1. To be more precise, Kosovo received an international peacekeeping force and became independent de facto, though not de jure. The government of Kosovo declared independence in early 2008, even though only about a quarter of the world’s states had recognized it by this writing.
2. As I detail at length, it is impossible to state with confidence what proportion of Uyghurs seek independence, although Chinese officials, Uyghur nationalists, and not a few foreign scholars have claimed the capacity to do so.
3. Some readers may be disconcerted by my use of the plural “Hans” when sinologists conventionally use “Han” for both singular and plural. I refer to Hans, and Uyghurs, and Huis, and Sibes, in order to underscore the point that the ethnonyms denote numbers of individuals rather than groups that think, or act, as blocs (Brubaker 2002).
4. Field notes, November 21, 1995. According to Joanne Smith (2002:169), “bus stories have become a favorite subject of Uyghur storytelling.” Minor disagreements have frequently precipitated fights on buses and streets.
5. Uradyn Bulag suggests poignantly that Mongols in Inner Mongolia are often held up as cautionary examples of what Uyghurs and Tibetans will someday become. Drastically outnumbered by Hans in the so-called Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, they seem to have given up on public resistance and “no longer exhibit … an independent spirit” (Bulag 2002:2-3). Bulag demonstrates that Mongols have continued to resist full integration into the “Chinese nation” in various ways. His method has been an inspiration for this book. For reports of public protests in Inner Mongolia in the 1980s and 1990s, see Jankowiak (1988) and BBC Monitoring Asia Pacific (1999). The Southern Mongolia Human Rights Information Center (http://www.smhric.org/) has reports of Mongol protests and clashes with Chinese authorities as recent as April 2006.
6. Most famously, Deutsch 1953 and Pye 1966, but see also Emerson 1962. For work focusing on China, see Solinger 1977 and especially Liu 1971. Eugen Weber’s celebrated work Peasants into Frenchmen is a particularly nuanced example (1976). The following critique draws on Connor 1994:28-66. For another brief critique of the “nation-building” literature, see Brubaker 1996:80-81.
7. Brubaker criticizes the model for assuming “development toward ‘full’ national integration” (Brubaker 1996:81).
8. For exemplary work on state-society relations, see Migdal 1988 and 2001 and Migdal, Kohli, and Shue 1994.
9. The term minzu has been rendered variously as “nation,” “nationality,” and “ethnic group.” Because its semantic field encompasses all these meanings and their political implications vary so widely, I generally choose not to translate the term. For more on the history and significance of the term minzu, see Gladney 1991 and Leibold 2007:8-9 and passim. See also Jin Tianming and Wang Qingren 1981; Li Hongjie 2002; Ma Rong 2004; Naribilige (Naran Bilik) 1995; and Ning Sao 1995.
10. A number of small parties provide the fig leaf of a functioning democracy, but in no sense do they serve as real opposition parties. The “four fundamental principles” articulated by Deng Xiaoping stand outside, and date ontologically before, the constitution. The most significant of the four is the stipulation that the leadership of the CCP may not be challenged. Perry Link and Andrew Nathan (Zhang Liang 2001:11, n. 12) describe the principles as “minimum standards for ideological rectitude.”
11. James Scott made these points persuasively in several books (Scott 1985, 1990).
12. Compare Henan Province, which, with one-tenth the area, claims nearly six times as many people (Banister 1987:298-99).
13. The son of former provincial governor Burhan Shahidi remembers traveling the several thousand miles to Xi’an by military truck in 1951, as there was no civilian transport, on his way to the Beijing Oil Institute. The journey took him twenty-nine days (Xinhua 1999).
14. China Data Online, at http://chinadataonline.org/ (accessed February 2, 2009). Population statistics in China have not been considered reliable until the very recent past. Many scholars view figures comparing Han and non-Han populations with particular skepticism (Toops 2004a). Several hundred thousand more Uyghurs scattered among the Central Asian states, with substantial populations in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan. Additional hundreds of thousands of “former Uyghurs” who changed their identities to that of the dominant group are rumored to be in each of those states under assimilationist pressure.
15. The 1975 figure is from the 1996 Xinjiang Statistical Yearbook (Xinjiang weiwuer zizhiqu tongjiju 1996:47); Geographer Stanley Toops (2004a:249) pointed out that by the turn of the millennium, given the size of the floating population, not fully reflected in official figures, Hans may already have outnumbered Uyghurs in Xinjiang.
16. Owen Lattimore’s (1950, 1951, 1962) work was a partial exception.
17. Both David Brophy and Näbijan Tursun argue that elites discussed the Uyghur identity before the 1921 Tashkent conference (Brophy 2005; Näbijan Tursun 2008).
18. Forbes contends that Uyghurstan (the Qumul and Turpan area in eastern Xinjiang) had been willingly and well bound to China, its population accustomed to centuries of intercourse, watched over by its khans, with Central Plains polities. Altishahr (the Tarim Basin) was the seat of regular rebellions, and Zungharia in the north had close ties to czarist and then Soviet Central Asia.
19. The survival of regional identities in France at least through the late nineteenth century (Weber 1976) and the collaboration of “subject nationalities” in the administration of the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires (Comisso 2006:140) demonstrate that these phenomena in Xinjiang were by no means exceptional.
20. Field notes, June 26, 1997, and July 31, 2002.
21. Justin Rudelson found in the 1980s that Uyghur merchants who regularly traveled to the interior were far more likely than intellectuals or peasants to identify themselves as “Chinese” (jonggoluq). The destruction of the “Xinjiang village” in Beijing (Agence France-Presse 1999b) and clashes with police in other inland cities (Agence France-Presse 2002c, 2004b) have made Uyghurs feel considerably less welcome since then.
22. Ildiko Beller-Hann notes that officials’ expanded attacks on Islam in the 1990s “inadvertently undermine[d] a force which, in some respects, provide[d] useful underpinnings for the acceptance and respect of secular authorities” (Beller-Hann 1997:90).
23. The idea that increased communication promotes nationalism was originally articulated in rather positivist form by Deutsch (1953). Anderson (1991) can be said to have developed the notion and given it more nuance by attending to particular forms of communication, focusing on novels and newspapers, and demonstrating the importance of their content.
24. Ernest Gellner puts this point with characteristic clarity. The rulers of the Soviet Union employed a “hierarchy of ethnic concepts: ‘nations’ deserved their own republics, ‘nationalities’ had to make do with autonomous regions” (Gellner 1995:252).
25. This is an honest mistake. He gets it wrong for the simple reason that he depends on English translations by either officials in China or Western sinologists, both of whom have tried to make CCP nomenclatures intelligible abroad by using contextual remapping. Thus where the Chinese texts have zhonghua minzu, they translate minzu as “nation,” and in reference to the various non-Han groups, they translate minzu as “nationality.” In other words, they collaborate in the Chinese state’s project of allocating rights to some groups while withholding them from others. For examples from Chinese and Western translations into English, see, respectively, Mao Zedong 1977 (1956); and Zhang Zhiyi 1966 (1956).
26. There is a grain of truth in Connor’s argument. While proclaiming that Han and non- Han alike were minzu-crucial to the official policy of “minzu equality” (minzu pingdeng), the party nevertheless made a categorical distinction between them. Because they comprised less than 6 percent of the population in the 1950s, the fifty-five non-Han minzu were assigned to the collective category of “minority minzu” (shaoshu minzu). In practice, the term minority is often omitted. Thus the expressions “minzu education,” “minzu cadres,” and “minzu problems,” all seemingly applicable to the entire population, are understood to refer only to the non-Han groups. Herein lies the germ of confusion that non-Hans have artfully manipulated.
27. Historian Xiaoyuan Liu argues to the contrary that “to its Chinese audience, the term literally meant the ‘central Hua [Sinitic] nation’ [and] carried the full meaning of the ethnocultural stratifications in Chinese history” (Liu 2004:23).
28. The original was Womende Hui minzu hen tuanjiede. I have altered Gladney’s translation in two ways: I have left minzu in Chinese, for the reasons just explained, and I have rendered tuanjie as “solidarity” rather than “unity” to avoid confusion with the term tongyi, often translated with the same English word. My interpretation remains compatible with Gladney’s.
29. The English gloss “(nation)” is in the original. Without it, the sentence would make even less sense.
30. See the Web site of the Minzu shiwu weiyuanhui at www.seac.gov.cn/ (accessed June 4, 2006).
31. Web site at www.cun.edu.cn/ (accessed June 4, 2006).
32. Web site at http://www.mzyj.cn/index-en.html (accessed June 4, 2006).
33. Only a year before my arrival, many foreign teachers and some foreign students had been permitted to live in apartments on or off campus, giving them much more freedom.
34. I asked for a statute book containing the relevant law and, having looked through the book, could find none. A public security official then told me that this prohibition was an “internal regulation” and therefore not published in the materials that I was permitted to see (Bovingdon 2002a:48). Stanley Lubman points out that well into the 1990s, many administrative units still relied on internal rules and regulations (Lubman 1999: 146-47)
35. I later learned from several sources that foreign journalists had used recording equipment during interviews in the recent past, with disastrous consequences for both themselves and their informants (field notes, October 22, 1997). I know of a linguistic anthropologist and a cultural anthropologist who were able to use audio and video recording equipment before or during the time of my research, perhaps because they had convinced their informants and officials that their work was not politically sensitive.
36. For a sense of the change in the research atmosphere over time, see Rudelson 1997; Dautcher 1999; and Smith 2006. Herbert Yee, who carried out two surveys in the region, met with a number of obstacles, which I describe in chapter 3 (Yee 2003, 2005).
1. Field notes, November 14, 1996.
2. Ernst Renan once famously wrote that forgetting was as important to the nationalist enterprise as remembering (Renan 1882/1990).
3. Eric Hobsbawm wrote that “no serious historian of nations and nationalism can be a committed political nationalist,” continuing archly that “nationalism requires too much belief in what is patently not so” (Hobsbawm 1990:12). James Millward’s Eurasian Crossroads: A History of Xinjiang (2007) is the first monographic longue durée history of the region in English and is a model of evenhanded scholarship.
4. The Chinese historian Gu Bao attempted to silence this charge, arguing that the term actually meant “native lands newly returned” (gu tu xin gui) (Gu Bao 1983:25).
5. European and Japanese historians distinguish three geographic regions in Xinjiang that had very different political histories over the centuries and up to the mid-twentieth century: Uyghur(i)stan, the eastern part surrounding the towns of Qumul and Turpan; Zungharia, the area north of the Tianshan mountains; and Kashgaria, the Tarim Basin south of the Tianshan, which includes the Taklamakan Desert and the many oasis towns ringing it. Nationalists use Uyghurstan to refer to all three regions.
6. Scholars acknowledge that the term Xiyu had different senses over time, sometimes applying to only a part of today’s Xinjiang and other times embracing parts of Central Asia and extending into the Near East.
7. Unless otherwise noted, when I refer to Chinese officials and historians, I mean those working and writing in China after 1949. On the complex interconnections of scholars and bureaucrats and the role of the party-state in the production of Chinese nationalist history, see Bovingdon and Näbijan Tursun 2004.
8. The statement emerged as an official “formulation” (tifa) in 1959 as part of the government’s effort to combat “local nationalism” in Xinjiang (Bovingdon and Näbijan Tursun 2004:359). On the party-state’s use of “formulations” for political ends, see the brilliant short work of Schoenhals (1992). I discuss local nationalism in chapter 2.
9. For an important partial dissent, see Zhao 2006.
10. The World Uyghur Congress’s Web site more modestly claims four thousand years (World Uyghur Congress 2006a). Exponents of the ambitiously named “Eastern Turkestan Government in Exile” boast more expansively that Uyghurs “existed before history” and will exist after it (Šärqiy Türkistan Jumhuriyiti Sürgündiki Parlamenti wä Hökümiti 2005:57).
