious environmental devastation around the Central Asian Aral Sea caused by cotton farming (Toops 2004b). The vastness of Xinjiang has long impressed party planners as a potential solution to overcrowding in China’s heartland. The region was chosen, for instance, for the relocation of a portion of the villagers displaced by the Three Gorges Dam project. Finally, owing to its location, the region has been seen, by turns, as a bulwark against the Soviet threat during the decades of Sino-Soviet tension, a gateway to the markets of Central Asia since rapprochement (and especially since 1991), and a corridor for shipping energy resources. The region now boasts an oil pipeline and will soon have a gas pipeline connecting Central Asia’s and Siberia’s far richer resources with China’s energy-hungry coast (Asiaport Daily 2008; Xinhua 2005).
Uyghurs predominate in the Tarim Basin oases of southern Xinjiang. According to official figures, 9.65 million Uyghurs lived in the XUAR in 2007.14 Sixty years ago they constituted the vast majority of the population, three-quarters of the region’s 1944 population of less than four million. Hans then were a tiny minority, barely exceeding 200,000, and that only after several decades of Han immigration with the support of successive warlords and later China’s Nationalist government. What the Nationalists had only encouraged, the Communists compelled for almost two decades: state-directed immigration beginning in 1950 that increased the Han population to nearly five million by 1975. From the mid-1980s on, state policies to lure more immigrants brought that figure to roughly 8.2 million in 2007.15 Thus while Uyghurs are still officially the most numerous non-Han group in Xinjiang, they now constitute only a plurality. There is little doubt that in recent decades the vast Han population has done as much as the military and the party to counterbalance Uyghurs’ political aspirations. Nevertheless, the persistence and depth of the Uyghurs’ alienation and Xinjiang’s substantial strategic value to the CCP have kept the “Uyghur problem” high on Beijing officials’ agenda since the founding of the PRC. While the government frames the problem practically in terms of the conditions and aspirations of a known population, we should not. Rather, we must inquire into the “Uyghur problem” by asking about the constitution of the population itself. When and how did the people now known as Uyghur come to think of themselves as such?
For a long time, scholarship on Xinjiang appeared to be caught in a time warp, insulated from developments in social science theory. This limitation was, of course, common to work focused on geographical regions rather than academic disciplines. Early studies of politics in Xinjiang shared the assumption that the Uyghurs’ ethnic origins and current identities were clear (McMillen 1979; Norins 1944; Whiting and Sheng Shih-ts’ai [Sheng Shicai] 1958).16 Scholars typically read political implications directly from the minzu categories of Uyghurs and others, using the identity of individuals and groups to explain their actions. Later work influenced by the constructivist turn in the social sciences transformed the study of Xinjiang by demonstrating that the Uyghur, Hui, and Han identities had emerged comparatively recently, were mobilized and shaped by political elites, and remained fluid and contested (Gladney 1990, 1991, 1996; Millward 1998, 2007; Rudelson 1997). Several scholars have argued controversially that despite the well-attested history of the powerful eighth-century Uyghur Empire (744–840) and the Uyghur Qoco Kingdom (850–1250), both the ethnonym “Uyghur” and its associated identity are in some sense modern inventions (Gladney 1990; Rudelson 1997). Gladney argues that the emergence of a Uyghur ethnonational identity in the twentieth century was the indirect result of a conference convened by Josef Stalin in 1921 at which participants proposed the official adoption of “Uyghur” as an ethnonym in the Soviet Union.17 The term later spread to Xinjiang and was institutionalized in 1935 by the government of the warlord Sheng Shicai (Bao’erhan [Burhan Shahidi] 1994:244). Though once debated, the thesis that Uyghur identity was a modern invention or reinvention has gained wide acceptance in Uyghur studies. Yet in presuming the sudden reemergence and speedy spread of a new category of identity, this thesis begs the question of why the Uyghurs did not mount a cohesive nationalist challenge to either Republican or Communist Chinese rule.
