1

COLONIALISM, 1759–2001

1 Man with rooster walking past the statue of Mao in Kashgar, January 1990.

One of the reasons it is so devastating to be labeled a ‘terrorist’ in the context of the Global War on Terror (GWOT) is that the war has successfully characterized its enemy as lacking in legitimate grievances – motivated instead by an irrational ideology based on an extreme and intolerant interpretation of Islam. In the case of the Uyghurs, this effectively strips them of their historical grievances with modern Chinese states, which are more important to understanding the present conflict between the PRC and Uyghurs than is a narrative of Islamic ‘extremism’ or ‘terrorism.’ Thus, in an effort to elucidate these historical grievances behind the tense relations between Uyghurs and the PRC today – which are often obscured by a narrative focusing on ‘terrorism’ – this chapter provides a historical overview of this relationship, beginning with the Qing conquest of the Uyghur homeland in the eighteenth century and concluding on the eve of GWOT in 2001. In doing so, it makes the case that this relationship has always been, and continues to be, colonial in nature.

In academic circles, it is somewhat controversial to describe the relationship between modern China and the Uyghurs in terms of colonialism. James Millward, one of the most prominent historians of Qing rule in the region, has until recently shied away from the colonial label, noting that the phenomenon of colonialism is too difficult to detach from the dominant role of European powers globally at this time and that the Han themselves viewed European powers as seeking to control them in a colonial manner.¹ Likewise, Justin Jacobs, who studies the rule of Republican China in the region, has argued that using the discourse of colonialism to discuss the relationship between modern China and Uyghurs has been problematized by the broad and incendiary political associations that this term evokes.² Nonetheless, both Millward and Jacobs acknowledge that modern China’s control over this region is a legacy of imperial conquest and rule, whether it is termed colonialism or not.

Some of the new generation of international scholars studying the Uyghurs and their homeland have been less reticent to embrace the terminology of colonialism in describing modern Chinese rule of this region and its people.³ While some of these scholars suggest that modern China’s rule of the Uyghurs and their homeland may not be colonialism in a ‘classic sense’ or a ‘direct replication’ of European colonial domination, they also assert that one cannot ignore the similarities between European colonialism and China’s conquest and subsequent rule over Uyghurs and their homeland. This is also apparent in more recent literature on the Qing Empire, such as that produced by Max Oidtmann, which freely refers to this empire as colonial in character.⁴

A recent article by Dibyesh Anand goes even further in asserting this argument, suggesting unequivocally that contemporary China has become a ‘colonizing nation-state’ in its rule of the Uyghurs.⁵ For Anand, China’s rule over both the Tibetans and Uyghurs are clear cases of colonial domination over both territory and populations, and he suggests that glossing over this fact in scholarly writing only contributes to the continued existence of these forms of domination.⁶ Furthermore, Anand suggests that colonialism is not merely a part of modern China’s past relationship to Uyghurs and their homeland; it is a process of domination that continues and, in many ways, is intensifying in the present.

This chapter adopts Anand’s perspective that modern China’s relationship with the Uyghurs and their homeland has always been, and continues to be, one best characterized as colonial. Framing this relationship as a colonial one explains the prominence in it of what Partha Chatterjee has called a ‘rule of colonial difference’ and what Anand calls ‘paternalistic control.’⁷ In other words, modern Chinese states have clearly distinguished the Uyghurs and other local Turkic people as fundamentally different from and inferior to the dominant Han population and, thus, incapable of either becoming equals to the Han or of even knowing how best to care for themselves. As a result, modern Chinese states’ attempts to assimilate Uyghurs have suffered from the classic dilemma of colonial powers trying to ‘civilize’ the colonized and make them more like themselves while simultaneously never accepting them as equals. I would argue that this attitude towards Uyghurs has been a defining characteristic of all modern Chinese states’ rule over this population.

If this chapter frames modern China’s relationship with Uyghurs and their homeland as fundamentally colonial in nature, it also recognizes that this particular colonial relationship is relatively unique in several ways. First and most notably, this is a case where colonialism still persists in the twenty-first century. In most instances of colonial conquest around the world, the colonizing powers eventually accommodated the peoples they colonized by relinquishing at least partial control of their homeland, allowing for either independent statehood or enhanced rights and recognition as the region’s indigenous population. In the case of modern China’s colonial relationship to the Uyghurs and their homeland, neither of these processes of de-colonization have taken place. There have been several moments in the history of modern Chinese history where the state tentatively began processes of accommodation that could have resulted in de-colonization, but it has always stopped short of recognizing the Uyghurs as being indigenous to their homeland and deserving of either sovereignty over the region or of special rights to self-governance within it. Ultimately, this inability of modern Chinese states to de-colonize their relationship with the Uyghurs and their homeland is marked by the fact that it has neither acknowledged its conquest and subjugation of this region nor recognized the Uyghurs as the indigenous population of their homeland.

Second, the Uyghur homeland is a colony that is geographically contiguous to China. Such situations generally foster one of two different colonial relationships – a frontier colony that is held at arms-length from the colonial metropole and a settler colony that is absorbed into the colonial power’s polity and settled by the dominant colonizing population. In the history of modern China, the Uyghur homeland has largely been constructed as a frontier colony where the local population was able to remain demographically dominant, at least in the Uyghur heartland of the southern Tarim Basin, and the Chinese state retained control of governance and resource extraction while seeking to establish and maintain Han dominance in the region’s north, including its capital of Urumqi. Arguably, with the creation of the PRC, the state sought to absorb the entirety of the Uyghur region and its indigenous population into a larger ‘socialist nation-state,’ but it was largely ineffective in this goal for the first thirty years of communist rule, especially in the southern Tarim Basin.

While the PRC had already succeeded in drastically altering the demography of the region by the 1960s and substantially so by 1980 through the massive re-settlement of Han citizens from outside the region, most of the Han who had come to the region remained in the north or in the military colonies of the Bingtuan. Most of the southern Tarim Basin remained overwhelmingly Uyghur in population, and few Uyghurs welcomed either assimilation into a Han dominated state culture or education in the Chinese language. This inability to fully integrate the region and its people into the PRC was due to a variety of reasons including the political and economic chaos of the PRC’s first thirty years, but it was also facilitated by the state’s view of this region as a buffer-zone and frontier, particularly vis-à-vis the Soviet Union.

This situation only began to change in the 1980s during the reform period when the region’s economic potential beyond resource extraction was first recognized. Much of the history of PRC rule since then has been characterized by the state’s efforts to fully incorporate this region and its population into the larger political and economic system of a changing communist China. Following an initial period of accommodation in the 1980s, which could have paved a path for integration through partial decolonization, the decades that followed have involved a steadily escalating attempt to forcibly integrate this region and assimilate its people into a unified PRC, representing a gradual shift from viewing the region as a frontier colony to viewing it as a settler colony. Unsurprisingly, much of these efforts have been concentrated on the Uyghur heartland in the southern oases of the Tarim Basin, which had previously remained largely uninfluenced by Han culture.

Lorenzo Veracini, who is one of the pioneers in the study of settler colonialism, suggests that while other forms of colonialism generally exploit the colonized population in addition to their territory as a virus lives off other living cells, settler colonialism only needs the land to thrive like bacteria living on surfaces without the need for a living host.⁸ Thus, Veracini notes that settler colonists tend to favor colonies with less density of indigenous populations and tend ‘to execute the transfer/removal of the Indigenous Peoples they encounter.’⁹ Given the density of the Uyghur population, particularly in the southern oases of their homeland, the PRC’s shift towards a more robust settler colonialism in the Uyghur region has not been easily accomplished, perhaps belying the reason why this process has been both slow and conflictual.

In many ways, the academic debate about whether or not one should refer to modern China’s relationship with the Uyghurs and their homeland as colonialism is less relevant than whether Uyghurs themselves view this relationship as such. The development of the Uyghur nation, particularly in the twentieth century, was shaped by a recognition of their colonial situation within modern China. As a result, Uyghur nationalist historiography inevitably frames its nation’s resistance to Chinese rule as part of an anti-colonial national liberation struggle.

This conflict between modern Chinese states and the Uyghurs over the territory known respectively as Xinjiang and Eastern Turkistan has often been viewed by both parties as a zero-sum proposition of either Chinese or Uyghur sovereignty, but these are not its only possible outcomes. As in many post-colonial states, one can imagine a situation where the PRC’s recognition of the Uyghurs’ status as the Indigenous People of their homeland, with special rights within that territory, could lead to a relatively harmonious incorporation of the Uyghurs and their homeland into the PRC’s polity and society. This chapter points to several moments in history where modern Chinese states appeared to be moving towards such accommodating policies in their governance of the Uyghurs and their homeland, but in each case, these efforts have been temporary and rolled back in favor of policies that were more reflective of a paternalistic rule of colonial difference. Unfortunately, the extreme nature of the PRC’s present approach to governing its Uyghur population may have finally closed the door to such an approach to decolonizing the relationship between Uyghurs and modern China.