11. Historians of this stripe have also subscribed to the widespread view that the Xiongnu and the Huns were one and the same; see, for example, Turghun Almas 1989. Denis Sinor points out that the view remains unproven (Sinor 1990:177).
12. As historian Joseph Fletcher contended, the notion that the ninth-century denizens of southern and eastern Xinjiang were culturally homogeneous and, more important, that they were Uyghurs, “is an innovation stemming largely from the needs of twentieth century nationalism” (Fletcher 1968:364, n. 96). The expression “self-same, national subject” comes from Duara (1995).
13. David Brophy argues that the name-and hence the collective identity-reemerged dialectically, not only as a result of top-down Soviet policies, but also because of popular initiatives by Turkis in Xinjiang and Central Asia (Brophy 2005).
14. The historian Geng Shimin (1984:13) argued that the “modern Uyghur nationality” emerged in the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century.
15. Walker Connor demonstrated persuasively that Marxists in the Soviet Union, China, Yugoslavia, and Vietnam strategically fused Marxism and nationalism. They all used class to deemphasize and defeat cultural categories within the “national” frame but, at the same time, emphasized national loyalties over internationalist class affinities to thwart secessionist or irredentist movements (Connor 1984). Feuerwerker (1968) brilliantly illustrated these tactics at work in Chinese communist historiography.
16. Nationalist history is a branch not of historical scholarship but of rhetoric. Still, this division of Chinese history into main and adverse currents can be understood as a particularly bald example of “retrospective analysis,” which, as Charles Tilly pointed out, cannot be used for valid explanations of state-building processes (Tilly 1975:14-15).
17. James Millward sympathetically describes one source of pervasive nationalism in post- 1949 Chinese historiography. Knowing that China had been ill treated by other states in the nineteenth century and could have been partitioned among European states and Japan, “few Chinese historians … would object if the lessons from their research served … a contemporary diplomatic or strategic purpose” (Millward 1996:120).
18. The first Chinese-language history claiming that “China” had run Xinjiang (more properly the Western Regions, or Xiyu) since the Han dynasty was actually written during the Republican era, in 1936 (Zeng Wenwu 1986). In 1996 Xinjiang People’s Press published a collection of historical essays that included the astounding claim that Xinjiang had become part of “China” in the twenty-third century BCE when Xiwangmu pledged fealty to Emperor Shun (He Jihong 1996:3-4). Some historians speculate that the legendary Emperor Shun might have had a real historical analogue, but Xiwangmu was not real, having the same historical status as Zeus.
19. Muhämmäd Imin was dedicated enough to this goal and practical enough that he sought Japanese support while living in exile in Kabul in the mid-1930s. He had reason to hope for such support, as Japanese officials had indeed plotted the establishment of an independent Turkic state in the region, even providing weapons and intelligence to the first ETR (Esenbel 2004:1160-62; Forbes 1986:140; Whiting and Sheng Shih-ts’ai [Sheng Shicai] 1958:36).
20. By convention, Isa Yusuf Alptekin is referred to by his adopted last name rather than by his given name, as are Muhämmäd Imin and the vast majority of Uyghurs. Alptekin also made overtures beyond the Muslim and Turkic communities, soliciting help from the United States and the United Nations as well. The political activities of the two are considered at greater length in chapter 5.
21. This matter was debated as early as the founding of the first ETR in 1933 (Millward 2007).
22. The book was published in Kashgar in 1989 and banned almost immediately afterward by the Chinese authorities.
23. By stopping his conquest at the Pamirs, Qing Emperor Qianlong bequeathed a western border to subsequent generations in Xinjiang that bounded the Uyghurs’ territorial imaginings and was therefore a principal factor in their seeing themselves as distinct from other Central Asians (Millward and Perdue 2004:55-56).
24. When they cite the (inaccurate) statistics that only 5 percent of the province’s population in 1949 was Han and that Uyghurs made up the remaining 95 percent, Uyghur transnational organizations seek to suggest that Uyghurs were once the sole proprietors of Xinjiang. These figures obscure the long presence of Qazaqs, Sibes, and others in the region. Equally important, they slight the evidence that Hans may have made up as much as one-third of the population when the Qing dynasty was at its height, around 1800, owing to substantial immigration after the Qing conquest (Millward 2000:122-23; see also Wang Shuanqian 1999:26-28).
25. In an ironic counterpoint, Chinese archeologists announced they had found Chinggis Khan’s tomb in Xinjiang in 2000 (Bulag 2004:110).
26. Uradyn Bulag observed that Beijing had “begun a process to systematically remove the foundations of minority autonomy by assertions of native status for Han everywhere.” He reported that a leading Han official at the Inner Mongolia Party School gave a lecture in 1993 claiming that Hans and not Mongols were indigenous to Inner Mongolia, eliciting strong protests from Mongols (Bulag 2000:191-92).
27. Interest among Chinese officials in demonstrating that Xinjiang had always been Chinese began no later than the Republican period. A European archeologist found in the 1920s that officials in Xinjiang “despised” artifacts connected with Buddhism or inscribed in Turkic or other non-Chinese languages and so welcomed foreigners to cart them away. Only stones inscribed in Chinese aroused their interest, and those stones they required to remain in the region (Le Coq 1986 [1928]:60).
28. For an excellent discussion of how disputants in territorial struggles rely on originary myths to stake prior claims to land, see Zerubavel 2003:101-10.
29. As Peter Perdue put it, the Manchus “knew well that these conquests were unprecedented.” It was Chinese nationalist historians of the twentieth century who implied that the Qing had “merely fulfilled the mission of its predecessors” (Perdue 2005a:336, 506).
30. The quoted phrase is Joseph Esherick’s gloss on Zhang’s text. Esherick notes that a debate about whether to claim all Qing territories or focus nation-building efforts on “China proper” continued through the first year of the Republic (Esherick 2006:237, 243-44).
31. Liang opposed “broad nationalism” to “small nationalism” (xiao minzu zhuyi), which pitted Hans against the other groups (tazu) (Zhao 2004:65).
32. After the Soviet Union declared the independent Mongolian People’s Republic in 1924, Sun officially supported Mongols’ right of self-determination, though he hoped to avert actual Mongolian secession by negotiating a federal compact. Sun made the concession to gain Soviet military support for the GMD. I am grateful to Chris Atwood for making this point to me. Chiang later demanded unsuccessfully that Stalin rescind Mongolia’s independence at the end of World War II and went to his death believing that Mongolia was properly part of China. I return to this matter in chapter 5.
33. In 1920 an obscure revolutionary inspired by the warlord governing his native province of Hunan argued that the province should become an independent republic and there should be “27 small Chinas.” Mao Zedong’s views later changed rather dramatically (Duara 1995:189).
34. The historian Xiaoyuan Liu argues that this was equally true of Mongolia and Tibet (Liu 2004:22). 198
35. The author of the definitive history of the period refers to Yang’s reign as “an ossified version of the Imperial administration extended for seventeen years into the Republican era” (Forbes 1986:37).
36. It is clear that misrule by Chinese overlords permitted, in fact set the tone for, similar maladministration by local Uyghur officials (Forbes 1986; Skrine and Nightingale 1973:22-23).
37. David Wang’s book, while generally quite thorough, consistently follows Beijing’s line on the pre-1949 history of Xinjiang. It contains no reference to these speeches. For an earlier discussion of them, see Lattimore 1950:83, 91-92.
38. The following paragraphs draw on Wu 1947.
39. Walker Connor justly observes that Lenin and his successors distinguished between the “right to a right and the right to exercise that right” (Connor 1984:52).
1. Herbert Yee comes to a similar conclusion: “At the moment, the major threat to Xinjiang stability is not external but internal, that is, Beijing’s own bad and [out]dated policies toward the national minorities” (Yee 2003:452). Oxford Analytica argues more starkly still that “Chinese policies, not foreign-sponsored terrorism, are the cause of Uighur unrest” (Oxford Analytica, December 20, 2002, 2; cited in Gladney 2006:4).
2. This chapter pays comparatively little attention to political sentiments of the more than one million Qazaqs and the several million members of several other non-Han groups who call Xinjiang home. On Xinjiang’s Qazaqs, see Benson and Svanberg 1988, 1998.
3. For discussions of the impact of state policies on Uyghur identity, see Bovingdon 1998, 2002b; Gladney 1990; and Rudelson 1997. Scholars have similarly implicated the state in the formation and strengthening of collective identities among the Hui (Gladney 1991) and Zhuang (Kaup 2000).
4. For concise treatments of politics in Mongolia, Ningxia, and Tibet, see the various chapters in Rossabi 2004; on Guangxi, see Kaup 2000.
5. The former XUAR governor Säypidin recalled that in 1955, leaders in Beijing had initially proposed calling the region simply the “Xinjiang Autonomous Region.” Säypidin objected that “autonomy is not given to mountains and rivers. It is given to particular nationalities. I do not think the name … is really appropriate.” He was gratified to learn, several days later, that Mao had agreed with him, insisting it be the “Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region” (FBIS-CHI-95-221, November 16, 1995, 89-90). He did not record his reaction to this 1951 “Uyghurstan” controversy (Zhu Peimin 2000:335).
6. In 1955, according to official statistics, the 3.72 million Uyghurs comprised roughly 73 percent of the total population of 5.11 million.
7. The data in this paragraph come from Yin Zhuguang and Mao Yongfu 1996:132-33.
8. I am grateful to Chris Atwood for the reference. To be sure, Mongols had faced similarly flagrant gerrymandering in their “home districts” long before 1949 and saw the shape of their “autonomous region” manipulated several times in the PRC period. They were vastly outnumbered by Hans from the founding of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region in 1947 (Bulag 2004:90-92). For a particularly lucid discussion of territorial manipulations in ethnographic Tibet, see Shakya 1999.
9. In 1947, Xinjiang’s Eighth District (roughly coextensive with today’s Bayangol) reportedly contained 15,000 Mongols, 89,000 Uyghurs, and 1,682 Hans (Xinjiang weiwu’er zizhiqu minzu shiwu weiyuanhui 1995:878-79).
10. Mao Yongfu was director of the Policy Research Office of the XUAR CCP Committee. See David Wang 1998:52, n.60.
11. 11. For an explanation of the rationale for establishing nested autonomies, and a description of the process through which the Xinjiang Autonomous Region was established, see Säypidin's recollection in 1995, originally published in the People’s Daily (Säypidin Äzizi 1995). A recent online article argues that “using Hui, Mongols, and Qazaqs to rule Uyghurs” was the explicit aim of gerrymandering and nested autonomies (Xue Yu 2003).
12. One immediately wonders what Zhu made of the decision in the following year to combine the party committees of Ürümci and the Changji Hui Autonomous District into a single “transadministrative region” organ (Zhang Ya 2005).
13. Residents of Xinjiang refer to all Chinese provinces to the east as “the interior” (neidi). To avoid confusion, I render this idea using the once-popular term “China proper” (Zhongguo ben bu in Chinese).
14. Unmentioned because obedience to party organs at equivalent and higher levels was beyond question.
15. Here “the people” (renmin) was understood to denote only a portion of the total population. The party-state retained the right to determine which citizen belonged to “the people” and who were “nonpeople”: class enemies or enemies of the state (Schoenhals 1994). For the program’s text, see Li Weihan 1982:521-26.
16. References in this paragraph are to the amended 2001 law, although the relevant articles are almost indistinguishable from those in the 1984 law. The most substantial change of interest here is in article 20, which has added a requirement that the higher-level government organ respond to proposed alterations within sixty days. According to an article in an official journal, the amendment committee made this change because the provision for local modification of national policies had “essentially not been enacted.” Superior governments routinely regarded such proposals by autonomous governments by “set[ting] them aside and ignor[ing] them, never providing a response” (Ao Junde 2001).