Three scholars have answered the question in slightly different ways. The historian Andrew Forbes contends that the very expectation of concerted Uyghur action betrayed a fundamental misprision regarding the history of the region and people. Xinjiang was not a single territory inhabited by a people with a common identity. Instead, it remained separated into three distinct regions before the Qing conquest, and the disorganization of warlord rule in Republican-era Xinjiang again brought these differences to the fore.18 Forbes (1986:230–31) suggests that these distinct regions and regional identities persisted through midcentury.19 Justin Rudelson argues that historically there had been four distinct zones within the territory and four corresponding regionalized identities. By closing the region to its western neighbors for several decades after 1949, the CCP actually contributed to the formation of a cohesive Uyghur identity, but the reopening of the region to the outside world in the reform era revived the four regional orientations. According to Rudelson (1997), Uyghur nationalist intellectuals reinforced the old divisions by vying to constitute authentic Uyghur identity according to regional dictates. Like Rudelson, Joanne Smith writes as if the emergence of a unitary Uyghur identity ought to be expected and its tardy arrival lamented. She contends that Uyghur unity has been thwarted not by oasis differences but by distinctions of age, gender, and occupation. Smith speculates that the passage of elder generations from the political elite (Smith 2000:195) or the renewed emphasis on religious and cultural identity (Smith 1999:128) might foster greater cohesiveness, and at the same time she concludes that city dwellers and rural folk differ enough in outlook that a single Uyghur-wide political platform, based on shared identity and interest, is unlikely to emerge any time soon.
Many Uyghurs themselves bemoan their disunity, seemingly confirming the theses of Forbes, Rudelson, and Smith. Some blame yurtwazliq, or “localism,” as the root of the problem (Abdurehim Ötkür 1996 [1985]). Others criticize what they regard as disloyal behavior, such as toadying to Hans and spying for the government. Many particularly regret the infighting among intellectuals, whom they expected to take the lead in promoting ethnonational unity.20 Indeed, while many of my informants felt that all Uyghurs should foster unity and act in concert with Uyghur-wide interests, few believed this was happening, and fewer still could specify what behaviors and attitudes this abstract wish for unity demanded of them and their friends. Not surprisingly, this divisiveness has not been confined to Uyghurs in Xinjiang. Chapter 5 discusses calls for both unity and factional behavior among Uyghurs in organizations abroad. What the Uyghurs’ laments and the scholars’ more dispassionate diagnoses of Uyghur disunity miss, I believe, is the distinction between identity and intention. They have somehow expected national identity to overcome quotidian politics (Roberts 1998a).
Following Anderson (1991), I suggest that educational and employment “pilgrimages” to Ürümci (and, to a lesser extent, regional educational centers such as Kashgar or Ghulja) have effaced the regional and professional differences among Uyghur elites, inculcating in them a strong sense of collective identity (Bovingdon 1998; see also Naby 1986). The trend of traveling to the regional capital for education or to find work has not abated, and travelers returning to their homes all over Xinjiang have spread widely the vision of a Pan-Uyghur identity and shared interests. The comparative rarity of Uyghurs’ traveling to China proper and the still greater rarity of their settling there have also contributed to the preservation of a Xinjiang- and Uyghur-focused rather than a Pan-Chinese identity.21
Furthermore, as a number of scholars have argued, both the Soviet Union and the PRC strengthened novel or weakly rooted identities in many groups by institutionalizing them, assigning people to discrete ethnonational categories and distributing goods or authority on the basis of those categorizations (Brubaker 1996; Gladney 1990, 1991; Pipes 1968; Roeder 1991; Roy 2000). Yet those identities have not extinguished or supplanted all others. Olivier Roy showed, for instance, that clan identities preceded ethnonational identities in Central Asia and have survived alongside them. To assert that identities remain plural is not to deny their power or substance, however. Uyghurs cleave deeply to the idea that they, as a group, are essentially different from Hans, which is a view that the vast majority of Hans share. The belief in a basic and universal difference between Hans and Uyghurs is predicated on the assumption of essential sameness among Uyghurs and among Hans. But what that essence entails in terms of language, practice, dress, or deportment is still, and will remain, contested. While nationalists imagine the irreversible “awakening” of a unitary and stable identity, we must recognize this as an aspiration rather than a description of reality. Even groups sharing a collective sense of belonging may display different levels of “groupness” over time and in different contexts (Brubaker 2002; Gladney 1996; Roy 2000).