QING CONQUEST AND RULE: HOW THE UYGHURS AND THEIR HOMELAND BECAME PART OF MODERN CHINA

While the PRC goes to painstaking lengths to suggest that the Uyghur homeland has always been a constituent part of China since ancient times, such arguments are completely disingenuous.¹⁰ Indeed, the area that is today officially called the XUAR has a long history of interactions with empires emanating from China, but it has also had a similarly long history of interactions with a variety of empires from Central Asia and has served as the center of its own empires at times. A proper reading of history suggests that this region only really started becoming a constituent part of a larger China when the Qing Dynasty conquered it in the 1750s, and only became integrated into a larger Chinese territorial polity in the late nineteenth century when the Qing made it a province of its domain.

In part, this is because the late Qing, like many empires of its time, was the first imperial power to conquer the Uyghur homeland that would gradually adopt the modern trappings of statehood which could eventually serve as the basis of a Chinese nation-state. However, initially the Qing control of this region differed little from past empires that had conquered this region, and it specifically adopted many of the practices of its direct predecessor, the Zunghars. The Qing would establish its imperial outpost in the northern region that had been the heart of the Zunghar Empire and which, to this day, is known as Zungharia.¹¹ Additionally, when the Qing conquered the southern oases of the Uyghur homeland known as the Tarim Basin, it would also initially rule this region indirectly through elites from the local population as the Zunghars had done.¹²

Qing conquest and early rule: continuity with the past

The Qing conquest of the Uyghur homeland almost destroyed the entire population of the region’s previous rulers, the Zunghars, and required a protracted military campaign to defeat Muslim resistance from the region’s southern Tarim Basin. By 1759, the Qing had replaced the Zunghars as the masters of the entire region, and in doing so it adopted many of the Zunghars’ means of rule. As the Qing created its imperial outpost in roughly the same location as the Zunghars’ capital near the present city of Ghulja, it borrowed a practice from its predecessor by resettling significant numbers of Muslims from their homes in the southern Tarim Basin to help build and feed this outpost.¹³ Similarly, with regards to its rule of the Tarim Basin, where most of the ancestors of the present-day Uyghurs lived, the Qing adopted essentially the same indirect system of rule as the Zunghars, relying on the Muslims’ own Bäg system, which consisted of local leaders essentially administrating issues of daily importance.

While, unlike the Zunghars, the Qing’s administration in the region during its first century of rule would benefit from a bureaucracy that had a penchant for documenting its subjects in the same manner of European colonial powers at the time, this did not really translate into the region becoming a physical colony of the empire. The Qing only really maintained outposts in the region, populated with military divisions and administrators mostly led by Manchus and Mongols, and the number of representatives from the conquering power in the region remained small. For this reason, historian Rian Thum has referred to the Uyghur homeland’s status at this time as a ‘dependency governed by a Manchu-dominated military’ rather than an integral part of the empire.¹⁴

This ambiguity of the region’s position in the Qing Empire became more obvious in the early nineteenth century. In response to the financial strains that controlling this region demanded, the imperial court began debates in the 1820s regarding whether the empire should continue to invest in controlling the Tarim Basin at all.¹⁵ As a result, when a series of substantial Muslim rebellions broke out in the 1860s, first in Gansu and later in the Tarim Basin and Zungharia, the Qing did not expend undue energy to re-establish control of the region, and they eventually withdrew entirely.

While most Uyghur nationalists tend to view these revolts as part of their history of national liberation struggles, it is difficult to justify such an interpretation given the rebellions’ multi-national character. Furthermore, the largest state to develop out of the revolts was led by Yakub Beg, who had come from the Ferghana Valley in present-day Uzbekistan and had no real connection to the Tarim Basin.¹⁶ Finally, no unified concept of a modern Uyghur nation even existed at this time, with the local populations identifying with multiple allegiances – Muslim, settled or nomadic, and Turkic.

After the Qing withdrawal, Yakub Beg sought to establish a unified state of sorts throughout most of the region, but there was also a separate independent para-state in the north known as the Ili Sultanate, which controlled the area around the former Qing military complex near Ghulja. Sensing a power vacuum and worried about the growing power of Yakub Beg, who was seeking British support for his state, the Russian Empire responded by conquering the Ili Sultanate and occupying its territory in the Ili valley. While the Russians ruled this region for only about a decade and publicly proclaimed that they were only maintaining control of the region until the Qing returned, their actions, which were arguably much more akin to colonialism than Qing rule had been, suggested a concerted effort to leave their mark in the region if not to remain there indefinitely.

Given the Qing Empire’s weakness at this time, there were fierce debates within the imperial court regarding whether or not to re-enter the region and seek to conquer it again.¹⁷ In the end, those arguing for re-conquest won the day, and the Qing began a military campaign in the north of the region in 1876. By 1880, the Qing had reconquered the region, with the exception of that part in the Ili valley controlled by Russia, and in 1881, Russia returned most of this territory to the Qing in accordance with the Treaty of St Petersburg.¹⁸

However, Russia’s impact on the Uyghur homeland and its population through its decade-long occupation of the Ghulja area was to have long-lasting ramifications. A substantial majority of the local Muslims in this northern area took the opportunity afforded them on the return of the region to the Qing to re-settle across the border in the Russian controlled portion of the Ili valley, which is now part of Kazakhstan.¹⁹ This created a substantial Uyghur population on the border of Chinese-controlled territory that would be influential throughout the modern period.

Late Qing colonialism and the creation of Xinjiang

Once the Qing had officially retaken the entirety of the region in 1881, the imperial court was quick to reform the region’s administration to integrate it more closely with the governance of the empire’s overall territory, declaring it in 1884 an official province entitled Xinjiang, or the ‘New territory,’ a name that had already been used less formally by the Qing for the region.²⁰ This occurred at a time when the Qing itself was changing. It was both adopting the hallmarks of modern statehood and becoming more dominated by the Han ethnic group that increasingly made up the bulk of its bureaucracy. As such, it was evolving into the basis for a nascent Han-dominated Chinese nation-state that would seek to absorb the new Xinjiang province and its people into its domain. As part of this process, the Bäg system was eradicated in all but a few locations and replaced with a bureaucratic network of territorial entities led by mostly Han administrators. To create a bridge with the local population, local Muslims, many the descendants of former Bägs, were hired as ‘clerks,’ a significant demotion from their former positions.²¹

Along with this marginalization of the local Muslim population in governance, the Qing also initiated policies aimed at assimilating this population, or at least its elite. The most critical aspect of these policies involved establishing an educational network in the Mandarin language, which had become the lingua franca of the Manchu-led Qing Empire. As Zuo Zongtang, the architect of the reconquest, noted, ‘if we wish to change their peculiar customs and assimilate them to our Chinese ways (huafeng), we must found free schools (yishu) and make the Muslim children read (Chinese) books, recognize characters, and understand spoken language.’²² In addition to reading and writing, the schools promoted Confucian thought as the de facto ideology of the empire. In the last years of the Qing Dynasty, this Confucian-based educational system was replaced in Xinjiang, as was the case in China proper, with a modernized scholastic system based on western concepts of science. However, neither the Confucian nor the new modern educational system succeeded in transforming the local population or even in attracting many Muslim students.²³

Thus, by the last years of the Qing Empire, which itself was becoming more Chinese than Manchu, its administration of Xinjiang appeared much more like colonialism. Indirect rule had been replaced by more invasive administrators from the colonial metropole, and conscious attempts were being made to assimilate the local population into Han culture. However, the region still remained a frontier colony that was only tenuously connected to the empire rather than a settler colony that could readily be absorbed into a future Chinese nation-state. The local population generally continued to live their lives as they had previously before the region had become a province. They mostly practiced their religion unfettered, spoke their native languages, had their own informal means of self-governance, practiced agriculture, and traded. They also maintained relations with other Muslims speaking closely related Turkic languages in the Russian Empire, and they frequently traveled to Russian territory to trade, and beyond for religious education and pilgrimage. In addition, they continued to develop and utilize their own educational systems, which co-existed alongside those created by the Qing. These systems included both the traditional religious education network associated with Islamic clergy and the more modernized Muslim schools based on the usul-i-jadid method that combined religious education with modern studies of literature, history, math, and science.²⁴

REPUBLICAN CHINA IN XINJIANG AND THE RISE OF MODERN UYGHUR NATIONALISM

The fall of the Qing Empire involved little of the revolutionary zeal that fueled the demise of other empires around the world during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The revolution was neither really anti-colonial, being driven by the dominant Han ethnic group, nor inspired by a disenfranchised class of citizens as in Russia. Furthermore, Republican China essentially inherited the territory of the Qing Empire, including its tenuous colonial appendages like Xinjiang and Tibet. In this sense, the fall of the Qing did not entirely mark a transition from ‘empire to nation-state,’ but a transition to a new concept of ‘national empire,’²⁵ While this was similar to the transition from the Tsarist Empire to the Soviet Union, unlike the USSR, Republican China did not acknowledge the excesses of its imperial predecessor or the rights to self-determination of those it had colonized.