17. Even though the constitution and autonomy law explicitly allow autonomous regions to pass such statutes, Xinjiang’s government has never done so (Ghalip Isma’il 1996).
18. Moneyhon makes these points with specific reference to Xinjiang. The autonomy law he analyzes applies to all autonomous regions in China, from the provincial level down, and since 1949 Beijing has chosen all the executives of the five autonomous regions.
19. On lawmaking by bureaucracies and the executive branch in China, see also Lubman 1999:141-44.
20. I refer to the paramilitary farms interchangeably as bingtuan and the Production and Construction Corps (PCC). On the PCC, see Becquelin 2000; Cliff 2009; McMillen 1979, 1981, 1984; Seymour 2000; Shichor 2006a.
21. Allen Whiting notes that Chinese media trumpeted the celebration of Muslim holidays, especially in the northwest, even as the Soviet Union in the mid-1950s denounced Ramadan as a “reactionary vestige of feudal superstition” and a drag on productivity (Whiting 1955:174).
22. Tibet, Inner Mongolia, and other non-Han regions also had campaigns against “local nationalism.” In this campaign as in so many others, the PRC recapitulated prior movements in the Soviet Union, in which Stalin targeted “local nationalism” in the Ukraine and Central Asia beginning in 1933 (Martin 2001:7-8, 356-62). The influence also appears to have flowed in the other direction. In 1959 Nikita Khrushchev cashiered many officials in Central Asia for “local nationalism” (Whiting 1960:35).
23. In 1963 a Qazaq who had fled in 1962 claimed to head a Soviet-sponsored guerrilla army of sixty thousand, staffed by refugees from Xinjiang and preparing to attack China (Mackerras 1994:172; McMillen 1979:124).
24. Interview, Ürümci, October 23, 1996; see also Rudelson 1997:104. Dru Gladney learned of forced pig-raising in Hui regions as well and attributes it to socialist enthusiasm. Harder to explain are episodes in which Hui were forced to eat pork or watched in dismay as pork bones were thrown into their wells (Gladney 1991:135, 138).
25. Interviews, Ürümci, October 10, 1996; April 1, 1997.
26. The protest was reportedly serious enough that PLA soldiers were dispatched to put it down. The report was published in Soviet and Hong Kong sources but never confirmed by Chinese sources. Han immigrants to Xinjiang also staged violent protests over “economic issues” in Shihezi and Qaramay in 1975. See Dreyer 1986:728, 729.
27. Hu made these suggestions before traveling to Xinjiang. He later visited the region twice en route to Europe, once in 1983 and again in 1986, and made a formal two-week inspection tour in the summer of 1985 (Zhu Peimin 2000:359-60).
28. This passage quotes from and paraphrases Dillon (2004:36). Dillon in turn cites the official’s quotation from Ruan Ming, “Missed Historic Opportunity Recalled,” Minzhu Zhongguo 8 (February 1992):17-18. Translated in JPRS-CAR-92-039.
29. For another account of Beijing’s combined “hard and soft policies” in Xinjiang, see Rudelson and Jankowiak 2004:301-2.
30. Although Beijing initiated the national “strike hard” campaign in 1983 to combat the rising crime rate and periodically repeated these sweeps in the intervening years, including in Xinjiang (Wang Shuanqian 1999:331-32), a special Xinjiang-specific strike hard campaign targeting separatists was announced in April 1996 (Dillon 2004:84-85; Tanner 1999). Amnesty International (1999) and other human rights organizations claim that officials have used strike hard campaigns to arrest suspected separatists, convict them in kangaroo courts, and imprison or execute them at lightning speed.
31. A dictionary of “new Chinese terms” explains it as steps taken “to resolve problems of social order … using political, economic, ideological, educational, cultural, administrative, legal, and other measures, to attack evil trends, crimes, illegality, and breaches of discipline” (Wen Hui, Wang Peng, and Li Bengang 1992:676). The term has since been replaced with “comprehensive political rectification” (zonghe zhengzhi).
32. Field notes, 1997. Antiseparatist propaganda sweeps have continued; see BBC Monitoring Asia Pacific-Political 2000, and a similar report by BBC News Online (May 29, 2000) at http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/asia-pacific/newsid_768000/768815.stm (accessed April 22, 2001); see also Becquelin 2004a.
33. Melvyn Goldstein contends that Beijing has chosen similar strategies for Tibet, and for similar reasons. Its plans for economic development and Han immigration are intended to alter Tibet so dramatically that “failure to win over a new generation of Tibetans will not weaken Beijing’s control over Tibet” (Goldstein 1997:110). Tsering Shakya suggests that Tibetan officials tacitly agreed to Han immigration despite widespread opposition from ordinary Tibetans (Shakya 1999:438).
34. A Qing official eloquently articulated the political point of Chinese colonization in 1827, writing that “as the numbers of [Chinese] soldiers and people increase over time, the Muslims’ strength will gradually weaken, and naturally they will no longer entertain ulterior aspirations” (quoted in Millward 1998:227).
35. One reviewer observed that Davidson’s book, sunnily titled Daybreak in China (1953), offered “almost unqualified praise” of the CCP’s endeavors (Escarra 1954).
36. Forty-five years later, one of Xinjiang’s most prominent social scientists struck a slightly apologetic note about the planned population transfers: “bringing the population into conformity [sic] inside one’s own country should not be too harshly criticized” (wu ke hou fei) (Pan Zhiping 2001:92).
37. In 1949 Zhang Zhiyi (Chang Chih-Yi), formerly a professor at Zhejiang University but by that time a fellow at Johns Hopkins University, wrote of southern Xinjiang that “any newly cleared ground should be allocated to the [Uyghur] peasants, who are hungry for land…. To import Chinese would be to invite new conflicts.” Zhang calculated on the basis of available arable land in the north and the low productivity of that land in Xinjiang that the region must set a maximum figure of three million for “Chinese colonization” (Chang 1949:74).
38. While recruiters called on youths to “volunteer to help the borderlands” (zhiyuan bianjiang), the internal description of the plan was “bring in immigrants to fill in the borderlands” (yimin shibian). This phrase had actually originated in the Qing with the noted scholar-official Zhang Zhidong. At the time a tutor in the Imperial Academy, he proposed that the government strengthen the defense of Mongolia against the territorial designs of Russia and Japan by “filling it in” with immigrants, a plan carried out over the strong opposition of many Mongolians (Lu Minghui 1994:115-17; see also Liu Xiaoyuan 2004:20).
39. This must have happened in the first three weeks of January because on the twenty-first, the XUAR government ordered that the “Aqsu reclamation region Shanghai youth liaison headquarters” and the “United Shanghai youth committee” disband immediately (Chen Chao 1990:229).
40. McMillen depicted this as a decision by Deng Xiaoping, “undoubtedly seconded” by the two Wangs. Zhu Peimin, a professor at the Xinjiang Party School, indicates more plausibly that Wang Zhen first raised the idea with Deng. Just back from touring the scene of the “Päyziwat insurgency” of May 27, 1981 (see appendix), and well aware of how many Hans wanted to leave Xinjiang, Wang was acutely concerned that the region was becoming increasingly unstable. In a June 1981 letter to Deng, Wang urged that the PCC be restored in order to protect against secession and local unrest. Deng himself toured Xinjiang in August, with particular attention to Shihezi, the city that the PCC had essentially built from scratch. On returning to Beijing, he announced in a Central Committee meeting that the organization must be revived. The orders went out in September (Zhu Peimin 2000:338-39).
41. The system registered each citizen as a resident of a particular locale and gave urban residents access to ration coupons only in that region. Household registration made it nearly impossible for peasants to move to cities. Urban residents could not change their registration to a new locale without an invitation from a work unit there and a release from the home unit, both extremely hard to obtain. Without a change in registration, they could not obtain ration coupons and therefore faced great difficulty purchasing food and other necessities.
42. Chongqing Municipality announced in August 2006 that it would send 100,000 cotton pickers to Xinjiang in that year, a substantial portion of the roughly 600,000 that had come annually in the recent past, and five times Chongqing’s 2005 contingent of 20,000. The PCC was slated to provide free housing and amenities for all cotton pickers, which it has recruited in large numbers since cotton planting expanded in the 1980s (“Chongqing to Send 100,000 Farmers to Pick Cotton in Xinjiang” 2006). For the 2005 figure, see http://english.big5.cqnews.net/system/2005/09/14/000526676.shtml (accessed September 14, 2005).
43. Sociologist Ji Ping noted that it was already clear by 1990 that the government could no longer control the movement of “the most needed labor” in and out of Xinjiang. In a survey he conducted in 1987, many Han intellectuals complained of the government’s “‘trap’ policy”: on arrival decades earlier, they had been promised the right to return to their homes after working in Xinjiang for five to ten years. Later on, no official acknowledged responsibility for the earlier promise. According to Ji, the fear of being “trapped” in Xinjiang inhibited many Hans from moving there (Ji Ping 1990:268).
44. I am grateful to Warren Smith for providing the FBIS reference to this article. The newspaper publishing the interview, the Guangming Daily, has always been aimed at educated readers, precisely the kind of “talented people” Wang hoped to recruit.
45. The paper is widely regarded as the CCP’s main mouthpiece in Hong Kong, a platform for broadcasting party views like the People’s Daily rather than a serious purveyor of news (Hutcheon 1998:7).
46. Information in this paragraph not otherwise cited draws on Rudelson 1997:106-7, 130-31; and Xu Xifa 1995:23-24, 170-73. Barry Sautman claims, citing a 1985 Xinhua article with no title, that the XUAR Congress adopted birth restrictions for urban non-Hans in 1983 and that this led to a “riot” in Ürümci within the year. I have found no published reports of a disturbance in Ürümci, or indeed anywhere in Xinjiang, in 1983 or 1984 (see appendix).
47. The XUAR government passed a formal law to replace the temporary regulations only two years later and took another year to put it into effect in 1992. The study providing this information justified the implementation of birth restrictions among non-Hans on economic, eugenic, and ecological grounds. The author did not comment on the implications of allowing continued Han migration while limiting Uyghurs’ fertility (Xu Xifa 1995:23-24, 170). For a more recent eugenicist justification of birth planning, see Zheng Pingjian and Dai Erfu 2003.
48. Ma Dazheng remarked that religious Uyghurs in the South had harmed relations between Uyghurs and Hans in 1990 by claiming, “Only because too many Hans have come to Xinjiang are they making minority minzu undergo family planning” (Ma Dazheng 2003:15).
49. There were originally PCC regiments in Mongolia and other “border” regions (see, for example, Bulag 2000:182-83; and He Gang and Shi Weimin 1994). All but those in Xinjiang were subsequently disbanded.
50. The 1974 figures are from Zhang Erju (1988:241); the 1994 figures are from the XUAR Local Gazetteer Editorial Committee (1995: 499) and Xinjiang Weiwu’er zizhiqu tongjiju (1995:46), and the 2004 figures are from Xinjiang Weiwu’er zizhiqu tongjiju 2005:121. 204
51. Anwar Rahman, a former Uyghur government official now living abroad, claims that every Uyghur chairman of the autonomous regional government has had a Han personal secretary, assigned to shadow him nearly constantly and living in the same compound. Anwar suggests that these Han secretaries not only closely supervise the chairmen’s actions but occasionally use the authority of the office for their own ends (Rahman 2005:76).
52. XASS researcher Li Shangkai claimed history showed that the government ought to rely on non-Han cadres to announce official policies and defuse conflicts, because they had special psychological effectiveness among other non-Hans by virtue of being “one of them” rather than “outsiders” (Li Shangkai 1992:144). Uradyn Bulag (2004:100) notes that Mongol officials in Inner Mongolia were similarly used to announce unpopular policies. In the Soviet Union, Gregory Gleason observes, Moscow selected “pliant local leaders” to provide an “aura of local representation” in the union republics while staving off the emergence of nationalism (1990:88).