The party-state has cleverly exploited internal distinctions among Uyghurs and other non-Hans. By the late 1950s, while recognizing and institutionalizing ethnonational categories, officials increasingly emphasized class, and by the mid1960s they placed class above all else. During the Cultural Revolution, the Gang of Four promulgated the notion that all group conflicts ultimately boiled down to problems of class. Officials worked to further weaken ethnonational loyalties by inviting women from all groups to join women’s associations. During the high socialist era, bureaus and work units tried to replace solidary with political ties by rewarding individuals willing to show enthusiasm for the regime (Oi 1989; Walder 1986); this certainly was true of party and government administrations in Xinjiang (McMillen 1979; Toops 1992). Having expropriated and marginalized Muslim clerics after 1949, officials then sought to loosen the hold of religion on the rest of the population while simultaneously working to transform Uyghur Islam into a state-supporting institution.22
Strengthening one identity in competition with others (and under patient government assault) requires work. It is partly through resisting party initiatives that Uyghurs have constituted themselves as a group. As we will see, the consumption and dissemination of heterodox popular culture link Uyghurs in circuits of transmission and identification.23 Thus to interpret “everyday resistance” as merely the consequence or expression of Uyghur nationalism is to miss one of its principal effects. In resisting, Uyghurs invoke the nation and claim membership in it, even if they have different conceptions of and interests in that nation.
I argue that a subtler institutional legacy also contributed substantially to the formation of Uyghur national consciousness: the very language the CCP used to denote the Chinese nation and the non-Han groups it supposedly encompassed. Officials employed a single term, minzu, to refer to both the nation and its subgroups. In so doing, they unintentionally opened a rhetorical and ideological space in which Uyghur identity and nationalism could flourish.
By using the same word to denote subnational and national groups, Chinese officials departed from earlier European and Soviet examples. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, as the ideas of the nation and national self-determination spread throughout Europe, the leaders of several states anticipated a problem in acknowledging substantial unassimilated populations while simultaneously attempting to construct unified nations. They sought to avert this problem through careful distinctions in nomenclature. The aim was to establish rhetorical bulwarks against demands for autonomy or separation. Between 1848 and 1868, Austrian and Hungarian bureaucrats developed the lexical strategies on which all subsequent multinational states would depend to manage intrastate cultural difference, using the term nationality (nationalität) to denote cultural communities without acknowledging them as nations (Seton-Watson 1977:147). The Russians would have natsionalnost to natsia; the Americans, ethnic groups and nation; and so forth. Walker Connor is quite right to point out that in the Soviet system, “being classified as a nationality rather than as a nation [could] have political implications,” the crucial one being the kind of autonomous unit to which a particular group was allocated. The hierarchy of republics, okrugs, and so on, indicated, on a territorial level, the status of each titular group in the great chain of peoples.24 But Connor gets it wrong when he asserts that “Peking, by referring to all peoples within China, other than the Han, as nationalities, justifies its refusal to create republics on the Soviet pattern” (Connor 1984:xv).25 In fact, after China’s officially sponsored ethnologists determined in the 1950s that there were fifty-odd distinct groups according to Stalin’s criteria, the party formally placed everyone, including the Han, on an equal footing by labeling them minzu.26 The party then placed above them the abstract category of the “Chinese nation” (zhonghua minzu), which, it emphasized, was not reducible to the Han but encompassed all groups.27 Thus despite the vastly different political rights assigned them by the party, both the putatively “minority” groups and the “Chinese nation” were given the same nomenclature, minzu. Official boosting of the zhonghua minzu is complicated by constant official reminders that China is a “multi-minzu state” (duo minzu guojia). If the zhonghua minzu alone possesses the state, as the party claims, the principle of transitivity suggests it is a “multi-minzu minzu.” The decision not to follow the example of the Soviet Union and other states, which underscored the political hierarchy of categories with careful linguistic distinctions, has contributed to the party-state’s difficulties with Uyghurs and others. It is for this reason that I leave the term minzu untranslated throughout this book.