Given that the ‘imperial form’ had not been jettisoned by the new state that replaced the Qing Empire, it is not surprising that the revolution of 1911 had little initial impact on the lives of the Muslims in the Uyghur homeland. This would change over time as the different Han administrators in charge of the region for Republican China would seek to control the lives of the local population with more zeal. Nonetheless, throughout the Republican period, the region would remain mostly a frontier appendage to the nascent Chinese nation-state, run by a series of Han governors with ambiguous relationships to central power, whose primary goal was maintaining control of the region, not integrating it into a larger modern China. At the same time, this period would witness the birth of Uyghur national consciousness, mostly established around the modern concept of anti-colonial self-determination and the desire among the region’s Muslims to differentiate themselves from the ruling Han people. Over the next several decades, this national awakening among the local Muslim population would lead to the establishment of two short-term para-states, which sought independence from China during the 1930s and 1940s respectively.

Early Republican rule’s continuity with Qing rule and the birth of modern Uyghur nationalism

The first Han administrator to run Xinjiang after the fall of the Qing was Yang Zengxin, who would rule the region until 1928. Most historians view Yang as an authoritarian ruler, who commanded loyalty and made the region into his own personal fiefdom.²⁶ However, he also modeled his mode of governance after early Qing rule in the region by deliberately limiting the state’s involvement in the lives of local Muslims. Yang sought to fulfill his duty of maintaining control over a frontier region, but he made little effort to integrate this region or its population into a new Republican China. As Yang is cited as writing, ‘if I am able to maintain one portion (of the country), and the (central) government is able to maintain another, is this not for the best?’²⁷ Part of his maintenance of this region included being particularly cognizant of the potential for revolt and foreign intervention. He especially worried that the USSR could have designs on Xinjiang, as it had demonstrated its ability to do so in Mongolia, and he was well aware that the local Muslim population could be mobilized for such ends. Yang’s fears were also fueled by an awakening at the time of modern Uyghur nationalism, which was substantially influenced by the USSR’s Leninist ideals of anti-colonial national liberation.

The formation of a modern Uyghur nationalism was a gradual process, which involved numerous influences from abroad, some of which appealed more to some Uyghurs than to others.²⁸ While this process had arguably already begun in the late Qing period, when it was highly influenced by Muslim reformist ideas from around the world, it gained significant momentum after the Bolshevik revolution and the establishment of a movement of Muslims who had left the Ghulja region for Russia in the 1880s and were now concerned with achieving the recognized status of ‘nationality’ within the Soviet Union during the 1920s.

Prior to the 1920s, there was a sense of collective identity among the settled Turkic Muslims in and from the Uyghur homeland, which was based on a shared sense of space, history, customs, language, and the oral transmission of texts, not to mention shaped by their obvious difference from Han and Manchu administrators.²⁹ However, this had yet to be expressed in the form of modern nationhood, with its related concept of the nation-state, and the ethnonym ‘Uyghur,’ which referred to an ancient Turkic empire in the region, was not in use at this time. The national designation of ‘Uyghur’ was established by Uyghur Bolshevik sympathizers, in what is today Kazakhstan, during the first years of Soviet rule and recognized by the USSR in the 1920s.³⁰ Of particular concern to Yang was that this nascent nation’s ideology was based in Leninist anti-imperialist revolution and celebrated the history of Uyghur resistance to Chinese rule as the centerpiece of its historiography.³¹ These developments apparently worried Yang enough for him to establish a consulate in Soviet Central Asia in order to track these developments and their influence on the many seasonal workers from southern Xinjiang who worked there intermittently.³²

Despite his concerns, Yang never had to contend with a serious revolt from the Muslims of Xinjiang. In fact, the one Muslim revolt he actively suppressed was not against his rule or against Chinese rule more generally, but against the abuses of power of a local Muslim prince in Kumul, who was infamous for the abusive treatment of his subjects.³³ In general, Yang had mostly maintained the status quo in the region during an extremely turbulent period. However, he had made many enemies among other Han administrators in the process, and he was eventually removed from office by assassination in dramatic fashion carried out by waiters at his own dinner party.³⁴

Paternalistic control in Republican rule and local resistance

Yang was succeeded by his disciple, Jin Suren, as governor of Xinjiang in 1928. While Jin adopted many of Yang’s policies, he seemed less attuned than his predecessor to the potential ramifications of discontent among the local Muslims. Like Yang, he fostered a group of loyal Han administrators, who together benefited from a system of graft, but he was greedier than Yang and failed to spread the wealth sufficiently among the local Muslim elite.³⁵ Furthermore, he instituted an even stauncher security apparatus than did Yang, and established a system of internal passports that kept watch on the movements of the local population.³⁶ Additionally, he levied large taxes on agricultural production as well as on the butchering of animals, encouraged state-led land reclamation projects, and forbade local residents to make the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca.³⁷ Such encroachments on the daily lives of the local Muslim population would inevitably prove fatal for Jin, who experienced significant resistance from local Muslims throughout his brief rule.

The first substantial signs of resistance by the local Muslim population to Jin’s rule occurred in the Kumul Khanate in 1931. The Khanate was a holdover administrative unit from Qing times where Kumul’s Muslim population enjoyed nominal self-rule implemented by a hereditary monarchy, which Yang had maintained. While Kumul’s Muslims had revolted against their own Khan in 1912, they still preferred their situation compared to that elsewhere in the region since, among other things, they were able to institute limits on Han land ownership.³⁸ When the Khan who had served under Yang died in 1930, Jin made moves to abolish the Khanate and establish more control over its territory. However, the dead Khan’s son and successor, with the assistance of several key figures in his royal court, resisted this decision and led a substantial revolt in the region.

While Jin sought to quickly and violently suppress this revolt, the rebels were able to solicit support from a variety of quarters, and the rebellion spread beyond Kumul until, ‘by the end of 1932, every corner of Xinjiang was aflame.’³⁹ To deal with this situation, Jin had received military reinforcements from decommissioned soldiers who had fought in Manchuria and came to the region via the Soviet Union. At the head of this new army supporting Jin was Sheng Shicai, a ruthless fighter with grand political ambitions. Sheng would lead the effort against the Muslim rebels, but he also simultaneously orchestrated a coup against Jin that led to Sheng’s de facto leadership of the province and to his eventual assumption of the position of regional governor.

In taking over de facto power, Sheng inherited a region that was in open revolt on all fronts from the local Muslim population. As a result, he allegedly signed an agreement with Khoja Niyaz Haji, one of the original organizers of the revolt in Kumul, that divided Xinjiang between a southern Muslim-led government and a northern one retained by the provincial administration.⁴⁰ This paved the way for the founding of the first Eastern Turkistan Republic (ETR) in southern Xinjiang in 1933.

While Uyghur nationalists often portray the First ETR as the original manifestation of a modern Uyghur nation-state, historian David Brophy has rightfully challenged this characterization.⁴¹ While some of the founders of the First ETR were influenced by the Soviet-born Uyghur nationalist ideology, the resultant para-state was built more on its population’s common identity as Muslim Turks. However, it would be equally erroneous to characterize this state as exclusively religious in nature as other studies have suggested.⁴² Rather, the political movement that formed this para-state brought together a broad array of indigenous intellectuals inspired by a variety of ideologies of self-determination that were popular at this time, including modernist Muslim nationalists inspired by the Jadid movement, Leninist anti-imperialist liberationists, and Islamic traditionalists. What united them was a desire to remove Chinese rule of their homeland and to establish an indigenously ruled state. This motivation was especially evident in the more religiously oriented rebels from Khotan, who called for the removal of Han residents, the abolishment of the use of the Chinese language, and the renaming of Chinese place-names in the local Turkic vernacular.⁴³

The First ETR was to be very short-lived, never attracting significant external support. In the end, the Soviet Union assisted Sheng’s military to repel Dungan (Hui) attempts to take the provincial capital of Urumqi, an act which sent the Dungan armies south to sack the still fragile ETR based in Kashgar, which essentially fell by March 1934.⁴⁴ However, the legacy of the First ETR would be incredibly important to subsequent developments in this region, including to this day. In addition to its importance for the subsequent evolution of politics in Republican Xinjiang, this para-state has served in recent years as the centerpiece for the historiography of Uyghur religious nationalists. In this role, the Republic is presented as not only an effort to liberate the region from Chinese rule, but also to liberate it from the rule of infidels.