53. Guo Zhengli (1992:89) also acknowledged that the real situation of non-Han cadre recruitment was “quite uneven; [among] its principal manifestations is the scarcity of non-Han core cadres (gugan ganbu) at the county level and above.”
54. Wang Lixiong (2002) describes a similar course of events in Tibet during the 1980s.
55. Not all cadres hold positions of political authority. One scholar-official notes with concern that in the late 1990s nearly 40 percent of non-Han cadres were elementary and middle school teachers (Yang Faren 2000:160)
56. The assertion about enterprises is based on an extensive survey of business advertisements in the annual Xinjiang nianjian (Xinjiang Yearbook) from 1988 to 2004.
57. Web site at http://www.jj.xjnews.cn/magazine/100shuji/index.asp (accessed July 10, 2006). We cannot exclude the possibility that some of these officials are from non-Han groups in China proper that use Han-sounding names.
58. Figures calculated from Xinjiang nianjian (Xinjiang Yearbook), from 1988 and 1995.
59. Ma observed that in 1991 the PSB caught thirty-one state cadres and party members in crackdowns on separatist organizations. In 1992, sweeps netted fourteen party members, thirty-eight Youth League members, and twenty-nine cadres, and in 1993 the situation was “even more terrifying” (Ma Dazheng 2003:80). Arrest figures may, of course, be poor indicators of the numbers in organizations that remained at large.
60. Field notes, 1996, 1997.
61. Interview, December 1996.
62. On the Dai, see Hansen 1999; on the Hui, Gladney 1991; and Lipman 1997. Matthew Kapstein describes in the case of Tibet the “twin phenomena of increasing freedom and continuing repression” (Kapstein 2004:261).
63. By one estimate, in the early 1950s there had been more than 12,000 mosques in Kashgar Prefecture and 126 in Kashgar City (Dillon 2004:28).
64. It is striking that avowedly atheist officials could claim to understand the needs of religious citizens, particularly since 1949 the population of the “believing masses” in Kashgar had nearly doubled, while a decade of reconstruction had restored only three-quarters the original number of mosques (Dillon 2004:28).
65. Officials like to point out that Muslims in Xinjiang enjoy the highest number of mosques per capita of any Muslim population in the world, with 24,000 mosques for some 9 million believers, whereas Iran has 5,400 mosques for 60 million, and Egypt has 17,000 mosques for 43 million (Zhu Peimin, Chen Hong, and Yang Hong 2004:221; see also Ma Dazheng 2003:98). These numbers, of course, take no account of the size of individual mosques or their functions in their respective societies.
66. Field notes, 1996.
67. An Arabic term meaning “religious pupil,” now well known in its plural form taliban.
68. This rule might also extend to Sufi shrines, which would mean the end of Sufi pilgrimages, a practice common for hundreds of years in Xinjiang. On Sufi practices and sites in Xinjiang, see Doktor Rahilä Dawut 2001; and Papas 2005.
69. A month after the report on the Ningxia Sufi network, it emerged that the Ili prefectural government in Xinjiang had outlawed a Sufi sect and arrested a large number of members in the prefecture (Rotar 2005).
70. Field notes 1996, 1997, 2002. On intellectuals’ suspicion of popular Islam, see Rudelson 1997; and Rudelson and Jankowiak 2004.
71. Remote control cameras were installed around the Idkah mosque to monitor those entering, according to a 2000 report (Sheridan 2000).
72. Article 10 states that students caught fasting would, without exception, be considered to have taken part in religious activities and would lose any subsidies they received, be barred from receiving any award for “progressiveness,” and be forbidden to serve as student cadres (Xinjiang daxue xuesheng shouce 2005:97).
73. The Amnesty report cites stories in AFP and Reuters for the arrests in Kashgar and Bayangol (Agence France-Presse 2001b; Vidaillet 2001) and a report by the Eastern Turkestan Information Center for those in Khotän (East Turkestan Information Center 2002).
74. Deng’s remarks from a 1981 conversation with Xinjiang’s second party secretary, Gu Jingsheng, were published in the Xinjiang Daily newspaper in 1998. Officials probably decided to publish the remarks seventeen years later as part of the plan to win public support for the struggle against separatists.
75. For a theoretical work justifying CCP choices with specific reference to Xinjiang, see Guo Zhengli 1992.
76. Ma even proposed addressing Han cadres’ concern that serving in Xinjiang might penalize their families, by recognizing that those children “should at minimum enjoy the same special treatment afforded the minority minzu students in the region” (Ma Dazheng 2003:20). In other words, cadre children should benefit from affirmative action. This suggestion is particularly striking, since near the end of the book Ma urges that leaders abandon the “inappropriate system” of admitting minority minzu students with lower scores on college entrance examinations (Ma Dazheng 2003:201). Hence between the covers of one book, he advocates extending affirmative action to some Han children and abolishing it for non-Hans.
77. Ma originally wrote the essay containing this sentence in 1999 and, of course, for internal circulation. A year later, the journal of the Xinjiang Academy of Social Sciences published an article on methods for “adjusting” inter-minzu relations in which the author discussed, among other methods, stipulating that the ratio of minority minzu cadres be roughly equivalent (dati xiangdang) to the ratio in the population at large (Tian Mengqing 2000:72).
78. Democracy offers little protection to autonomy regimes when it is weakly institutionalized, as shown by the reversals and “backsliding” in Jakarta’s handling of autonomy in Aceh and Papua (McGibbon 2004:3-5).
1. I have slightly interpolated the original translation.
2. Within days, the party announced a broad crackdown on cultural units and media in Xinjiang, targeting those seen as “advocating separatism by means of art.” Ablet Abdurisit, chairman of the XUAR government, informed cadres that “politics” was henceforth to be the sole criterion in evaluating literary and artistic works (Chan 2002).
3. Field notes, summer 2002.
4. Field notes, summer 2002.
5. Tursun Islam, the leader of a Uyghur organization in Kyrgyz Republic, claims that in 1951 a group of fifty-one intellectuals calling themselves “the Fifty-one” demanded independence from the Chinese government, notifying other Uyghur intellectuals they had done so, and urging members of the former Ili National Army to prepare for an armed struggle. According to Tursun, the government bloodily suppressed the ensuing movement, jailing and secretly executing many of the intellectuals, thereby enraging the general population and spurring further popular resistance (Tursun Islam 2004:45).
6. After three years in a labor reform camp, Ziya escaped and fled to Kazakhstan, where he went on to have a distinguished career as a writer and fame in the Uyghur diaspora for his political activities. The latter are described in chapter 5.
7. Xinjiang officials reviewed many questionable cases between 1959 and 1964 and lifted the label from some who had been accused. Some cases dragged on until 1985, at which point wrongful accusations had been “basically” rectified (Dang Yulin and Zhang Yuxi 2003:192).
8. In 1993 Ma Dazheng warned that the “negativity and destructiveness” of what he called “minzu consciousness” (minzu yishi) were growing more prominent daily: “Dissatisfied talk and public opinion about minzu rights, status, and interests have clearly intensified, and demands on these scores have increased as well” (Ma Dazheng 2003, no. 939:17).
9. The XUAR Propaganda Department acknowledged that these “incorrect” attitudes were prevalent among both masses and cadres (J K P Š U A R komiteti täšwiqat bölümi, 2000?:47). Both Ma Dazheng (2003:184-88) and Yin Zhuguang and MaoYongfu (1996:260-63) discuss criticisms of the autonomy system that Uyghur cadres circulated inside the government.
10. Both Valerie Bunce (1999:28) and Nancy Bermeo (1992:184) suggest the value of Scott’s method for research on popular attitudes in socialist countries. Unfortunately, given the sensitivity of this study, I cannot provide in this chapter the kind of ethnographic richness that is a hallmark of Scott’s work. The risk is too great that my informants might be identified if I provided details about their backgrounds, jobs, and the circumstances in which we spoke. I hope in the future to be able to write a companion work that provides that detail.
11. This is a judgment about the spatial extension of power and its role in the constitution of subjects. Scott focuses on punitive power and hence on a hypothetical realm autonomous from power’s operation: “social spaces insulated from control and surveillance from above” (Scott 1990:118). Foucault asserts that power also can be productive: of discourse, of behavior, and even of resistance. In this sense, the structure of domination both frames and shapes resistance. For a critique of Scott that pursues this point, see Moore 1998.
12. See, for instance, his chart schematizing the argument (Scott 1990:198).
13. Interviews with former delegates to congresses in Xinjiang, October 1996 and September 2006. Stanley Lubman observed in 1999 that most laws in China were made by the State Council, the pinnacle of the executive branch, and its more than sixty administrative subunits, rather than by the congresses. Furthermore, administrative offices continue to employ “internal” regulations either partially or completely shielded from public scrutiny (Lubman 1999:141-47).
14. I already have discussed in the difficulties that Hong Kong-based researcher Herbert Yee faced while conducting surveys in Xinjiang in 2000 and 2001. He nevertheless published in English-language journals the findings that there were strong prejudices between Uyghurs and Hans and that Uyghurs did not support the government’s policies in Xinjiang, including those toward separatists (Yee 2003, 2005). In 2002 he collaborated on another survey on “minzu solidarity” (minzu tuanjie) with Guo Zhenglin of Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou. The resulting article, published in Chinese in Hong Kong, drew markedly different conclusions. It indicated a strong belief in a shared Chinese national (zhonghua minzu) identity and found that most Uyghurs believed the government had “basically implemented” (jiben luoshi) minzu regional autonomy. The authors also noted that the vast majority of Uyghurs believed Xinjiang had been part of China since ancient times and was now an inseparable part of China (Guo Zhenglin and Yu Zhen [Herbert S. Yee], n.d.).
15. CCP propaganda officials in Kashgar tacitly acknowledged in 1995 that “incorrect” views about resource exploitation were widespread (Kashi diwei xuanchuan bu 1995:55). Informal interviews by foreign researchers confirm that such views continued to prevail in 2002 (Smith 2007); field notes, summer 2002.
16. For survey evidence in support of this claim, see Yee 2003, 2005.
17. It is not clear why this is a slur, although there is no doubt that it is one. The term has a very long history, reaching back to the (non-Sinitic) Khitan. It is the unmarked proper name for “China” in Russian. Chinese authorities frown on the use of the term, insisting that Uyghurs instead use a localized form of Hans’ Chinese-language autonym, khänzu.
18. Field notes, April 25, 1997.
19. Field notes, July 21, 2002.
20. Field notes, March 8, 1997.
21. Field notes, June 13, 1997. The Uyghur dentist did not share the prejudice of the muäzzin. He told me, “Han, Uyghur, I fix their teeth just the same.” In a previous conversation, however, he had speculated that Uyghurs had grown to hate Hans with a passion in recent years and that the sentiment was growing stronger (field notes, June 1, 1997).
22. I regularly encountered discussions of race (irq in Uyghur; zhongzu in Chinese) within either Uyghur or Han circles of friends, with many Hans wanting to know whether foreigners regarded Uyghurs as racially white. Uyghur informants who raised the matter of race often claimed scientists had proved that Uyghurs were Europeans, in many cases bringing up the notorious “Xinjiang mummies” (Mallory and Mair 2000). The discussions called to mind Chiang Kai-shek’s insistence in the 1940s that all the various minzu in China were from the same “racial stock” (Chiang 1947). Both Uyghur and Han informants were disappointed to learn that Western scholars no longer regard race as a scientific category. On the discourse of race in China, see Sautman 1997 and Dikötter 1992, 1997.