In other work I have provided extensive evidence (Bovingdon 2002b) that the instability of the term minzu has, from the vantage of the state, dangerously exposed it to political manipulation from below. Here I cite only two examples. The CCP has made “minzu solidarity” (minzu tuanjie) the centerpiece of its yearly propaganda drives to combat separatism. The slogan is intended to advocate solidarity among the various minzu. Yet Dru Gladney discovered during field research in the late 1980s that some Huis used it in quite a different sense. Several people told him, “Our Hui minzu has deep solidarity.” Gladney observed that “without changing the Chinese phrase, they [had] radically altered its meaning.” Whereas it originally had been promulgated by party elites to strengthen solidarity among all the groups making up the “Chinese nation,” his Hui informants used it to describe their strong collective identity distinct from that of other groups in China (Gladney 1991:313).28 In 1995 Beijing University professor Ning Sao published a massive theoretical work that sought to nail down the complex relationship between minzu and state (guojia) in China, and to do so by distinguishing the various meanings of the term minzu. Seeking to contain the very semantic leakage just described, Ning wrote sententiously that “in China there is only one minzu that can be called a minzu (nation)”29—that being the “Chinese nation” (zhonghua minzu) (Ning Sao 1995:13). In recent years, the official English name of the State Council’s minzu shiwu weiyuanhui was quietly changed from “Nationality Affairs Commission” to the “Ethnic Affairs Commission.”30 Officials also changed the English title of its mass periodical Minzu tuanjie from Nationality Unity to Ethnic Unity (Bulag 2000:196). The decision of bureaucrats in Beijing to make these changes can be seen as part of a drive to eliminate ambiguity and close the door on unwanted international interpretations of Beijing’s contention with Uyghurs and Tibetans as national rather than ethnic conflicts. But bureaucrats and scholars in Beijing have not yet agreed. China’s premier postsecondary institution dedicated to the education of non-Hans, the Zhongyang minzu daxue, retained the English name Central Institute for Nationalities until February 2009, when its title changed, intriguingly, to the Minzu University of China.31 The flagship scholarly journal of the Minzu Research Institute at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences now claims the English title Ethno-national Studies.32 These divergent translations of a single vexed term, and the disagreements among various agents who use the term, illustrate in microcosm the political importance of linguistic strategies of representation.
I conducted twenty months of field research over three years between 1994 and 1997 and followed up with two months in the summer of 2002 and a short trip in 2005. The bulk of my interviews were unstructured and open-ended and involved one or more meetings with more than 160 individuals, among them ninety-five Uyghurs, fifty Hans, and a small number of Xibos, Huis, Uzbeks, Mongols, and Qazaqs. I encountered many more people through informal interactions, participation in everyday activities, and attendance at ritual celebrations. I interviewed the Uyghurs and Uzbeks in Uyghur, and the others in Mandarin. My informants included clerks, service workers, students, teachers, professors, lawyers, judges, doctors, businesspeople, office workers, police, bureaucrats, local government officials, editors, reporters, writers, and farmers. The group was weighted heavily toward educated urbanites aged nineteen to fifty. As a young male in a society with fairly strict restrictions on cross-gender socializing, I had easier access to men than to women, and men therefore constituted roughly two-thirds of my interview sample. Social groups underrepresented among my informants included farmers and very religious people.
I spent much of my time in Xinjiang’s capital city of Ürümci, where I was formally registered as an advanced postgraduate student at Xinjiang University for several months in 1994 and again for the academic years 1995/1996 and 1996/1997. During those periods I studied oral and written Uyghur more or less daily for several hours with a single instructor. Personnel in the university’s Foreign Affairs Office (waishi bangongshi) made clear from the start that they were responsible for me and, in that capacity, offered strong advice about where I could travel and with whom I could interact. I lived in a student dormitory, and although I moved about quite freely during the day when not in language classes, I was expected to return home every night by 10 p.m. local time (midnight Beijing time) during the semester, which placed obvious (and obviously intentional) constraints on how far I could travel.33 I was able to make day trips to the suburbs and exurbs of Ürümci, as well as to the more distant towns of Changji and Hutubi. During weekends, long holidays, and when school was not in session, I traveled to other parts Xinjiang. I lived for short periods in private homes in periurban neighborhoods of Kashgar and Qumul and moved about those towns unimpeded. At one time, I was stopped by Public Security personnel, asked where I was staying, informed it was illegal for a foreigner to stay in a private home, and made to move into a hotel.34 Finally, I made other week-long trips to Kashgar and Turpan, as well as subsequent, shorter visits to Ürümci in 2002 and 2005.
The atmosphere in Xinjiang was sufficiently tense and my informants cautious enough, given the topics of my research, that I had to rely on informal and often impromptu, rather than formal, interviews. Even though I had brought a tape recorder with me on my first research trip, it became clear within days that pulling it out in interviews would immediately end most interactions.35 Indeed, as I learned in the initial days of my first stay, taking out a notepad and showing signs of writing down what my informants said caused most of them to fall silent or flee immediately—or, equally disastrous, to lapse into mere platitudes. After trial and error, I developed the technique of bringing a notebook and jotting down “grammatically interesting” sentences or “unfamiliar” vocabulary for future language study, to jog my memory about crucial moments in the interviews. As soon as possible after such interactions—sometimes half an hour, sometimes half a day—I would return home and type detailed field notes into my computer, often for several hours. For those conversations lasting an hour or more, except the quotations for which I had jotted notes, I could record only the general flow of ideas. Accordingly, when I use direct quotations in this book, I base them on those verbatim (or shorthand) records in my notebooks.