Sheng Shicai’s Sovietization of Xinjiang

When the dust had settled on the wreckage of the First ETR, Sheng Shicai had emerged as the governor of Xinjiang, and the Soviet Union as his patron. Although Sheng remained a representative of the Nationalist government in Nanjing in name, in spirit it has often been said that he was more loyal to Moscow and the Soviet Communist Party, of which he became a member.⁴⁵ While much of the Tarim Basin initially remained under the control of the Dungan armies that toppled the ETR and were loyal to Nanjing, Sheng was able to employ his Soviet patronage to establish a powerful state in the north and eventually regain control of the Tarim Basin by 1937.

Initially, Sheng dealt with the discontent of local Muslims in the region by instituting the first instance of a Chinese administration adopting accommodationist policies towards the Uyghurs that were based in Leninist ideals of anti-imperialism.⁴⁶ The new policies sought to engage the local Muslim people on their own terms but also promoted a culture of socialist modernism as had been the case in Soviet Central Asia following the Bolshevik revolution. To accomplish this, the Soviets provided Sheng with much guidance through Soviet advisors, many of whom were ethnic Uyghurs, and promoted the inclusion of local Uyghurs with Soviet sympathies in Sheng’s administration.⁴⁷ Additionally, the Soviets invited nearly 30,000 Uyghurs from Xinjiang to study at Soviet universities where they were completely indoctrinated in the full range of Marxist-Leninist ideology, especially as it related to Soviet nationalities policy.⁴⁸

With this assistance, Sheng created something akin to a Soviet-inspired multi-ethnic state in Xinjiang. He co-opted much of the leadership of the First ETR, including its president Khoja Niyaz Haji, into the government, and he greatly increased the number of Muslims in his administration of the Uyghur homeland, based on the experience of the Soviet korenizatsiia (or nativization) policy.⁴⁹ The Soviet Uyghur advisors in the region also pushed for the adoption of the Uyghur ethnonym by Sheng’s administration and succeeded in having it officially recognized in 1935 as a descriptor for the region’s largest Turkic-speaking population.⁵⁰ This official recognition of the Uyghur nation was accompanied by a variety of efforts, supported by Soviet Uyghur advisors, to establish a narrative of this nation’s history and literary development as well as by campaigns to raise the profile of the Uyghur language.

If these accommodationist policies were likely welcomed by many of the local Muslims, and especially by those with pro-Soviet sympathies, other policies that Sheng borrowed from the Soviet Union, such as the bolstering of his secret police, would be less welcome. In general, Sheng’s administration was even more dedicated to suppressing dissent than those of his predecessors, employing security organs with direct links to Stalin’s infamous NKVD, whose aggressive tactics it generally adopted.

Sensing a resurgence of Uyghur religious nationalism in the Kashgar region, which Sheng worried might lead to renewed revolt, the provincial administration sought to suppress it, purging some of the local Uyghur leaders, taking control of the local newspaper, and seeking to bring teachers from the Soviet Union into local schools.⁵¹ These restrictive policies and purges of local elites resulted in yet another revolt in 1937 in Kashgar and Khotan, which was orchestrated by some of the remnants of the leadership from the First ETR.⁵² With Soviet assistance, including troops and air support, Sheng quickly suppressed the revolt, setting in motion a massive purge of Uyghurs from Sheng’s administration and the targeting of other Uyghur nationalists throughout the province. This campaign coincided with, and adopted the language of, Stalin’s own purges as Sheng began mass executions of Uyghurs throughout the region, justified by accusations of Trotskyism and associations with foreign imperialists just as was happening across the border in the USSR.⁵³ Subsequently, Sheng virtually obliterated the Uyghur elite and intelligentsia and sought to recruit an entirely new and more loyal group of native intellectuals and officials.⁵⁴

Soviet influence on Sheng continued to increase after the purges of 1937 and 1938, and Sheng allegedly even suggested to Stalin in 1941 that the USSR incorporate the Uyghur region into the Soviet Union.⁵⁵ However, a year later Sheng began a drastic change in his policy towards the USSR as he sought to cut ties with his patron. In 1942, Sheng ordered the arrest of some one hundred of the most prominent communists and Soviet sympathizers in the region, accusing them of plotting a conspiracy to take over the region and incorporate it into the USSR.⁵⁶ Simultaneously, Soviet cultural societies and institutions in the Uyghur region were closed, and thousands of local residents who had worked with Soviet advisors and workers or who had studied in the USSR were arrested for their links to the alleged conspiracy.⁵⁷

Thus, having just undergone a purge of alleged anti-Soviet elements, the Uyghur population was now subjected to a purge of its pro-Soviet elements. As a result, the attitudes of the local Muslim population had turned against Sheng. Feeling betrayed by Sheng, the Soviet Union saw an opportunity to utilize this dissatisfaction among the local Muslims as a means to topple Sheng himself. According to Russian scholar Valery Barmin, the Soviet Politburo had already discussed the option of creating a cross-border Uyghur resistance movement for this purpose in 1943.⁵⁸ However, with his Soviet patrons gone, Sheng had already lost much of his power and was not destined to stay in the province long enough to experience Soviet retribution. In 1944, he was removed from power and given a national-level position in China proper.

Even though Sheng was now gone, the Soviets continued their planning to undermine Republican China’s control of the Uyghur homeland. During 1943 and 1944, the USSR would disseminate propaganda among the Uyghur population to highlight the Han’s colonial rule over them and their homeland in an effort to incite revolt.⁵⁹ In the meantime, the Soviet Union was in discussions with local Uyghurs about supplying them with weapons and advice for a planned revolt in the northern region of Ghulja just across the Soviet border.

The Second ETR and the apex of Uyghur self-determination in modern China

In October 1944, the Soviets would help these rebels carry out a revolt that broke out in the three districts surrounding the northern city of Ghulja, a region once briefly controlled by the Russian Empire in the 1870s. Armed with Soviet weapons and assisted by Soviet advisors, this rebellion entered the city of Ghulja on 7 November where it declared the establishment of a second independent ETR on 12 November 1944.⁶⁰ Appearing to have aspirations of extending this new independent state to the entirety of the Uyghur homeland, it continued to fight Chinese troops throughout 1945, threatening to take the provincial capital of Urumqi by September of that year.⁶¹ It was at that point that the rebels’ Soviet patrons apparently intervened to stop their advance and proposed to broker peace talks between the rebels and the Guomindang (GMD). As a result of the peace talks, the GMD agreed to the establishment of a coalition government in the Uyghur region, which substantively involved the leaders of the ETR and gave them de facto control over the Ghulja region.

The Second ETR would exist in its de facto autonomous form throughout the rest of the 1940s, and it succeeded even more than its predecessor from the 1930s in establishing the symbols of modern nationhood. With Soviet assistance, it published journals, newspapers, and textbooks. It also made its own currency, had its own uniformed army, its own school system, and, of course, its own flag and national anthem.⁶² While, like the First ETR, this semi-autonomous state was formed explicitly as a multi-national polity, many Uyghurs have since viewed it as the prototype for a secular-based Uyghur nation-state, and its ethnic Uyghur leadership has entered the pantheon of Uyghur nationalist heroes.

Although the Soviet Union continued to sponsor and sought to control the actions and ideology of the Second ETR, it would be inaccurate to view it merely as a Soviet puppet state. Many of the local Uyghur supporters of the Second ETR saw the state as the first step towards an anti-colonial national liberation movement, and the state’s leadership often acted autonomously more in the interests of the local population than in those of their Soviet patrons. The content of media produced in the autonomous state frequently focused on topics related to Soviet socialism, but it also addressed issues related to the development of Uyghur nationalism and the role of Islam in social life, subjects that were no longer tolerated in the Soviet Union after the 1920s.⁶³

Perhaps in recognition of the power of the ETR to mobilize local Muslims, the GMD also empowered local Muslims in its administration of the region’s new coalition government. In particular, this included giving critical positions in the coalition government to three prominent Uyghur intellectuals who were sympathetic to the GMD: Isa Yüsüp Alptekin, Muhämmäd Imin Bughra, and Mäsud Sabri.⁶⁴ In addition, the GMD’s first governor of the new coalition government, Zhang Zhizhong, established locally elected councils in the region and mandated that the Uyghur language be used side-by-side with Chinese in government at all levels.⁶⁵

In many ways, the Xinjiang coalition government that existed from 1945 to 1949 represented the most accommodating administration to the region’s local Muslim population in modern history, including to this day. In this sense, it held great promise for a decolonized future of the relationship between modern China and the Uyghurs. Uyghurs had become intimately involved in the governance of their homeland and recognized as essentially equal citizens of China with the dominant Han, and a public debate among Uyghur politicians discussed the relative merits of independence and autonomy for the Uyghur homeland.⁶⁶ Emblematic of these accommodating policies, in 1947 Zhang resigned his post as governor and was succeeded by one of the three primary local Muslim GMD officials, Mäsud Sabri.