23. Field notes, July 21, 2002. Hans were often equally dismissive of Uyghurs, averring that they were primitive and of “low quality” (suzhi hen di). The Han hairstylist in whose shop the Uyghur policemen had spoken derogatorily-without her understanding-told me (knowing only that he dressed nattily and spoke Chinese well) that he was a particularly cultivated Uyghur, an exception to the rule. “In general,” she told me, “we think of them as, we don’t really … well, we fairly hate them” (field notes, April 22, 1997).
24. Field notes, June 1, 1997. I also frequently heard Uyghurs refer to Hans as dragons and Uyghurs as wolves. The wolf is a totem of Uyghur and Pan-Turkic nationalism, and its use is severely proscribed in Xinjiang.
25. Field notes, April 23, 1997.
26. Field notes, July 18, 2002.
27. For the twentieth-century career of the term “Zhonghua minzu,” see Leibold 2007.
28. Field notes, April 22, 1997.
29. The term huaxia was an ancient name for peoples living on the Yellow River, later considered the core of the Han minzu. A Uyghur intellectual who had studied at an elite Beijing university reported that he had infuriated one of his Han teachers by saying, “Since Zhonghua really refers to huaxia, and huaxia were only a tiny part of what is now the Han, why not just say ‘Hanzu’? It would be more inclusive” (field notes, June 30, 1997).
30. Field notes, November 9, 1996, and June 1, 1997. Chow (1997, no.707:47-49) argues that the claim that all Hans descended from the Yellow Emperor (Huang di) was an early twentieth-century nationalist innovation.
31. Field notes, June 26, 1997.
32. My informants clearly chose different levels of candor, depending on their perception of the safety of the situation. Informants would speak candidly only around people they knew and trusted, changing the topic when strangers walked by or a new person joined the conversation. Many proposed to meet in noisy public spaces rather than indoor settings that might be bugged or quiet places where neighbors might eavesdrop.
33. Field notes, December 17, 1995.
34. Field notes, January 27, 1996.
35. Field notes, October 25, 1996.
36. Field notes, spring 1997, various dates.
37. Field notes, July 2, 1997.
38. In chapter 5 I discuss the efforts of Uyghurs in Turkey to drum up international support beginning in the 1950s, and Uyghurs in Central Asia to gain the support of Moscow beginning in the 1960s.
39. Field notes, January 27, 1996.
40. Field notes, May 5, 1997.
41. Field notes, July 20, 2002.
42. Field notes, July 31, 2002.
43. Yee cited the earlier 1987 survey of Ji Ping and Gao Bingzhong (1994) also finding that Uyghurs had much stronger collective identities than did the Hans polled (see also Ji Ping 1990).
44. For comparison, it is worth considering a survey on Uyghur-Han relations conducted in 2005 by Yang Shengmin, an anthropologist at the Central University of Nationalities, with Chinese government support. On the one question comparable to Yee’s, “Is it true that participating in separatist activities is harmful to most people?” 88 percent of Uyghurs agreed or strongly agreed, and 93 percent of Hans fell into the same categories (Yang Shengmin 2008:17).
45. Indeed, these works comprise the bulk of published research on popular politics (Bovingdon 2002a; Dautcher 2000; Harris 2001; Naby 1991; Rudelson 1997; Smith 2007).
46. On language policies in Xinjiang, see Dwyer 2005. A 2005 survey revealed that nearly 58 percent of Hans reported no Uyghur proficiency whatsoever, while only 4 percent could speak and write the language well; by contrast, roughly 17 percent of Uyghurs said they knew no Mandarin, and 30 percent said they wrote and spoke proficiently (Yang Shengmin 2008:14).
47. I have transcribed both songs from a bootleg recording of live performances in my possession, though a somewhat expurgated version of the second can be found in Mähmud Sulayman 1994.
48. For analyses of political songs by other musicians, see Dautcher 2000; Harris 2001; and Smith 2007.
49. For the fate of particular tapes, see, for example, Smith 2007 and Bovingdon 2002a. A Uyghur émigré who claimed to have worked in the publishing industry in Xinjiang offered an explanation of how materials might pass the censors and be published, only to be withdrawn months later. He suggested that each work was watched for up to three months after publication by a number of bureaus, including Public Security and the Xinjiang Academy of Social Sciences. If “any problem” emerged within that time, the publisher would cease production, and distributors would pull the work from shelves (Ertughrul Atihan 2002).
50. In 1996, Sultan was arrested after landing in Kyrgyzstan with thousands of tapes he hoped to smuggle into Xinjiang. After nine months, he was released and told to leave the country within twenty days, a sure sign of Chinese influence over Bishkek (Hoh 2004).
51. Perry Link (2002) argues that the CCP inhibits criticism by issuing threats in purposely vague terms, so that people censor themselves. See also the articles by Link and others in a Woodrow Wilson Center special report, “Scholars Under Siege? Academic and Media Freedom in China” (Link et al. 2002).
52. Field notes, April 22, 1997.
53. Performers have reused and embellished many key themes. Note that the earlier tape Pighan (Rooster’s Cry) contains a poem about a rooster waking people, as well as Abuxaliq Uyghur’s celebrated poem “Awakening” (Rudelson 1997:146-49).
54. Field notes, summer 2002.
55. On the Uyghurs’ contested historiography and the role of Turghun Almas, see Benson 1996; Bovingdon 2001; Bovingdon and Näbijan Tursun 2004; and Rudelson 1991, 1997: chap. 6.
56. On the content and official treatment of Turghun’s work, see Bovingdon 2002b:chap. 5. Red Guards had burned Qur’ans and “nationality historical writings” in 1966, early in the Cultural Revolution (McMillen 1979:196).
57. Xu Yuqi had already used this expression in 1999 to describe the state’s response to the work of Turghun Almas (Xu Yuqi 1999:114-28).
58. Field notes, summer 2002. Reporters sans Frontières (2002) reported the crackdown and new book burnings. A 1995 “administrative regulation” on the handling of religious texts forbids the publication of commentaries, recorded sermons, audiovisual materials, and cartoon books on religious subjects, and requires approval from various departments for the publication of permitted materials (Xinjiang weiwu’er zizhiqu minzu zongjiao shiwu weiyuanhui 1999:243-46). In 2002, a reliable source gave me an undated internal-circulation memo (most likely promulgated in 2002), issued jointly by the XUAR Party Committee Propaganda Department and other organs, that repeats and amplifies these regulations.
59. Field notes, summer 2002. There is no way to verify these assertions at present.
60. As discussed in chapter 2, Mao made this pronouncement in 1949 specifically to deny that the leaders of the Eastern Turkestan Republic had sought, or achieved, independence.
61. I have not translated millät here for the same reasons that I have not translated the Chinese minzu elsewhere.
62. Field notes, summer 2002, four different informants.
63. The book was later re-released in a modified version, with all these passages intact.
64. A knowledgeable informant suggested that the journal’s editor, later jailed himself, must have had powerful backers for the story to get past censors in the first place. Interview, September 8, 2006.
65. Hamudun Niyaz, chairman of the Xinjiang People’s Congress, claimed that the government had uncovered and stopped a plot to fight for independence on the day of Hong Kong’s retrocession (Lim 1997).
66. Field notes, summer 2002.
67. An image of the flag seen through the goal, which appeared on the BBC Web site at http://news.bbc.co.uk/media/images/38072000/jpg/_38072303_suker300.jpg (accessed June 13, 2002), was distributed the same day on Uyghur listservs.
68. On further questioning, they admitted that the students had been accused not merely of clapping at the wrong times but of making contacts with international separatist organizations, a charge that these teachers considered groundless (field notes, summer 2002).
69. The editor of Netease, one of the most popular Internet portals in China, was dismissed in September 2006. Among the mistakes that may have cost him his job was reporting on the nomination of Uyghur dissident Rabiyä Qadir (Kadeer) for the Nobel Prize. Though his source was an official statement by the Chinese Foreign Ministry to foreign reporters, Beijing had apparently mandated a domestic news blackout on the topic (French 2006).
70. An RFA reporter in Washington confirmed that Uyghurs regularly call the toll-free number from Kashgar and Khotän to complain that “they’re bullying us.” Interview, July 11, 2003. In 2002 Shäpqät Imin (Xiaokaiti Yiming), vice party secretary and bureau head of the XUAR Radio, Film, and Television Bureau, complained that “telephone hotline regulation has been too lax, allowing a few bad people to take advantage” (Xiaokaiti Yiming 2002).
71. In 2002, the government announced a crackdown on “illegal television stations” in Ghulja (Agence France-Presse 2002a). In 2005, government censors cut off BBC programming about Xinjiang in mid-broadcast, even though it was transmitted only to hotels and apartments serving foreigners. Just seconds after the announcer said that “the Uighur people have little affection for their Chinese masters,” television screens went black (“PA” 2005).
72. Field notes, summer 2002.
73. In late 2006, two of her sons were jailed in Xinjiang on the charge of threatening state security. Both were later sentenced to long prison terms (U.S. Department of State 2007).
1. “Strike hard” campaigns to reduce crime were begun in 1983 in China proper (Tanner 1999). PSB officials in Xinjiang initiated a strike hard campaign against escaped criminals in 1987 (XUAR Local Gazetteer Editorial Committee 1988:138). After Beijing initiated the 1996 national strike hard campaign, Ürümci announced that in Xinjiang it would target splittists, building a “Great Wall of Steel” against their threat (Macartney 1996b). Similar “antisplittist” campaigns were announced in Inner Mongolia and Tibet at the same time (Macartney 1996a, 1996c).
2. A 2005 article by a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, for instance, asserted that the “‘ET’ problem continues to escalate” (Song Xinwei 2005).
3. Longtime New York Times China reporter Nicholas Kristof announced in July 2006 that he saw “more fragility in the system than at almost any time in … 23 years” and likened the atmosphere of 2006 to that at the beginning of 1989 (Kristof 2006, 11). He did not speculate whether this analogy extended both to social fractiousness and a party-state still intent on delivering a bloody lesson to quell it.
4. In the English language alone, there are open-source examples from the United States (McNeal 2002), Canada (George 1998), and India (Raman 1999, 2002).
5. For a brief statement, see “Yongding” [pseud.] 2005. For an article specifically urging that China work to prevent “color revolutions” from destabilizing Xinjiang, see Song Tianshui 2005. In October 2005 I attended a conference in Ürümci on “nontraditional security” in China and Central Asia. Two panels and most of the discussions were devoted to the color revolutions. The speakers emphasized the use of NGOs by Western governments to interfere in other countries’ domestic politics (copies of the conference papers in my possession).
6. For examples of early and more recent work predicting that social pressures would lead to democratization in China, see Nathan 1986 and Gilley 2004.
7. James Millward argued, similarly, that Qing and Republican-era Inner Asia differed starkly from the regions of China proper, and its systematic exclusion in major Anglophone studies of those polities allowed conclusions that were artificially narrow and, in some cases, simply wrong (Millward 1998:4-19)
8. Field notes, March 1997.
9. In the introduction I discussed why the surveys conducted by Ji Ping (1990); Ji Ping and Gao Bingzhong (1994) and Herbert Yee (2003, 2005; Guo Zhenglin and Yu Zhen [Herbert S. Yee] n.d.), while quite valuable, almost certainly did not reflect the respondents’ heartfelt political attitudes.
10. In fairness, Hurst was speaking only of protests by laid-off workers. The official figures do not break down contentious episodes by type and include rural protests. Nevertheless, given the size of the figures, it seems certain that laid-off workers’ protests numbered not in the hundreds or thousands but the tens of thousands.
11. Note that the figures we have are for all episodes of unrest. There have long been many more labor disputes than this number would suggest. Official Labor Ministry statistics showed that labor disputes increased 1400 percent from 1992 to 1999, when the figure was 120,000, and another 12 percent in the subsequent year (Kurlantzick 2003, citing, Forney 2002c; Pomfret 2000). Michael Szonyi (2000) claims, citing no source, that “over 100,000 mass demonstrations were reported to the government in 1999; the real number is surely many times higher.”