In addition to interviews with one person or several in various settings, I employed the technique of participant observation. When invited, I attended weddings and funerals, circumcision ceremonies, holiday celebrations, and other social gatherings. These large events were particularly valuable, for several reasons. First, they enabled me to interact with multiple people without fear of being overheard and without the stiffness of a formal research encounter. Second, I could observe conversations directed by others and determine what topics emerged without my intervention. Third, I became known to a large number of people in various communities, which facilitated later contacts.
In sum, all my interviews in Xinjiang were conducted under conditions that were far from ideal. Even though my sample contained more than 160 informants, it was very small compared with the total population of the region, and given the combination of logistical challenges and my research goals, it could not have been a random sample. Instead, I used the “snowball” method, seeking out individuals of interest and encouraging them to introduce me to family or friends. The advantages of this method included the ability to gain the trust of and learn about the social networks of a large number of people. The most obvious disadvantage is that the complexion of my sample was influenced by the first people I met or sought out in each site. I never allowed officials to suggest interviewees, and I ignored strong hints that I cease meeting with some of my informants. Only on very rare occasions was I aware of individuals trailing me, although I cannot exclude the possibility that some of my acquaintances had been instructed by the government to watch me and provide information to officials. Scholars conducting research in Xinjiang then or since have faced similar constraints.36
I supplemented my interviews with constant attention to print and broadcast media in both Chinese and Uyghur. I regularly listened to the radio and watched television programs, focusing attention on news and programs about China’s cultural diversity. During my research stays, I subscribed to and read several local newspapers and nearly a dozen scholarly journals. From the Statistical Bureau and several Gazetteer offices, I bought statistical yearbooks, narrative yearbooks, and other such compendia. I acquired nearly one hundred audiotapes, videotapes, and compact discs with performances of music or poetry.
I also drew on interviews with many Uyghurs abroad, conducted between 2000 and 2006. One clear advantage of émigré interviews is that they can be conducted more freely and the respondents do not worry nearly as much about the consequences of frankness. At the same time, there is the problem of bias in the sample, since émigrés clearly “voted with their feet” by leaving Xinjiang. Social scientists studying the PRC in the 1960s and 1970s, when field research inside China was impossible, confronted the same problem when they interviewed émigrés in Hong Kong (Chan, Madsen, and Unger 1984; Madsen and Center for Chinese Studies 1984; Parish 1978; Whyte 1974; Whyte and Parish 1984).
In order to strengthen confidence in my interviews and my interpretations of them, as well as published sources from China, I set them carefully alongside the writings of foreign journalists and researchers. Wherever possible, I juxtapose different versions of the same events both to arrive at a most likely version and, reflexively, to judge the reliability of those versions or their authors. My conclusions are based on these combined resources. This is the first work in English to make extensive use of Uyghur-language sources produced by transnational organizations abroad. These materials provide crucial information about political activities and representational politics in the Uyghur diaspora, and many of them also offer descriptions of historical events affecting Uyghurs inside and outside Xinjiang. This book is also the first to pay sustained attention to the important internal-circulation work Guojia liyi gaoyu yiqie (The National Interest Above All Else, 2003) by the Beijing based researcher Ma Dazheng. Ma’s importance as both a researcher and a policy adviser on Xinjiang cannot be overestimated. The research that he and his assistants conducted for the book was commissioned by top party leaders in Beijing and written in consultation with the highest officials in Xinjiang. Equally important, two of the most powerful officials in Xinjiang, Wang Lequan, the party secretary, and Feng Dazhen, head of the Propaganda Department, claimed, in the prefaces they wrote for it, to have read most or all the book (Feng Dazhen 2003; Wang Lequan 2003). This text is an indispensable guide to official strategies of representation. It offers extensive advice on how to respond to Uyghurs’ heterodox speech and media and how to handle international scrutiny of human rights problems.