Mäsud’s brief leadership greatly empowered other Uyghur nationalists in the coalition government, leading to the increasing use of ‘Turkistan’ in place of ‘Xinjiang’ in official communications, the expansion of Uyghur language education, including new curricula that discussed the history of the Turkic people, and the further strengthening of the role of the Uyghur language in governance.⁶⁷ However, just like the brief period of accommodation experienced under Sheng Shicai, this new empowerment of indigenous Muslims was destined to be short-lived and reversed.

Once the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had seized control of Beijing in January 1949, the GMD leadership in the region knew that their days were numbered. As a result, Isa Yüsüp Alptekin and Muhämmäd Imin Bughra fled the country via Kashmir and finally found refuge in Turkey where they would lead a Uyghur nationalist movement in exile.⁶⁸ In August 1949, Moscow helped to broker a meeting between a CCP delegation and the core leadership of the ETR. It was agreed at this meeting that the ETR would help facilitate the entry of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) into the region and that the core leadership of the Republic would be invited to participate in the First Plenary Session of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference in Beijing.⁶⁹ The five leaders who left for Beijing via Kazakhstan allegedly all died in an airplane crash in Siberia en route to the conference on 27 August 1949.⁷⁰ Subsequently the ETR was dissolved, as was the provincial coalition government, as the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) established PRC rule in the region. The remaining local Muslim leadership of both the GMD and the ETR were left with the choices of declaring allegiance to the Chinese communists, fleeing the country, or being liquidated. Mäsud Sabri, who remained in the region in opposition to the communists, would be executed in 1951.

CHINESE COMMUNIST RULE AND THE BROKEN PROMISES OF ETHNIC AUTONOMY, 1949–1980

When the GMD authorities in the Uyghur region surrendered to the CCP in September 1949, the First Field Army of the PLA easily entered the region and took a leading role in setting up communist power in it by the end of the year. During the first years of communist rule, the PLA would play the role of occupying force in the region, which largely remained a frontier colonial appendage to the PRC as it had to Republican China. However, the transition from Republican rule to the PRC did translate into a fundamentally different approach to China’s polity and society, which would have vast ramifications for the Uyghur region’s status as a frontier colony. Maoist ideology advocated for a flattening of difference in society, which was also assumed to be anti-imperialist. As a result, initially the PRC sought to adopt the Soviet version of decolonization that had become known as ‘Soviet nationalities policy’ and integrate the Uyghur homeland as an integral part of a Chinese communist state. This would partially extend the accommodationist policies in the Uyghur region that had characterized the coalition government between the ETR and GMD and raise expectations for a new post-colonial reality in the region. However, these expectations would not be met as the PRC took a more assimilationist approach to the region in the late 1950s that would escalate throughout the 1960s and 1970s.

Initial accommodation and the role of the Soviet Union

The Soviet Union played an important role in encouraging these early accommodating policies, especially after the signing of the Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship, Alliance, and Mutual Assistance in 1950. This treaty allowed for a return of Soviet advisors and industries to the Uyghur region, as well as for the continued education of Uyghurs and other local populations from the region in the USSR. Soviet involvement in the region during this time likely also contributed to the decision to invite many Uyghurs and other local non-Han people, primarily former ETR officials, to take prominent roles in the CCP’s initial governance of the region. This also made demographic sense given that Uyghurs in 1949 still made up 75% of the region’s population in contrast to only 6% consisting of Han.⁷¹ With many Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims playing a prominent role in governance in the region, state schools and universities with Uyghur-language instruction were created, and Uyghur language publishing expanded.

Soviet advice to the CCP also likely played a critical role in the creation of regions of ethnic autonomy inside China that appeared similar in structure to the Soviet Socialist Republics of the USSR. In the Uyghur region, this led to the creation of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) in 1955.⁷² While the establishment of the XUAR marked a recognition of the Uyghurs’ attachment to, and historical role in, this region, it stopped short of the independence theoretically allotted to the Soviet Republics, which had the constitutional right to secede from the USSR if they chose. The XUAR and other autonomous regions in the PRC were never given such a right and instead were only allotted ‘theoretical autonomy.’ Furthermore, not only was secession not provided as a constitutional right, but was condemned as a serious danger to the state’s success. This condemnation was achieved through a feat of ‘double-speak,’ which labeled all anti-colonial liberation movements inside China as ‘pro-imperialist.’ As an editorial in a state paper declared in 1951, ‘at this point, any nationality movement that seeks to separate from the Chinese People’s Republic (CPR) to become independent is reactionary since, objectively considered, it would undermine the interests of the various nationalities, and hence would work to the advantage of imperialism.’⁷³

While Soviet involvement in the establishment of socialist rule in the region helped to extend some of the accommodationist policies from the coalition government of the late 1940s, it also likely played a role in early attempts to transform the social life of Uyghurs. Rian Thum has suggested that the PRC, likely with Soviet guidance, quickly moved to dismantle the religious institutions of the region, outlawing traditional Muslim courts, subsuming clergy into a state managed system, and redistributing land from the Waqf system that had used land trusts to support mosques, madrassas, and shrines throughout the region.⁷⁴ However, given that these radical measures were taken simultaneously with land reform that provided Uyghur agriculturalists, who had previously worked rented lands, with their own property, the mass of the local population appears not to have resisted the changes.

The end of accommodation and the Sino-Soviet split

Ironically, the period of CCP accommodation in the XUAR began to end shortly after autonomy was declared in 1955. Already by this time, Soviet influence in the region was on the wane as tensions increased between Mao and Khrushchev. As a result, the PRC quickly began reducing Soviet influence in the XUAR, and by 1957, it had stopped the importation of books and journals from the Soviet Union entirely, including those in the Uyghur language.⁷⁵ Additionally, the reform of the Uyghur alphabet into Cyrillic to match the Uyghur language in the USSR and allow for shared textbooks across the border, which began in early 1956, was halted, and a new plan was adopted to create a Latin alphabet for the Uyghur language in China to be introduced by 1960.⁷⁶

As the PRC was gradually purging the Uyghur region of Soviet influences, it also began implementing the ‘Hundred Flowers Campaign’ in 1956. Encouraging people, and especially Party members, to openly criticize Party policies with which they disagreed, the campaign suggested the desire to involve citizens in governance, but it would ultimately be used to attack those who spoke out. In 1957, this campaign was quickly followed by an ‘Anti-Rightist Rectification Campaign,’ which punished those people who had criticized the state in ways the CCP deemed ideologically inappropriate. In the Uyghur region, this ‘Anti-Rightist’ campaign translated into a purge of nationalists among the local Muslim population, including many former ETR officials, and those purged were publicly criticized and sentenced to forced labor. According to one Chinese Party historian, during this campaign, 1,612 cadres among the local Muslims of the Uyghur region were labeled ‘local nationalists,’ the majority of them being forcibly sent to labor camps for re-education.⁷⁷ As a result, it was becoming clear that the Soviet-inspired partially accommodationist policies of the early 1950s were coming to an end.

During this time, the PRC was also settling more Han in the region, helping to alter its demographics. Borrowing loosely from the history of Qing military-run farms in the region, the PRC established the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps (XPCC), or Bingtuan, in 1954.⁷⁸ This institution allowed the PRC to quickly move de-mobilized soldiers from the PLA and surrendered ones from the GMD to the XUAR, employing them both as production corps in the service of agriculture, making them de facto settlers, and as a militia ensuring security. This institution has remained critical to PRC policies in the XUAR to this day.⁷⁹ In many ways, the XPCC has long served as the symbol of the CCP’s colonial approach to the region, creating a segregated system for settlement and economic exploitation while simultaneously providing an occupying military force.