12. See also the “China Balance Sheet” (http://www.chinabalancesheet.org/Snapshots.html), a project sponsored by the Institute for International Economics and the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
13. The two principal interpretations in these paragraphs can be found, for example, in Frum 2006.
14. See http://www.cfr.org/publication/9425/#6 (accessed June 1, 2006).
15. I thank Jeff Wasserstrom for underscoring this point in comments on an early version of this chapter.
16. A bus explosion in Beijing on March 7, 1997, was first blamed on Uyghurs, partly because of the recent bombing of several buses in Ürümci on February 25. Xinjiang’s government chairman later stated flatly that it had no connection to Uyghurs (Svartzman 1997). A bus bombing in Wuhan in February 1998, again initially attributed to Uyghurs (BBC Monitoring Asia Pacific 1998), proved to be the work of a man whose girlfriend had left him (Associated Press 1998).
17. For Uyghur activists’ comments, see Mooney 2004; and “Anti-Chinese Feeling ‘Rising’ in Xinjiang” 2005. For those of foreign journalists and academics see, for example, Blank 2004; “China’s Far West: Under the Thumb” 2005; “China’s Growing Problem with Xinjiang” 2000; and Zhao 2004:208.
18. On officials’ strategic decisions to broadcast information about unrest in some situations and mute it in others, see the HRW/HRIC document “Devastating Blows” (Human Rights Watch 2005:25). On the sharp reversal of the previous habit of minimizing unrest immediately after September 11, see Millward 2004:11.
19. There was considerable violence in Xinjiang during the Cultural Revolution: at least 1,300 violent clashes among Red Guard factions in 1967 and 1968, some of them protracted armed conflicts (Millward 2007:268-69). Furthermore, as I have already noted, the reporting of violence changed dramatically during the 1990s. Thus the chart certainly overstates the contrast between the Cultural Revolution era and the reform era.
20. Murray Scott Tanner (2005) published the figures on unrest in China.
21. Ma Dazheng cites a different set of figures for the period 1990 to 2000, that “according to authoritative figures,” the 253 “violent terrorist events” caused 166 deaths (twenty-six of police or soldiers) and 371 injuries (Ma Dazheng 2003:126).
22. Yitzhak Shichor (2006b:100-101) makes a similar point.
23. Since I have space to cover only a small number of cases here, the complete database of cases of open resistance, whether acts of violence or organize protests, is in the appendix.
24. I saw a number of handwritten manifestos during several trips to Xinjiang, and I heard about many more from trustworthy sources. The risk to informants precludes a more precise specification of texts, times, or locations. In 1999, while exhorting local PSB and PAP to capture the “Küräš gang,” Ismayil Tiliwaldi noted that capturing “illegal audiovisual materials and publications” was a crucial component of the mission. “We must dig out the roots, pull out the nails, and kill the leader,” he urged (Zhonggong Hetian shiwei bangongshi 1999:6). As we have seen, Küräš Sultan, the Uyghur singer who fled Xinjiang in 1996, was arrested in Kyrgyzstan with thousands of tapes of his songs he hoped to smuggle back into the region (Hoh 2004).
25. There is a seeming tautology in the description: it is precisely the participation of large numbers that proves that the frame has had wide appeal. Yet the “resonance” of a frame is analytically separable from its empirical success, if not often easy to distinguish in practice.
26. These concerns have certainly prompted officials not to advertise some episodes of conflict or unrest. Two XUAR regulations from 1995 declare secret all information about, analysis of, and state responses to incidents with religious or minzu implications (Human Rights Watch 2005:app. III, 101-5).
27. Ma Dazheng’s report on the event, written in 1996, attributes the protests to students and includes the two complaints reported by Li, plus opposition to nuclear testing, Han immigration, and “sham autonomy.” In Ma’s version, the separatist slogans described by Xu “appeared in a few places at the same time as” the student protests (Ma Dazheng 2003:51-52).
28. Several Uyghur students and employees required to participate in public criticisms of splittists reported such conclusions to me.
29. One can see the progression from unexplained “dates as labels” in 1995 (Kashi diwei xuanchuan bu 1995:16), to the categorization of different dated events into “illegal student demonstrations” and “beating smashing looting incidents” in 1996 (He Fulin 1996:3), to chronological ordering of dates (and more events) with an explanatory phrase for each in 1997 (XUAR Party Committee Propaganda Bureau 1997:16-17), to multipage narratives published in a book in 1999 (Xu Yuqi 1999).
30. The Chinese term taibilike denotes both the Arabic term tabligh, for publicizing one’s faith, and the missionary organization active in Pakistan and elsewhere in South Asia, the Tableeghi jamaat. Religious influence evidently began spreading in the early 1980s. In 1986 Olivier Roy saw “hundreds of Uighur pilgrims” supposedly making the hajj but in fact staying up to a year in lodgings provided by the Pakistani Jama’at islami (Roy 2002:140). According to Ma Dazheng, in May 1992 Pakistan’s Tableeghi jamaat sent eight groups with a total of eighty-seven people to southern Xinjiang, where they reportedly intrigued with separatists hoping to recruit more followers (Ma Dazheng 2003:10). Ahmed Rashid noted that in 1997 Peshawar’s madrassas contained “hundreds” of Uyghurs and other Turkic speakers from China (Rashid 2003:141, 204). Sean Roberts argued that religious influence spread both through Pakistani traders in Xinjiang and Uyghurs studying in Pakistan until the crackdown in 1997 (Roberts 2004:226-27). Dewardric McNeal reports that Kyrgyz authorities broke up a sect of Tableeghi Jamaat led by a Chinese-born Uyghur in 1998 (McNeal 2002:12-13)
31. Party officials have used these venerable charges to cut the legs out from under political opponents at least since 1959, when Mao accused Peng Dehuai of an “organized, premeditated” attack at the Lushan plenum (Kuang Chen and Pan Liang 2005:131).
32. In 1992 the government issued a secret list of sixty-two secret organizations. There were reports of at least six underground parties in Xinjiang in 1993, including one still formally run by Isa Yusuf Alptekin (who was already blind and frail in that year and died two years later at the age of ninety-four) (Dillon 2004:66). A news story released by Xinhua in 2002, a week after the January 21 document, claimed there were more than fifty organizations at that point. The figure combined domestic organizations with those abroad, and Xinhua asserted that all had ties to “‘ET’ terrorist forces” (Xinhua 2002).
33. Although as Elizabeth Perry showed, different kinds of protest have received different treatment. Some forms have been tolerated, while others have been rigidly suppressed. Events that protest unemployment or other economic ills have been grudgingly borne, though often with stern lectures to participants. The multiday riots and protests against the bombing of the PRC embassy in Belgrade in 1999 enjoyed not just sufferance but active support from the government; officials may even have orchestrated the protests. Falun Gong practitioners met with implacable government repression (Perry 2001). Kevin O’Brien (1996, 2003) made a similar argument in discussing righteous resistance and boundary-spanning contention, although his point is that the reception of protest may vary from official to official.
34. Beijing provided a designated space, and procedure, for protests to be held at the Olympics in August 2008-and then denied every single petition to protest.
35. The next two paragraphs summarize points in Ma Dazheng 2003:92-105.
36. Chinese sources (which, of course, must be used with caution) assert that the armed participants in the 1990 Baren uprising wanted to secede and set up an independent Islamic state with its capital in that town. On this point, see Dillon 2004:62-63, which draws on Xu Yuqi 1999:130.
37. The three most detailed accounts, which tally quite closely, are in Ma Dazheng 2003:49-51; Xu Yuqi 1999:106-9; and Zhu Peimin, Chen Hong, and Yang Hong 2004:208-9. See also Li Shangkai 1992:131; Zhang Yuxi 1993:347; Dillon 2004:60; and McMillen 1984:581.
38. The following two paragraphs summarize and combine the accounts in Zhang Yuxi 1993:338-41; Xu Yuqi 1999:129-33; Ma Dazheng 2003:57-60; and Dillon 2004:62-65.
39. In 1984 this county had been held up by the autonomous regional government as a model of inter-minzu harmony (Zhang Yuxi 1993:360).
40. The shahada is the fundamental profession of faith in Islam, acknowledging a single divinity and Muhammed’s status as prophet.
41. Artoush Kumul claims there were more than four hundred mäšräp in Xinjiang by the end of 1994 but he cites no source, and other figures in his article incline one to skepticism (Artoush Kumul 1998).
42. In December 2008, Xinjiang officials announced that they had thwarted a student demonstration in which college students from several Ürümci campuses planned to urge or force shopkeepers to stop selling tobacco and alcohol. A December 26 report claimed that the handbills advertising the protest were “reactionary” and that the planned “illegal assembly” would threaten “stability and unity” (Congressional-Executive Commission on China 2009).
43. This assertion conflicts with a 2001 report in China’s national court newspaper, which claims that Alerken Abula was the leader of the organization until his arrest in January 1997 and that it was not called ETIPA until November 1996 (BBC Monitoring Asia Pacific 2001).
44. In 2001, for example, Mukhlisi boasted creatively that “twenty-two million Uighurs … even little boys” were ready to rise in arms against the Chinese government (Working 2001).
45. The basmala is the phrase that introduces individual suras in the Qur’an, invoking the name of Allah (videotape with explanatory notes in my possession). Xu Yuqi claims this banner was raised during the second march of around one thousand people, beginning around noon (Xu Yuqi 1999:178).
46. The Ili prefectural government Web site records that the youths’ slogans included “Struggle with kapirs,” “Don’t pay taxes,” “We don’t want anything from the government,” and “There is only one Allah” (Anla wei yi). This last is a Chinese translation of the first part of the shahada (quoted from mail.xjyl.gov.cn/qy/dys/18.htm [accessed June 28, 2006]). Xu Yuqi has all of these slogans plus “Establish an Islamic caliphate” and “Expel the Hans” (Xu Yuqi 1999:178).
47. This story is hard to believe, for three reasons. First, the marchers would have had to choose to put on the clothing in the morning only to take it off during the march, difficult to imagine given the extremely cold temperatures in Ghulja in February. Second, they would have had to recognize particular items of clothing as “Han,” and few such items suggest themselves other than the Mao suit, which at any rate was no longer widely worn by Uyghurs by then. Third, adult Uyghur men and women generally adhere to high standards of sartorial modesty in public. This story seems to have been concocted to depict the demonstrators as irrational religious extremists.
48. This claim is quoted in Campion 1997. Other police in Ghulja told widely divergent stories. On Monday, February 10, one police officer told a reporter that Uyghurs had “demanded independence” and gone on a violent rampage; the police had arrested five hundred. A day later, the director of the same police department rejected this and other versions, asserting instead that some two hundred members of an “illegal religious organization” demonstrated by “[taking] off all their clothes and shout[ing] slogans like ‘Don’t sleep. Don’t eat. Don’t work.‘” This official said that police arrested five “ringleaders” and that the other protestors melted away after a stern lecture. The reporter to whom the official delivered this version remarked drily that it “could not be immediately reconciled” with others (Hutzler 1997).
49. The Ili Prefecture Political Consultative Committee Web site records that the February 5 demonstration “seriously endangered national security.” See http://www.ylzzx.gov.cn/history/ShowArticle.asp?ArticleID=239 (accessed August 9, 2006).
50. The fullest exposition of the Ghulja uprising is in Dillon 2004:92-88.
51. Xu Yuqi had ETIPA active only from 1995 under its leader Peyzulla (Xu Yuqi 1999:177). By 2002, Chinese government spokesman Kong Quan was claiming that ETIPA was the another name for ETIM, the organization declared terrorist by the United States and the United Nations in August 2002 (Xinhuanet 2002, cited in Amnesty International 2004).