When not in Xinjiang, I have kept abreast of developments there through a continuous review of various news sources, including foreign, Chinese, and Uyghur media. Over the last decade, the growth in the amount of information about Xinjiang has been staggering. National and local newspapers, various government organs down to the county level, and a number of research organizations all have extensive and regularly updated Web sites (though nearly all sites in Xinjiang were shut down in July 2009 and have not reopened as this book went to press). Uyghur transnational organizations have also developed sophisticated sites for the dissemination of news, polemics, and communiqués. In addition, since the late 1990s, human rights organizations such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Human Rights in China have produced carefully researched studies of affairs in Xinjiang. The April 2005 work “Devastating Blows: Religious Repression of Uighurs in Xinjiang” (Human Rights Watch 2005) and the many reports by the Congressional-Executive Commission on China are of particularly high scholarly value. It goes without saying that all publications from Chinese government organs, Uyghur transnational groups, and human rights organizations have been crafted with political purposes in mind; I have read them critically and cross-referenced them extensively, treating none as a sole authoritative source.
Chapter 1 describes how both Uyghur and Han nationalists (including officials in the Chinese state) strategically concocted histories to serve political purposes. It also illustrates how Uyghurs could have come to the conclusion that Chinese rule over them and Xinjiang is imperial. I briefly describe the Qing rule over Xinjiang as a colony, how Chinese nationalists at the turn of the twentieth century sought to retain Qing territories while jettisoning the baggage of empire, and how some officials in the Nationalist government acknowledged that Xinjiang was a colony and might be due for decolonization on the model of India or the Philippines.
Having defeated the Nationalists and consolidated authority over China’s interior, the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party squelched talk of decolonization soon after Red Army forces occupied the strategic cities and towns in Xinjiang. In lieu of independence or a Soviet-style republic, they offered the Uyghurs a system of “minzu regional autonomy,” a truncated version of the one they had set up in Inner Mongolia in 1947. Chapter 2 analyzes the system that the party established in Xinjiang. I first evaluate the actual system according to international legal standards for autonomy and then examine the particular components or consequences of that system, showing how each has contributed to the Uyghurs’ discontent. Han academics and policy advisers have proposed various changes to that system since the late 1990s, and in the concluding section of the chapter, I argue that far from accommodating the demands of Uyghur protestors and critics, these proposed changes portend the further consolidation of power by Han party officials, more policy-driven Han immigration, and the perpetuation of policies that many Uyghurs oppose.
Officials and public security personnel have kept a tight lid on public protest in Xinjiang. As a consequence, most protest has been individual or private. In chapter 3 I describe many Uyghurs’ everyday strategies for criticizing and defying the system of governance they find so objectionable. I contend that while these strategies have done little to change the region’s system of governance, they have nonetheless strengthened the Uyghurs’ collective identity and widely disseminated information about the nature and depth of popular discontent.
In chapter 4 I turn to the comparatively rare occasions when that discontent burst onto the public stage, in the form of protests and violent episodes that brought Xinjiang and the Uyghurs some notoriety in the 1990s. I point out that such protests in fact took place decades earlier, indicating that opposition to rule from Beijing emerged immediately after the revolution and continued, openly or secretly, through the end of the twentieth century. Second, I show that the incidence of violence and protest in that region was falling precisely during the period that Beijing began to publicize the idea of a “violent Xinjiang” harassed by terrorism. Equally important, the frequency was declining just as protests were on a dramatic rise in the rest of China.
Few Uyghurs inside Xinjiang have dared to organize politically, and as explained earlier, Chinese officials have dealt harshly with open expressions of discontent. Uyghurs in the diaspora have been far more successful at establishing organizations and working to direct international attention to Xinjiang’s contentious politics. In chapter 5 I look outside Xinjiang to that substantial diaspora community, with a focus on Uyghur transnational organizations. I address the decision of the United States to label the Eastern Turkestan Islamic Movement a terrorist organization in August 2002, and Beijing’s politically adroit use of this identification to argue that Uyghur separatist organizations were part of a global terrorist network. I cast doubt on Beijing’s claim that such organizations have been the principal cause of unrest inside Xinjiang and show that there is very little evidence of terrorist activity or affiliations among the vast majority of the organizations.
In the conclusion I discuss the implications of the current deadlock, given that a sizable proportion of Uyghurs will not be satisfied with anything less than a substantial expansion of autonomy in Xinjiang, even though China’s leaders show no willingness to compromise and, in fact, appear to plan further diminutions of the autonomy provided by the current administrative arrangements.