In addition to the Han being sent to work on the XPCC, as many as two million Han came to the region fleeing famine caused by the Great Leap Forward (GLF) during the late 1950s and early 1960s.⁸⁰ However, the GLF’s impact on the Uyghurs and their homeland went beyond this influx of Han settlers to the region. Instituting the collectivization of agriculture, the GLF likely represented the most concerted effort to disrupt the daily life of the mass of Uyghurs in the region up until that time. As Rian Thum has suggested, the GLF ‘not only brought economic disaster and, in many cases, starvation, but also tore apart Uyghur social structures’ as it transformed village life.⁸¹ While the formal institutions of religion had already been dismantled during the early 1950s, the GLF also initiated the first state policies to discourage Uyghurs as individuals from practicing religion.⁸² Furthermore, the creation of collective farms offered opportunities for more general attempts to assimilate Uyghurs into a Han-dominated PRC culture, as state slogans increasingly discussed the necessity of the ‘blending of nationalities’ for the success of socialism.⁸³

In response to these increasingly repressive policies, many Uyghurs sought ways to flee their homeland during the later 1950s and early 1960s. The largest group fled to the Soviet Union, which had accepted Uyghur immigrants since the early 1950s as part of a larger campaign to repopulate the USSR in the aftermath of World War II.⁸⁴ By the late 1950s, the number of Uyghurs leaving their homeland for the Soviet Union increased significantly, and by 1961, it had reached a fever pitch as it became clear that Sino-Soviet relations were headed towards a conflict. In the spring of 1962, Soviet authorities had virtually opened their border with the XUAR in the Republic of Kazakhstan to any local Muslims who were willing to leave, and local CCP authorities appeared to be complicit in this as they provided buses leaving Ghulja for the Soviet border.⁸⁵ When it was announced on 29 May 1962 that the buses would no longer leave for the border, many Uyghurs who held tickets for the bus panicked, assuming that the border had already closed. A protest ensued that was allegedly suppressed with gunfire, resulting in scores of Uyghur deaths.⁸⁶ In the wake of this disturbance, some 67,000 Uyghurs and many ethnic Kazakhs fled towards the border and were allowed to leave over the course of the next several days.⁸⁷ Shortly after this incident, the Sino-Soviet border was officially closed to all travel and trade in 1963.

At the same time as these Uyghurs were arriving in the USSR, the Uyghur region of China was closing off from the rest of the world. Along the Soviet border in the Ili Valley, which had long served as the entry point of Russian and Soviet influence to the region, military-run XPCC farms were set up as a buffer zone, and the residents of the region were denied the ability to leave the country.⁸⁸ As China isolated itself from the Soviet Union, a power struggle ensued at the upper echelons of the CCP as a result of the debacle of the GLF. In this struggle, the regional Party Secretary of the Uyghur region, Wang Enmao, pulled back from the mass collectivization effort and followed the new economic policies of Mao Zedong’s rivals. However, this was soon to end as Mao unleashed the chaotic Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (GPCR) throughout the country in 1966 as a last-ditch effort to maintain his control of the CCP.

The chaos of the Cultural Revolution and its assimilationist policies

Most of the scholarship on the GPCR in the Uyghur homeland has focused on the political struggles between Red Guard youth who had come to the region to challenge the power of long-standing Party leader Wang Enmao.⁸⁹ These political struggles certainly impacted those Uyghur officials and intellectuals who had remained within the CCP in 1966, but the impact was somewhat unevenly distributed on the majority of Uyghurs due to the chaos that surrounded this period in PRC history. Nonetheless, the GPCR did involve an unprecedented effort to assimilate Uyghurs into a Han-dominated socialist culture and resulted in an exponential increase of Han settlers in the region.

Given that a major thrust of this youth-propelled Cultural Revolution was attacking the three ‘olds’ (old ideas, old customs, and old habits), it was inevitable that the many zealous Han youth who came to the region during this time to promote revolution would also attack Islam and Uyghur culture. There were reports in 1966 that Red Guards had targeted Islam extensively in the region, closing mosques, burning religious books, and arresting suspected Muslim clergy.⁹⁰ Additionally, there is anecdotal evidence that efforts were made to ban indigenous forms of dress and force all Uyghurs to wear clothing modeled after the PLA uniform, to turn mosques into pig farms as a means of deliberately desecrating Islam, and to force Uyghur women to wear Chinese hairstyles.⁹¹ Finally, most of the secular Uyghur elite who still remained in the country, including academics and artists, were sent to labor camps for ‘re-education.’

However, the extent and impact of these assimilationist actions are less clear given the chaotic ways in which power was wielded at this time. For example, the fact that schools virtually ceased operating during the GPCR meant that many Uyghurs emerged from the period illiterate and unable to speak the Chinese language. As one Uyghur recounted, whom I interviewed in the 1990s and who had been a teenager in Ghulja at this time, he mostly sought to stay at home with his family and avoid the ongoing political struggles and street fights that he interpreted as a Han matter. While this may have characterized the experience of many Uyghurs, a recent dissertation on the impact of the GPCR on Uyghurs clearly demonstrates that the Red Guards were also successful in recruiting Uyghur youth, especially from the educated urban populations in the Uyghur region.⁹²

Regardless of the extent or impact of the GPCR’s assimilationist aims vis-à-vis the Uyghurs, it is clear that this chaotic political campaign left an impression on all Uyghurs who lived through the period. The XPCC settlements had evolved into bases for Red Guard youth from China proper who had dedicated themselves to transforming the rural population of the region into modern socialists.⁹³ While authorities in Urumqi allegedly sought to limit the impact of such groups of radical youth in the countryside so as not to incite another Uyghur rebellion, it is likely that these Red Guards did succeed in subjecting many rural Uyghurs to humiliating persecution for their traditions and religious beliefs.

In this context, it is not surprising that violent Uyghur resistance to Chinese rule once again emerged during this period. Drawing from the experience of the Second ETR and at least tacitly supported by the USSR, an insurgency allegedly calling itself the Eastern Turkistan People’s Revolutionary Party (ETPRP) reportedly emerged at this time to fight for an independent Eastern Turkistan state in the Uyghur region based on Soviet styled socialism.⁹⁴ Allegedly having existed between 1968 and 1970, the ETPRP reportedly carried out numerous attacks during the GPCR before being defeated in a battle with PLA troops in the foothills of the mountains near Kashgar.⁹⁵ According to recent PRC sources, the organization was liquidated in 1970 when local authorities arrested close to 6,000 Uyghurs accused of being involved in it.⁹⁶

The Cultural Revolution likely altered the lives of Uyghurs more than any periods of modern Chinese rule that predate it. It successfully destroyed many Uyghur cultural and religious institutions, temporarily curtailed the use of the Uyghur language in official documents, broke up communities and social capital, and fostered an uneducated generation of Uyghurs who had no sustained access to standard education. It also facilitated a major demographic shift in the region. Between 1953 and 1967, the population of Han had already increased almost six-fold from 300,000 to 1,791,000, but, by 1982, the Han population had exploded to 5,287,000, almost equaling that of the Uyghurs in the region but mostly concentrated in the north of the region or on segregated XPCC bases.⁹⁷ However, even this period’s extreme policies, demographic shift, and interventions in the daily lives of Uyghurs had failed in truly integrating this region into China proper. The distance of the region from the rest of China and the legacy of colonial difference seemed to limit the Cultural Revolution’s impact on Uyghurs in important ways, including shielding some Uyghur populations from the movement’s most radical intentions. This was particularly true for the rural Uyghur population in the southern oases of the Tarim Basin.

UYGHURS AND THE XUAR IN THE REFORM PERIOD, 1980–2001: ACCOMMODATION, DEVELOPMENT, AND THE INTENSIFICATION OF SETTLER COLONIALISM

When Deng Xiaoping emerged as leader of China after the end of the Cultural Revolution, there was yet another opportunity to decolonize the relationship between the PRC and the Uyghurs. Deng’s reform agenda had substantially changed the state’s attitude towards this region and its role in the state’s development. The PRC had shifted from isolating itself from outside influences to engaging the outside world, especially economically. In this context, the Uyghur homeland became a potentially important region geo-strategically, which could serve as a bridge to engage countries to the west and south-west for which the region had long served as a buffer zone. As a result, the PRC was to initiate a gradual project of integrating the Uyghur homeland and its population as a bridge to, rather than a buffer from, states bordering on China.⁹⁸ It was probably during this period that the region became more integrated into a larger China than during any time prior in modern Chinese history. For the first time in the history of modern China, the state would have the capacity and resources to focus on integrating the Uyghur homeland into a larger Chinese polity and society, and it would likewise have more motivation to do so given the region’s emerging geostrategic significance. The PRC had a variety of options at its disposal to do so, including engagement with Uyghurs as the indigenous population of the region as well as forcibly seeking to assimilate them and colonizing their homeland. After briefly flirting with the former, it would decide to adopt the latter.

The 1980s and the last attempts at accommodation

During the early reform period, the PRC ostensibly initiated its first policies of accommodation vis-à-vis the Uyghurs since the 1950s, raising hopes in the region that the PRC’s relationship to the Uyghurs and their homeland might be decolonized and result in real ethnic autonomy. Apparently at the urging of Hu Yaobang, the youngest of the reformist officials in the CCP Central Committee at the time, the PRC adopted a resolution in 1980 calling for cultural and economic reforms in the XUAR and allowing for a substantial number of the Han officials and XPCC members stationed in the region to return home to China proper.⁹⁹ The results were quickly felt in the region as the Uyghur alphabet was returned to a modified form of Arabic writing, Uyghur schools and university sections were re-opened, mosques were re-established, and there was an explosion in Uyghur language publishing. Hu Yaobang would subsequently rise to the positions of Party Chairman and General Secretary of the CCP in 1981 and 1982 respectively, ushering in a period of increased freedom in the Uyghur homeland and elsewhere in the PRC for the next six years.