52. Because uranium mining is a security matter of the highest priority and because the mines were run by the PCC, it is safe to assume the miners were mainly, if not exclusively, Han.
53. To be fair, officials also made the case that the rail line would facilitate the transport of goods to and from the south, spurring further economic growth. A proposed line through Kyrgyzstan to Uzbekistan, announced as far back as 2000 and still under discussion in 2006, will necessarily begin from the Kashgar spur (RFE/RL 2006).
54. There are occasional acknowledgments of the Uyghurs’ estrangement from the party-state and Hans. Zhang Yuxi observed after the Baren uprising that it showed fierce feelings of hatred toward Hans who had thrived in that region (Zhang Yuxi 1993:341). Ma Dazheng cautioned readers in 1997 that the “splittists’ ability to stir up the masses must not be underestimated” (Ma Dazheng 2003:100). XUAR Party Secretary Wang Lequan admitted during a 1999 speech in Khotän that locals had no love for government officials (Wang Lequan 1999:17).
55. The document lists periodicals, texts, or artistic performances that “disseminated feelings of dissatisfaction” among the six types of “splittist sabotage” (“Xinjiang shouci pilu minzu fenlie shili zai yishi xingtai lingyu pohuai huodong de liu zhong xingshi” 2002).
56. Ma might have been referring to an article describing China’s “vast human rights problems” in Xinjiang and Tibet (Mirsky 1998) and to another expressing surprise that Beijing was pressing Jakarta to protect Indonesia’s Chinese minority from rioters, since the CCP regards foreign criticism of its handling of unrest in Tibet and Xinjiang as “interference” (Richardson 1998).
57. For a scholarly study of Uyghur protest arguing that the strike hard campaign was principally responsible for the downturn from the late 1990s on, see Hierman 2006.
58. Ronald Schwartz counted 140 demonstrations in Tibet between 1987 and 1992 (Schwartz 1994:1). There have been far fewer protests in Tibet since then.
59. Mackerras argues that China’s territorial claims enjoy “some legitimacy” in the periphery, although he cautions that they are “much more doubtful” in Tibet than in the other regions. I think he misses the level and pervasiveness of resentment among Uyghurs (Mackerras 2004a:230).
60. A decade earlier, after Tibetans mobbed a delegation from the Tibetan government in exile everywhere it traveled in 1980, Hu Yaobang is said to have concluded pessimistically that they “preferred to report their grievances to the Dalai Lama … rather than to complain to the Party…. The Dalai Lama still represented their hopes for freedom and … a speedy deliverance from their suffering” (Shakya 1999:378).
1. In another 2003 publication, Rashid correctly noted that the United States classified only ETIM as a terrorist organization (Rashid 2003:121-22).
2. In September 2002, foreign diplomats in Beijing queried about ETIM told a reporter that according to their information, the organization was defunct and its activities had always been limited to Afghanistan (Forney 2002a).
3. In a 2006 article, two analysts at a terrorism research center in Singapore pretend to view skeptically the PRC’s claim that Uyghur separatists belong to a global terror network and then seem to confirm that claim. As evidence, they rely uncritically on the January 2002 document, a video of unknown provenance, entitled “Jihad in Eastern Turkestan” and posted on a jihadist Web site, and a database maintained by their research center, proved by James Millward to consist entirely of the entries in the January 2002 document. They come to the conclusion that “the Uighur groups [unspecified] are now significantly influenced by the developments in the global jihad arena.” They misread the January 2002 document as attributing all violent events to ETIM, and they misleadingly suggest there are many other Uyghur organizations with ties to ETIM. Particularly egregious is their insinuation that the World Uyghur Congress, an explicitly secular organization, inclines toward Islamism (a term whose complexities they do not acknowledge). The 2006 article should not be read as an independent confirmation that Uyghur separatists are Islamists and terrorists, when it is nothing of the kind (Gunaratna and Pereire 2006:57 and passim). For an excellent brief critique, see Clarke 2007:19-20.
4. The most important works on Uyghur organizations abroad include Shichor 2003; Besson 1998; Gladney 2004a:229-59; Dillon 2004; and Millward 2004. In reading Shichor’s very thorough and well-documented article, the reader should keep in mind that his abbreviation “ETIM” is his own acronym for the “Eastern Turkestan Independence Movement,” a movement that Shichor himself acknowledges is not unified. His acronym must not be confused with that of the “Eastern Turkestan Islamic Movement.”
5. The U.S. State Department’s report on terrorism claimed that Uyghurs trained by al-Qaeda had returned to China but provided no supporting evidence (U.S. Department of State 2003:16).
6. I refer to Uyghur organizations as transnational for two different reasons. First, some Uyghur organizations have been transnational by nomenclature and design. The Eastern Turkestan National Congress, the Eastern Turkestan Information Center, the Eastern Turkestan European Union, the World Uyghur Youth Congress, and the World Uyghur Congress all share this characteristic. Second, each organization, regardless of the state in which its members live, is at least partly oriented to Xinjiang. Some organizations focus predominantly on regulating local communities and protecting their interests, but all keep the imagined “Uyghur homeland” in mind. This is true even of those groups that explicitly adopt the name of their host states, as, for instance, the Uyghur American Association, the Uyghur Canadian Association, and the Swedish Uyghur Committee.
7. Note that the geographic shifts and spreading diaspora mean changes in language. The full record of Uyghur organizations in the world includes names in all European languages, Turkish, Arabic, Russian, and Uyghur. It also necessarily includes Chinese, since Chinese officials and scholars have leveled charges at various organizations using translations or transliterations in that language. As a consequence, the names of organizations and their leaders are an extraordinary tangle. When jumping from one language to another, it is a constant challenge to determine which names refer to the same organizations, which to distinct ones (including names that were made up). Except in the case of well-established names (and even then on occasion), I have generally opted for fidelity to Uyghur spelling and chosen a consistent word order for long names. Hence Eastern Turkestan United National Revolutionary Front (ETUNRF) and not United Revolutionary Front of Eastern Turkestan (URFET), Dolqun Isa and not Dolqun Eysa, Qähriman Ghojambärdi and not Kaharman Khojamberdi, and Rabiyä Qadir rather than Räbiya Kadeer. I list the acronyms for most organizations in the abbreviations in the front matter.
8. He published the first edition in Kashmir in the early 1940s and then later revised it in Turkey (Bughra 1942/1987).
9. Muhämmäd Imin had been seeking outside support for the cause for many years. In 1935 he met with the Japanese ambassador to Kabul and proposed that Japan provide money and weapons to help found an independent “Eastern Turkestan Republic.” He believed that Japan’s reward would be “special economic and political privileges” vis-à-vis the new republic, though it is clear that Japanese officials instead had in mind a client state like that in Manchuria (Esenbel 2004:1161-62; Forbes 1986:140).
10. Tyler’s account, based on a Uyghur news source to which I do not have access, has Özal himself announcing his acceptance of the cause.
11. The book was printed in Turkey and was circulating in Central Asia in the late 1990s (Sean Roberts, personal communication, September 29, 2006).
12. Although Uyghur organizations persisted, after Jiang Zemin encountered public protests over Beijing’s treatment of Uyghurs during his 2000 visit, Ankara forbade them to engage in “overt political work,” in order to avoid jeopardizing its relations with China. Two years later, Zhu Rongji elicited a promise from Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit that Ankara would “curb the Uyghur ‘terrorists’” in the country (Hoh 2000; Tyler 2003:241). Ankara also had to worry about annoying the U.S. government, which by that time was deeply concerned with the rise of “Muslim power” (Cheong 1997).
13. Chinese scholar Li Danhui argues that Moscow had authorized consular officials in Xinjiang to issue large numbers of Soviet passports to would-be emigrants, with the long-term goal of using those émigrés to exert pressure on China (Li Danhui 2003:86).
14. A retired intelligence official in Kazakhstan explained, in nakedly Machiavellian terms, Moscow’s support for one such organization: “We were at odds with China then, and it was of use to us” (Eurasianet 2003).
15. The story of Russian involvement is quite implausible. Two thousand Uyghur protestors rioted, reportedly shouting religious slogans as they did so. The protestors blamed the arson on a Uyghur PSB official (Alptekin 1983:150; Ma Dazheng 2003:48-49; XUAR Local Gazetteer Editorial Committee 1997:78; Zhang Yuxi 1993:343; Zhu Peimin 2000:334).
16. The arms race between Moscow and Washington was complemented by a propaganda contest. Judging from volume alone, Moscow was winning the latter handily, according to a U.S. source. In 1980 the Soviet Union produced a total of 2,760 hours of radio broadcasts a week in more than 80 languages; the United States only 1,927 hours in 46 languages, through the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) (Shultz and Godson 1984:28).
17. Curiously, a year later Mukhlisi traveled to Istanbul with Moscow’s help to pay a visit to Isa Yusuf Alptekin. The person reporting the meeting suggests that it did not go well because Mukhlisi’s sponsors had placed limits on what he could offer the Uyghur leader, although it is equally possible that Mukhlisi proposed and Isa declined to support a plan for military action (Uighur 1983).
18. A former intelligence official in Kazakhstan claimed that the ETUNRF had been founded in Alma-Ata in 1975 with the support of the Soviet Politburo (Eurasianet 2003), a claim echoed by a knowledgeable scholar (Roberts 2004:424-25, n. 47). A Uyghur source records that Yusupbek Mukhlisi founded the ETUNRF only in 1992 (Äkhmät Egämbärdi 2004). It is quite possible that both sources are right, in the sense that the organization operated clandestinely in the Soviet era and was established openly and legally only after the Soviet collapse.
19. Sean Roberts’s fine documentary Waiting for Uighurstan captures this tension with great sensitivity (Roberts 1996).
20. A Uyghur leader in Kyrgyzstan told James Millward in 2003 that young Uyghurs armed and trained themselves in that country’s mountainous regions around 1995 and later were arrested. It is not clear whether the youths had grown up in Kyrgyzstan or fled from Xinjiang, and no organization was named (Millward 2007:336, n. 89).
21. A journalist who interviewed Wahidi in 1992 pronounced him and other ULO leaders “far more interested in history than waging guerrilla warfare” (Higgins 1992).
22. A CCP scholar-official suggests that some of the thousands of reactionary handbills circulating annually in Xinjiang in the 1990s resulted from Uyghurs’ listening to “broadcasts from enemy stations in countries surrounding Xinjiang, tidying them up, and then distributing them” (Yang Faren 2000:243).
23. Mukhlisi, interviewed by AFP on May 31, 1996, claimed twenty dead in gun battles in Turpan and Qaramay. (“PRC: Exiled Leader Claims 20 Dead in Street Fighting in Xinjiang” 1996; PRC: AFP Reports Further on Clashes in Xinjiang,” 1996). At the time, Chinese officials denounced the report as “pure lies” (“PRC: Security Official Says Deaths in Xinjiang ‘Pure Lies’” 1996).
24. Sean Roberts, who conducted fieldwork over several years in Kazakhstan, counsels skepticism, pointing out that the elder and younger Mukhlisi were the group’s “primary members” and that it was originally set up by the KGB for “propaganda purposes” (Roberts 2004:424-25, n. 47).
25. Wahidi died a year later. Uyghur organizations widely believe this was a political assassination engineered by the Chinese government.
26. James Millward argues that Almaty and Bishkek found it easy to point fingers at Uyghurs for economic and organized crime, both because they were “unpopular minorities” and because it pleased China (Millward 2004:30).
27. Beginning in the late 1990s, Beijing persuaded Central Asian states, Pakistan, and Nepal to extradite Uyghurs accused of separatism back to China and later executed many of them. The extraditions sent a very strong message to refugees that they remained vulnerable to prosecution in China even after leaving the country. The intent was clearly to deter would-be demonstrators inside Xinjiang (who might have imagined they could escape to Central or South Asia and safety) and in Central Asia (Blua 2004; IRINNEWS 2004; “Tighter Security for Chinese Diplomats in Pakistan” 2006). The arrest of Canadian citizen Husäyin Jelil (Huseyincan Celil) in Uzbekistan and his subsequent extradition to China in 2006 was particularly striking. The Uzbek and Chinese governments ignored his Canadian passport and denied Canadian consular officials to him, contravening international law and exemplifying Beijing’s view that one cannot discard Chinese citizenship even after acquiring citizenship in another country (York 2006).
28. According to Shichor, it was because Turkey declined to resist Chinese pressure that Uyghur activists shifted their hopes to Europe (Shichor 2003:307).
29. On Uyghur “cyber-separatism,” see Gladney 2004a:229-59; and on “virtual transnationalism,” see Shichor 2003: esp. 297-311. Both authors see online political participation as less involving, and therefore less effective, than traditional political organizing.
30. There were reports in 2002 that Uyghurs in Central Asia, Europe, and America still disagreed. Central Asian organizations preferred the “radical path” of using force to achieve national independence, while “pro-Western secular nationalists” in Europe instead preferred democratic methods and alliances with Chinese democratic organizations (BBC Monitoring Central Asia 2002). In a 2003 interview with Konstantin Syroezhkin, a scholar and security analyst in Kazakhstan, the head of the East Turkestan Europa Union stated that the members of the ET(U)NC regarded Mukhlisi’s ETUNRF as “opposition” and acknowledged that Mukhlisi had criticized the goals articulated in the congress charter (Syroezhkin 2003). For disputes between the ULO and ETUNRF, and between ULO leaders and Dolqun Isa, see Sabit Abdurakhman 2002:185-90, 232-34.
31. Sabit claims this took place on the third day of the conference, October 12, which would suggest extraordinary deliberation in handling the agenda items. Tursun Islam recalls that the conference lasted from October 11 to 15.
32. For Hashir Wahidi’s argument in favor of “Uyghurstan” over “Eastern Turkestan,” see http://uyghuramerican.org/about_uyghurs/history/east_turkistan_or_uyghuristan (accessed October 15, 2004). Erkin Sidick actually translated this on January 7, 1998, but it was not posted on the UAA site until August 17, 2004.
33. When Turkis and other Muslims rose against the Xinjiang government in the early 1930s, the rebels debated what to call the new state they had founded. An eyewitness reports that the debate led to the choice of the “Eastern Turkestan Republic” because “there were other Turkic peoples besides Uyghurs in Xinjiang and in the newly established government.” Dr. Näbijan Tursun learned this in an interview with Ghulamettin Pahta, one of the earliest Uyghur activists in the United States (Millward and Näbijan Tursun 2004:78, 403, n. 33). Gunnar Jarring suggests that the terms “Uyghur” and “Uyghurstan” first appeared in printed texts in the region in 1935 and attributes the use of the term to increasing Soviet influence. Noting that the very popular “Turkestan calendar/almanac (taqwim)” published yearly by the Swedish Mission in Kashgar was renamed the “Uyghurstan calendar/almanac” in 1936, he attributed the change to pressure from “authorities in power” and printed facsimiles from 1909 and 1937 illustrating the name change (Jarring 1991:6, 35, 106).
34. This is an oversimplification, since there also were Pan-Turkists from Turkey who were neither “narrow” Uyghur nationalists nor advocates of a culturally plural state but still envisioned a fusion of Turkic peoples (and possibly of territories).
35. In it, Dolqun declared himself the widely acknowledged former leader of the June 1988 student protests in Ürümci (see appendix) and detailed how he had been hounded out of Xinjiang University as a consequence. He also pointed to the charter of the World Uyghur Youth Congress, which insisted on strictly peaceful methods of challenging China’s control of Xinjiang. Dolqun closed his case by noting that the German authorities watched all such organizations and would never have tolerated any suspicious activity. As this book went to press, Dolqun was facing restrictions on his international travel for the second time in three months. In July 2009 he was denied entry to Taiwan, and in mid-September he was held without charge at the Seoul Airport, reportedly because Beijing had warned the Korean government he was a terrorist (Associated Press 2009:2233; Llopis-Jepsen 2009:2234).
36. Dolqun Isa later reported that Chinese officials had tried to intimidate him by calling him from China with his parents and brother in the room and asking him to cancel the Munich meeting (Cloud and Johnson 2004).
37. See http://www.uygur.org/uygurche/uchur/2004/10_11.htm (accessed October 17, 2004).
38. Original announcement promulgated by the East Turkistan National Freedom Center at http://etnfc.org (accessed November 2, 2004). Site now defunct. The organization now uses the URL http://www.eastturkistangovernmentinexile.us (accessed September 17, 2009).
39. BBS originally found at http://www.uyghuramerican.org/phorum/read.php?f=11&i=1166&t=1166 (accessed October 1, 2004). Link no longer available as of September 1, 2006. Interviews with Uyghur expatriates in the United States in late September 2004 confirmed that this was a widespread concern among politically active members of the community.
40. Interview, August 22, 2005. Speculation in this vein grew rampant when Anwer and his entire family were able to travel back to Ürümci for a family funeral in January 2006 and then return safely to the United States. Critics also pointed out that this trip disqualified him as an officer of the ETGIE. Discussion at http://www.uyghuramerican.org/forum/archive/index.php/t-3029.html (accessed September 1, 2006). Article 13 of its constitution specified that “anyone having a political or economic relationship with China” could not serve in office (Šärqiy Türkistan Jumhuriyiti Sürgündiki Parlamenti wä Hökümiti 2005:7).
41. Blog entry at http://www.uyghuramerican.org/forum/archive/index.php/t-250.html (accessed June 1, 2006).
42. By January 2009, the ETGIE, now with Anwer Yusuf as prime minister and a “parliament” of sixty-one named members, had taken to providing Web links to news stories and issuing press releases. A sampling from 2008 included a communiqué extending recognition to Kosovo and announcements that the ETGIE would boycott the Olympics and had the “legitimate right to wage war” against the PRC (http://www.eastturkistangovernmentinexile.us/press_releases.html [accessed January 31, 2009]).
43. Besson notes that Uyghur organizations in Central Asia and (in the past) the United States have depended heavily on the generosity of wealthy Uyghurs in Saudi Arabia (Besson 1998:170, 187).
44. The organization was founded on May 23, 1998, in Washington, D.C., with Dolkun Kamberi as chair and Ghulamettin Pahta as honorary chair. See http://www.uyghuramerican.org/aboutuaa/uaa.html (accessed March 15, 2003; URL now defunct). Current information about the organization is available at http://www.uyghuramerican.org.
45. The NED’s close connections with the U.S. government were exemplified by Washington’s withholding development aid from Nepal until its King Gyanendra agreed to open the country to NED in 2005. Many observers also see Washington’s hand behind NED’s support for the “color revolutions” in post-Soviet states (Maitra 2005).
46. In 2006 the endowment agreed to fund the World Uyghur Congress as well (World Uyghur Congress 2006c).
47. Interview with Rabiyä Qadir, September 25, 2006. In a July 2006 communiqué published on the WUC Web site, President Erkin Alptekin referred to Rabiyä as the “spiritual mother and political leader of the people of Eastern Turkestan” (Alptekin 2006). The WUC leadership is listed at http://www.uyghurcongress.org/En/AboutWUC.asp?mid=1095738888 (accessed March 21, 2007). In 2007 the Web site betrayed a curious sloppiness: while the list of officials prominently identified Rabiyä as president, the accompanying picture showed Alptekin seated front and center behind the official seal, with Räbiya to his right, and the introductory text still described Alptekin as the president.
48. When a Spiegel reporter suggested to the recently appointed party secretary of Tibet that Beijing had held talks with representatives of the Dalai Lama, he vehemently denied it. Zhang Qingli responded, “His government-in-exile is illegal. Our central government has never recognized it. No country in the world, including Germany, recognizes it diplomatically. There are no talks between the Chinese and his so-called government-in-exile. The current contacts merely involve a few individuals from his immediate surroundings. The talks revolve around his personal future” (Spiegel Interview with Tibet’s Communist Party Chief 2006).
49. The article was published simultaneously in English in the Taipei Times and in Chinese in the Ziyou shibao on October 11, 1999. It is necessary to read both to grasp subtle differences in wording, since Cao notes that he interviewed Riza Bekin in English.
50. For a thorough discussion of the Dalai Lama’s changing public statements and the talks between Beijing and Tibetan representatives through 2004, see Rabgey and Sharlho 2004.
1. Compare Bennigsen’s (1986, 132) appraisal of the situation in the Soviet Union: “It can be stated without exaggeration that the survival of the Soviet empire depends largely on the positive solution of the nationality problem…. For the last fifty years, Soviet theorists have been repeating ad nauseam that the problem has already been solved, but there is ample evidence that this is just wishful thinking on their part.”
2. To be sure, the final status of Kosovo was still uncertain as of the winter of 2008, with only a minority of the world’s states recognizing its independence.
3. On another occasion, Ma wrote more optimistically that the example of Chechnya showed the “Kosovo model is not absolute.” He pointed out that to avert such an outcome, Beijing needed to make sure that China’s “comprehensive national power” continued to grow. The implication was that because it was strong, Russia could fend off interference, whereas weak Yugoslavia could not (Ma Dazheng 2003:120). On the subject, see also Carlson 2005:146-83.
4. See, for example, “Gong’anbu gongbu shoupi rending de ‘dongtu’ kongbu zuzhi ji chengyuan mingdan” 2003; Guowuyuan xinwen bangongshi 2002, 2003; and Pan Zhiping 1999.
5. The 1970 Declaration on Principles of International Law Concerning Friendly Relations and Co-operation Among States in Accordance with the Charter of the United Nations observes, in part, that “all peoples have the right freely to determine, without external interference, their political status … and every State has the duty to respect this right” (quoted in Buchheit 1978:247). See also Raič 2002.
6. In the introduction I suggested that the use of the single term minzu to refer to both entities elides the normative distinction and thus renders the conceptual apparatus of China’s system of autonomy vulnerable to immanent critique.
7. RFE/RL 2000. A 1999 China Daily article warned that Western diplomats were “peddling ideologies” placing human rights above sovereignty (“UN Has a Mission to Build New World Order” 2001). A professor at the China Institute of International Studies argued that no international body agreed to this ranking (Yang Chuang 2005).
1. There is not space here to discuss a protest in Khotän on March 23, 2008, or a reported attack on police in Kashgar on August 4 of the same year. For preliminary accounts, see French (2008) and Foreman (2008), respectively.
2. My chronology hews closely to that offered on the BBC Web site (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8249848.stm), although it incorporates information from numerous other sources. For a thorough and carefully prepared analysis of the events and reportage on them, see the Congressional-Executive Commission on China report, “Xinjiang Authorities Forcefully Suppress Demonstration, Restrict Free Flow of Information” at http://www.cecc.gov/pages/virtualAcad/index.phpd?showsingle=125582 (accessed August 10, 2009).
3. The chairman of the XUAR government, Nur Bäkri, announced that some 200 protestors assembled in the People’s Square around 5:00 p.m. Beijing time, then a larger number gathered in Uyghur areas south of Nanmen and “shouted slogans.” The violence began, he continued, at “approximately 8:18 p.m.” (“Xinjiang pilu” 2009).
4. An article in the party newspaper Global Times asserted that in 2007 the National Endowment for Democracy had funded various “ETIM organizations,” including the World Uyghur Congress (“Rebiya Kadeer’s Funding Sources” 2009).
5. See, for example, BBC reporter Quentin Somerville’s report at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7FcBVpUlSk (cited August 1, 2009).
6. Xinhua (2009) produced figures of 531 victims, 171 with “obvious signs” of stabbings, on the same day.