This period of accommodation had already started narrowing in its scope by 1987 with the purging of Hu Yaobang, and it narrowed even more with the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. Ultimately, reforms were halted prior to granting any increased ethnic autonomy or facilitating a regional demographic shift in Uyghurs’ favor. Still, the 1980s allowed for a Uyghur cultural renaissance and for a re-emergence of Islam in the region, which would raise Uyghur expectations for the future and reverse most of the cultural erasure that had transpired during the Cultural Revolution. When I first visited the XUAR in January 1990, the impact of the previous decade of accommodating policies was clearly visible. Although many rural Uyghurs continued to wear the coats and hats styled after the PLA’s uniform that were popularized during the Cultural Revolution, small mosques had popped up everywhere, and public displays of religiosity were common, especially in the south of the region. The revived Arabic script for the Uyghur language was now also visible everywhere, and the Latin alphabet that had been propagated during the Cultural Revolution was virtually non-existent.

Furthermore, many of the Uyghur intellectuals and religious scholars who had spent time in labor camps and prisons during the Cultural Revolution had been released and were allowed to teach and publish again. While few of these intellectuals dared to write standard history books, many did write historical novels, some of which discussed the periods of the First and Second ETRs and others that asserted the Uyghurs’ indigeneity to the region.¹⁰⁰ Additionally, religious scholars who had been released from prison opened informal schools and began once again propagating Islam on their own terms without scrutiny from the state.

Many Uyghurs who lived through the 1980s to this day call this time the ‘Golden Period’ in recent Uyghur life, remembering it for the hope it provided for a different future and a different China. In retrospect, if these accommodating policies had been sustained, it is likely that Uyghurs would have more readily integrated with Chinese society during the 1990s, especially if the PRC had recognized the XUAR as the Uyghurs’ homeland and had instituted substantive ethnic autonomy there. While the accommodations of the 1980s once again stopped short of such policies that could have decolonized the relationship between the PRC and Uyghurs, the cultural liberties and religious freedom they did afford to the local population would be difficult to reverse.

The 1990s: between settler colonialism and integration

If, during the 1980s, the PRC sought to integrate the Uyghur region and its population into a reforming PRC through accommodation, in the 1990s, this integration would mostly be promoted through economic opportunity. Indeed, the economic growth of the PRC under Deng’s reforms brought Uyghurs new opportunities, and many took advantage of being able to open businesses or even travel abroad to do trading. However, political space was simultaneously tightening as Uyghur publishing and music came under more scrutiny from censors, and religious freedoms were severely curtailed. These reversals of civil liberties would combine with the hope created by the fall of the Soviet Union and the creation of independent states in Central Asia to increase Uyghur calls for self-determination over the course of the decade, at times being articulated violently. As a result, the PRC would institute a series of campaigns to attack signs of Uyghur resistance in the region that, in many ways, overshadowed the PRC campaign to develop the region and integrate it more into Deng’s vision for a new China. This interplay between Uyghur resistance and corresponding state repression would begin almost immediately at the outset of the decade.

In April 1990, a major disturbance broke out in a rural area of the XUAR called Baren township near the southern city of Kashgar. Although the details of the ‘Baren incident’ remain unclear, the event ended in the occupation of local government buildings for nearly three days until Chinese military and security forces were able to take back the buildings and either kill or arrest the Uyghurs who had occupied them. Some reports suggest that the violence that broke out in Baren was spontaneous, occurring after the Chinese military clashed with some 200 Uyghur demonstrators protesting against recently applied limits on the number of births allotted to minority families.¹⁰¹ Other reports, including official Chinese sources, maintain that the incident was a premeditated attempt to overthrow state control of this small rural area by a religiously oriented pro-independence group calling itself the East Turkistan Islamic Party (ETIP).¹⁰²

The actual truth may lie somewhere in between. There are credible accounts that the disturbance was initiated when a group of young religious Uyghurs began a protest regarding a variety of PRC policies targeting Muslim beliefs. However, there is also credible evidence that the leader of this protest, Zäydin Yüsüp, had indeed created an organization by the name of ETIP that intended to wage an armed struggle to liberate Uyghurs from Chinese rule and had been stockpiling stolen weapons for this purpose. When the protest was attacked by security forces, the members of ETIP who organized it were ready to respond with armed resistance.

The combination of an ideology of self-determination with Islamic religiosity apparent in the Baren incident raised fears in the government that Uyghurs may be organizing a religiously inspired violent resistance movement to Chinese rule. These concerns of the government were amplified two years later when two buses were blown up in the city of Urumqi.¹⁰³ While there are few details available about these bombings, there was evidence that they were organized by Uyghurs who had studied with the same informal religious teacher as had those involved in the Baren incident.

These worries about Uyghur resistance to Chinese rule were exacerbated by the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991. This event sparked fear throughout the CCP that the PRC could face a similar fate to the now defunct USSR, but it sparked particular fear amongst those CCP officials responsible for governing the Uyghur homeland. Already in the late 1980s, the opening of the Sino-Soviet border had allowed Uyghurs to reunite with family members who had fled to the USSR in the 1950s and early 1960s. Thus, many Uyghurs from China had witnessed the twilight of Soviet power, the fall of communism, and the emergence of Central Asian nation-states, and they had done so in the company of Uyghur nationalists who had once fought against Chinese armies to achieve similar goals in their homeland during the 1940s. For many Uyghurs, these events renewed hope of attaining independent statehood. As one Uyghur I met in the XUAR in 1994 noted plainly, ‘now there is a Kazakhstan, a Kyrgyzstan, and an Uzbekistan, where is Uyghurstan?’ While there is no evidence that such sentiments had led to a substantial organized Uyghur resistance, the PRC was concerned that it might.

As a result, the PRC security campaign in the XUAR, which had been initiated after the Baren incident, intensified in 1991 with the fall of the USSR. This campaign targeted Uyghur expressions of nationalism as well as Uyghurs’ religious revival under the guise of combating ‘separatism’ and ‘unsanctioned religious activity.’ Through this campaign, between 1990 and 1995, security forces arrested some 1,831 Uyghurs under suspicion of nationalist and religious sentiments, claiming they were members of ‘separatist counter-revolutionary organizations, illegal organizations, and reactionary gangs.’¹⁰⁴ Additionally, the state created a strict process of vetting for Muslim clergy that required regular political exams testing their loyalty to the PRC, and closed many of the smaller community mosques that had been built during the 1980s.¹⁰⁵

While this crackdown on Uyghur dissent and religion appeared to be reactive to Baren and the fall of the USSR, it was not until 1996 and the leaking of ‘Document No. 7’ that it would become clear that the PRC’s strategy for suppressing Uyghur religiosity and calls for self-determination was systematic. This document, the contents of which were allegedly resolutions from a high-level Party meeting, laid out a strategy that simultaneously sought to integrate Uyghurs and their homeland more solidly into the PRC while eliminating what the state considered to be ‘separatism’ and ‘unsanctioned religious activity.’ On one hand, the document instructed officials to ‘speed up economic development and improve the life of people,’ referring to economic construction, reform, and China’s ‘open-door policy’ as the ‘bases of maintaining stability in Xinjiang.’¹⁰⁶ On the other hand, it mandated aggressive security measures targeting Uyghur dissent, which it alleged was supported by ‘international counter-revolutionary forces led by the United States of America.’¹⁰⁷

In addition to requiring a stronger and more active presence of military and security organs in the Uyghur region, this document also advocated limiting the spread of ‘separatist ideas,’ which the PRC viewed as being at least partially related to independent religious activity. Thus, the document mandated a strict regulation of religious observation in the region, including the curbing of construction for new mosques and the closing of informal religious schools and ‘Qur’an studies meetings.’¹⁰⁸ It also called for enhanced surveillance of Uyghurs and the media they consumed, especially in the south of the region where it suggested there was a need to ‘establish individual files’ on Uyghurs suspected of ‘unsanctioned religious activities’ or of harboring self-determination aspirations.¹⁰⁹

Despite, or perhaps in part due to, the extensive control measures called for by ‘Document No. 7,’ another major disturbance broke out in the region in February 1997 in the northern town of Ghulja near the Kazakhstan border. Although accounts of this event are contradictory, it appears to have begun with a protest by Uyghurs against limits on religious observation, and it spiraled out of control after security forces clashed with protestors, leading to multiple casualties.¹¹⁰ The PRC reaction was again very heavy-handed, and the town was put under curfew and its transport connections to the rest of the region cut off for two weeks.¹¹¹

Less than three weeks after the ‘Ghulja incident,’ three bombs exploded on public buses in the capital city of Urumqi, which killed nine and seriously injured twenty-eight people.¹¹² While no specific organization took credit for the bombings, and little details about the incident are available, it occurred on the day of memorial services for the recently deceased Deng Xiaoping, suggesting political motivation. These violent events in Ghulja and Urumqi led to a renewed region-wide crackdown on Uyghurs that was much more intense than others during the early 1990s.¹¹³ The crackdown resulted in countless arrests and further restrictions on Uyghur religious behavior, which was now limited to men over eighteen at state-sanctioned mosques. At the same time, the PRC also began to cut off the cross-border ties between China’s Uyghurs and those in Central Asia and used the newly established Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) to ensure that Central Asian security organs would silence the political activity of the Uyghurs living in their countries.¹¹⁴

This extreme crackdown on dissent and closure of access to Uyghurs outside the PRC provided a new impetus among young Uyghurs in northern urban areas to follow state-prescribed paths towards integration into the PRC’s Han-dominant culture.¹¹⁵ Seeing few other available options, many such youth made the decision to study in Chinese-language schools and to pursue careers that might break the ethnic segregation between Han and Uyghurs, while others immersed themselves in Islam as a means of resisting assimilation into Han culture.¹¹⁶ However, few of the clear majority of Uyghurs who lived in rural regions, especially in the south, were even provided opportunities for integration, finding themselves in constant conflict with local security organs.

As the crackdown in the wake of the Ghulja events and the Urumqi bombings expanded over the following three years, violence in the region also increased. Gardner Bovingdon documents approximately 38 incidents of violence that took place in the Uyghur region between February 1997 and the beginning of 2001, but it is striking that most of these incidents of violence can be explained as attacks on the police and security organs, which were spearheading the crackdown and the frenzied search for ‘separatists’ in the region.¹¹⁷ The few instances that did not involve violence against police were mostly assassinations of local religious clergy who had become the face of religious regulation in the region and a few bombings utilizing home-made explosives, about which virtually no details are available. Even more noticeable is that reports of violent incidents in the region virtually disappear in 2000 and 2001.

In retrospect, the 1990s represented a period when the PRC sought to integrate Uyghurs and their homeland more solidly into the state, but without undertaking the accommodations to the local population required to incentivize such integration. Having found the power of market economics, the government presumed that economic liberalization would erase the over two centuries of colonial relations that had fueled tension in the region. The Chinese state seemed to hope that Uyghurs would be satisfied to integrate into a new China where ‘to get rich is glorious’ and assimilate into a Han dominant culture without any recognition of their unique relationship to their homeland and cultural roots. Indeed, during this time, a portion of urban Uyghurs in the north did get rich, and some of them, especially in Urumqi, sought to integrate into a newly reformed PRC by assimilating to a Han-dominant culture. However, others, especially in the south where economic opportunities were minimal, viewed economic liberalization as a new means of facilitating the region’s colonization and one that was more explicitly articulated as Han settler colonialism.

There were clear reasons for such an interpretation of Chinese policies at the time. By 2000, the Han who had left after the Cultural Revolution had been replaced by a new generation of migrants, maintaining the Han portion of the region’s population almost on par with that of the Uyghurs, representing 40.6% and 45.2% respectively.¹¹⁸ Unlike those Han who had been sent to the region during the Cultural Revolution, however, these new migrants were coming to the region voluntarily to take advantage of economic opportunities generated by development, increased resource extraction, and commerce with the neighboring former Soviet republics, suggesting that they were there to stay and would likely be followed by more. While these new migrants mostly settled in the north of the region, state policies, especially the establishment of a rail link from Urumqi to Kashgar in 1999, were already seeking ways to bring more Han migrants to the southern oases, which had remained mostly Uyghur in population.

If the region had long looked like a frontier colony of modern China, these new developments suggested the initial stages of an intensified settler colonialism where Uyghurs could eventually be overwhelmed. At the same time, the state was viciously attacking the Islamic faith among Uyghur believers, forcibly removing a portion of their identity and culture.¹¹⁹ Finally, it was clear that the PRC had completely stepped back from its promises in the 1980s to provide Uyghurs with more autonomy over their homeland, and the space for Uyghur political discourse had been mostly erased as any questioning of state policies became grounds for accusations of ‘separatism.’ With the declaration of a broad state development campaign to ‘Open Up the West’ at the end of the decade, these characteristics of settler colonization would only increase, especially in the southern oases of the Tarim Basin, where they would meet with increased resistance from the local Uyghur majority.

FROM FRONTIER COLONY TO SETTLER COLONY?

The Uyghurs have long had a contentious relationship with modern Chinese states that originates from a history of conquest and colonialism. In itself, these colonial origins do not set this relationship apart from majority-minority ethnic relations in a host of post-colonial states which began as colonies around the world. However, what does make the relationship between modern China and Uyghurs unique is that these colonial origins have never been fully acknowledged by Chinese states as a precursor to initiating a process of decolonization or post-colonialism as has been the case in most other former colonies. As a result, the region is, in many ways, still a colony of the PRC today, an observation that will not come as a surprise to most Uyghurs reading this book.

During its more than two centuries of history, this colonial relationship has involved a variance in state strategies for controlling the region and its peoples, but these policies have never served to truly integrate the region and its people into modern China. Arguably, modern Chinese states, and especially the PRC, have long desired a more blatant absorption of this region and its population into their polities, but their efforts to do so have been consistently thwarted by a lack of state capacity as well as by distance and their own paternalistic attitudes of colonial difference towards the local population. As a result, the region, and especially its mostly Uyghur populated south, remained on the margins of modern Chinese society into the 1990s, akin to a frontier colony.

This tenuous position of the region in modern China allowed Uyghurs to maintain cultural distinctiveness and largely avoid assimilation. Thus, when the 1990s began, the Uyghur language was still far more prominent as a mode of communication amongst Uyghurs than was Chinese, Uyghur children were still afforded an education where Uyghur was the primary language of instruction, and Uyghurs were largely free to pursue their own cultural rituals and even to practice Islam. This relative cultural freedom had likely tempered Uyghur resistance to what had essentially been a long-term colonial occupation of the Uyghur homeland. However, events during the 1990s presented new challenges to this state of relative equilibrium. Suddenly, the PRC was more directly involved in the region than ever before, and state-led development was transforming the landscape, especially in the north, to look more like the rest of China. Simultaneously, the state was also rolling back the political, cultural, and religious freedom of Uyghurs in the name of fighting ‘separatism.’ In many ways, the Uyghur homeland was becoming more integrated into China than ever in the 250 years reviewed in this chapter, but, for many Uyghurs, this felt as if their homeland was under siege from a new stage of settler colonization, which was intended to marginalize, if not entirely displace, them.

It is worth stating that at the end of the 1990s, there still existed a policy option for the PRC that could have allowed for the peaceful integration of the Uyghur homeland into modern China. However, that policy option would have required the PRC doing something unprecedented; it would need to acknowledge the region’s past colonization and the Uyghurs’ indigenous status, followed by accommodations that would have given Uyghurs a lead role in the region’s future development. This chapter highlights numerous moments in the history of modern China’s relationship with Uyghurs and their homeland when the beginnings of such processes appeared to have been set in motion, but they were all eventually curtailed and reversed.

Instead of pursuing such accommodationist policies towards the Uyghurs and their homeland in the early 2000s, the PRC would adopt a strategy that would ultimately marginalize and dehumanize the Uyghur people as a whole. It would suggest that Uyghur dissent in the region was actually the product of a ‘terrorist threat’ linked to Al-Qaeda in the context of the US-led GWOT. This decision came as a surprise to those who had followed developments in the region over the last decade because there were few signs that such a ‘terrorist threat’ existed among Uyghurs. While there were significant incidents of Uyghur resistance to Chinese rule in the 1990s, some of which had turned violent, there was no evidence that any of this resistance was led by a specific organization, let alone one linked to Al-Qaeda. Furthermore, with the exception of the 1992 and 1997 Urumqi bus bombings, which both remain shrouded in mystery, there was no violence allegedly perpetrated by Uyghurs in the 1990s that could be described as ‘terrorism’ under the working definition of that term provided in this book’s introduction.

Nonetheless, the PRC did decide in October 2001, on the heels of the 11 September attacks on the US, to link Uyghur dissent in China to the global ‘terrorist threat’ that was the focus of the emerging US-led GWOT, and it would be successful in getting at least partial international recognition of this threat. These events would ultimately facilitate the PRC’s further settler colonization of the Uyghur homeland by justifying the increased marginalization and repression of its indigenous population as an existential threat to Chinese state and society. As such, they did not only initiate another stage in the long contentious and colonial relationship; they also fundamentally altered this relationship, ultimately making any attempts to peacefully decolonize it unimaginable in the foreseeable future.